response 116 of 176:

Dec 6 15:03 UTC 2005

re 100 - I'm not suggesting that staff doesn't do the best they possibly can
to avoid email loss and other such things.  I'm suggesting that we as users
should not expect or demand anything more.  The fact is, if this were a
commercial organization, there would be daily tape backups, stored off site,
our hardware would probably be more "enterprise" level and all sorts of such
things - policies in place to prevent such occurences, and paid employees
whose PRIMARY responsibility is maintenance of the server(s).

Grex is nobody's primary responsibility.  I'm pretty sure it's nobody's
secondary responsibility - at the very best, I would expect Grex to come
somewhere after job and family.

response 118 of 176:

Dec 6 17:29 UTC 2005

 re #117:  Are you seriously arguing that the board has an *obligation*
 to ensure that Grex is run at the same level of service and reliability
 as a commercial service?

 If not, what *does* your statement imply?

response 120 of 176:

Dec 6 21:37 UTC 2005

You're talking about an obligation which is so vaguely defined that in legal terms, someone would have to be actively subverting the system or sabotaging it to be provably NOT complying with your demand.

It is a volunteer organization, with a volunteer staff, and a volunteer board. As such, the reality is that it will get whatever benefits of goodwill it gets in terms of money and time, and that's it. You can't make it something it isn't, and something that it isn't is a service with the possibility of being held to the standard of performance of a commercial service provider with contractual obligations.

response 122 of 176:

Dec 7 02:26 UTC 2005

No one.  It's all volunteer.  But then, you're saying that's a problem (and
so it is).

response 124 of 176:

Dec 7 04:29 UTC 2005

I refuse to believe that Cyberspace's elected directors can't do a better job
with staffing Grex.

response 126 of 176:

Dec 7 05:08 UTC 2005

lol do u volunteer for gay fags 4 america

lol u probably do and ur excuse is im straigt lol

response 128 of 176:

Dec 7 12:55 UTC 2005

For some people here, Grex IS their life.  Check it out - barely an hour 
or two can go by without their jumping in with commentary.  They live 
here. I'm not surprised they have a hard time seeing that not everyone 
sets the same priorities.  But I certainly wouldn't wish that level of 
involvement on anyone who wasn't being paid to do a job and then get on 
with real life.

response 130 of 176:

Dec 7 17:12 UTC 2005

 Also be sure to ask them what would happen if some person chewed
 them out for not going back into their burning house to save their
 photo album, and if a bunch of people joined in and started piling
 on about how poor the firefighting had been lately and how they
 really needed to commit themselves more "or else."

response 132 of 176:

Dec 7 17:46 UTC 2005

I'm not trying to pick on staff too much Mike. You guys really go a
fantastic job.

response 134 of 176:

Dec 7 22:31 UTC 2005

Regarding #128; Maybe you should encourage some of them to become staff.
Oh, wait....

You know, something the board *could* do is advertise a position for a
staff liason person; something that someone could run for if they chose.
Them taking that position would sort of make them the chief staffer, but
also make them accountable.  If circumstances in their life changed so
that they couldn't handle it anymore, they could resign.  Since they
volunteered for that position, with the additional responsibilities it
entails, there really shouldn't be much of a problem with asking them to
do whatever extra it entails.

response 136 of 176:

Dec 7 23:44 UTC 2005

I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how things work in commercial
environments, making it sound as if there's one way of doing things in
such places.  In fact, from what I've seen, there's a pretty wide
spectrum.  Commercial organizations have a wide variety of experience,
budgets, resource constraints, contractual obligations, perceived levels
of importance, and operational philosophies, even if they're providing
services that may look quite similar from the outside.

It seems non-useful for people to say, "commercial content providers do
X, therefore Grex should too."  It likewise seems non-useful to say,
"Grex isn't a commercial organization, so it can't do what commercial
organizations do."

It's perhaps worth taking a look at change management procedures in some
of the slowest changing but most stable network operators -- traditional
phone companies.  At the one I worked in the web hosting division of,
nothing could be done without filling out lots of change management
documentation: extensive documentation about the change procedure,
including exact commands that would entered, test procedures, backout
plans, justification of why the change was needed, who was going to be
involved, when it was going to happen, what the impacts were going to be
and to which customers, and so forth.  This all had to go through a
committee, which might approve it a couple of weeks after it was
submitted.  It wasn't fun.  Nobody did anything just because they
thought it might make some small incremental improvement.  Problems were
often left alone until they became emergencies, because the bureaucracy
involved in fixing them would become somewhat easier then.  But at the
same time, human error-caused outages became pretty rare.  The committee
that reviewed these things didn't really know how to do anything other
than see if the questions had been answered, but answering the questions
forced people to think through things carefully.  Adopting a very
stripped down version of that protocol, asking people to answer a list
of standard questions to their own satisfaction before diving into major
changes, gets a lot of the same benefits and doesn't cost much.

There are also the comments I've seen here about enterprise-class
hardware that Grex can't afford.  A lot of commercial sites also can't
afford it, or decide it's not worth the cost.  A lot of services which
the Internet would be perceived as not working without -- some of the
root and top level DNS infrastructure, Akamai caches, Google, etc. --
involves standard off the shelf hardware deployed in large enough
numbers that if some piece of it breaks, end users won't notice in the
few days it may take to fix it.  What sort of hardware to use, how much
of it, and how much support to provide in case it breaks, are
interrelated decisions with costs associated, and different
organizations come up with different answers.

Managing volunteers is different than managing employees.  Managing
employees who are paid less than they could earn elsewhere is different
than managing employees who are paid more than they could earn
elsewhere.  A general question to ask is, "are we getting more out of
this person than we're paying them."  I've dealt with employees who have
been hard to deal with, but who were occasionally doing things that were
really important, and they've seemed worth keeping.  I think I've even
been such an employee at a few former jobs.  At my current non-profit
employer, I've "fired" volunteers who were taking more of my time to
manage than it would have to do the work they were doing.  At the same
time, if somebody isn't doing anything, is known to not be doing
anything, and isn't costing anything, telling them to go away probably
isn't all that useful.  Having volunteers who occasionally do something
that wouldn't otherwise get done can be a very useful thing.  Telling
anybody to go away before you're sure you want them gone can have some
less than desirable consequences.  On the other hand, having somebody be
in charge, with at least the authority to tell voluneers what not to do,
may have more positive impact than its cost in ruffled feathers.

response 138 of 176:

Dec 13 20:35 UTC 2005

Please, that's just deflecting responsibility.  Someone really does need to
be "in charge" of Grex.

Besides, arbornet not having its annual meeting isn't necessarily Todd's
fault.

response 140 of 176:

Dec 14 23:21 UTC 2005

a very Romanian response.