<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=windows-1251">
</head>
<body>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Emilie,</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Do you consider
maintaining over 90 servers in a global network with only two
part-time volunteer sysadmins to be low-risk and sustainable in
the longer run?</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">When I ran the computer
center for the Foreign Agricultural Service 20 years ago, a
small U.S. government agency with 1,350 seats and a few dozen
servers, we had a dozen fulltime network techs, all of them
accredited as sysadmins, so that we would have plenty of
redundancy to handle travel, vacations, sickness. They put in
lots of overtime keeping our global network up and running. I
don't know about you, but OSM's lack of redundancy makes me
nervous. <br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">You wrote:<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
<blockquote type="cite"> I am not a big fan of hiring people
without properly thinking it through</blockquote>
We are doing exactly that, thinking it through, and soliciting
ideas from the OSMF membership. Your suggestions, please? The
Board wants your ideas on how best to deal with the shortage of
volunteers for critical functions. <br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">apm<br>
</font></p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 5/11/2020 5:55 PM, Emilie Laffray
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CA+Zmw31hrDtdETuRwswd-ivGd8ZNNRawCvpE23iZiusW8aDaiA@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=windows-1251">
<div dir="ltr">Hello Allan,
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I will mostly say two things, one short, one slightly
longer. </div>
<div>First, my name is not Emile but Emilie. If you have to
butcher it, please use Emily. </div>
<div>Second, SMART and agile are not really on the same level. I
want nothing to do with SMART in a system like the OSM
foundation to be honest. I think it is a waste of people's
time in the first place. Also, I am quite incensed by the
juxtaposition of opposing SMART to opposing the need of well
defined goals in the first place. </div>
<div>I kinda disagree with operations not being able to work in
an agile environment (I use Kanban at the office for exactly
that reason) but that would be besides the point.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>In the end, I agree with a lot of points that Frederick
raised and I am not a big fan of hiring people without
properly thinking it through. I strongly believe in paying
people to do some jobs like accounting and so on (and even
pushed for it in the past). I am not sure we want to do so in
operations without some kind of supervision. And supervision
takes time.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Anyway,</div>
<div>Emilie Laffray</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, May 11, 2020 at 5:40
PM Craig Allan <<a href="mailto:allan@iafrica.com"
moz-do-not-send="true">allan@iafrica.com</a>> wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<div>Emile: "oh hell no" is a fair expression of horror!
The buzzword is hateful and often mis-applied - but do you
hate the general idea of pinning routine work and
performance assessment down to pre-agreed work goals and
times? If you're spending other people's money, I hope
not. <br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I fully agree that there are other ways to work. Agile
development is far looser, allows frequent direction
changes and is just far more fun. In this case we are not
hiring people to do development, we are working to reduce
risk and improve the resilience of our operations. In my
world, Operations are not agile - for good reason. The
proposed Ops contractor is there to follow the Standard
Operational Procedures to the letter, and keep the engines
running at 99.999% availability. <br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>In this way our dedicated SysOps and SysAdmin
volunteers are released from the daily drudgery of
monitoring and maintenance work and can take on the more
interesting systems development work. <br>
</div>
<div>CA<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>On 2020/05/11 22:42, Emilie Laffray wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="auto">Just a quick "oh hell no" to SMART. It is
one of the worth assessment methodology in the tech
world.
<div dir="auto">This is the bane of my life and you end
up creating goals just for the sake of creating goals
that are impossible to miss. </div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, May 11, 2020,
14:15 Craig Allan <<a
href="mailto:allan@iafrica.com" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">allan@iafrica.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px
0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid
rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Hi All,<br>
I was battling to find a short reply to Tobias's
request for comments, <br>
but Severin has crystallised my thoughts.<br>
We are being asked to comment in the absence of
specifics which IMHO is <br>
not a good approach - I predict it will produce lots
of words and very <br>
few answers. So here are my words:<br>
<br>
The situation seems to be serious. We are running a
world wide network <br>
of about 96 servers, using only 4 volunteers as
sysadmins. The system <br>
is, as far as I know, very heavily used and is only
just coping with the <br>
loads. So I pause to salute the heroes who keep it all
running. Amazing <br>
work!<br>
I fully support buying some permanent resource to add
resilience to the <br>
system and take the load off the volunteers.<br>
<br>
I also fully support a lot of the concerns people have
posted about the <br>
messiness of directly hiring somebody who is going to
work for a <br>
collective, not work for one manager. To eliminate a
lot of the <br>
problems I would support arms-length hiring practice.
By that I mean we <br>
should be hiring a medium to large company to perform
the services. <br>
Hiring a company is typically more expensive at first
impression, but <br>
the extra we will pay to a company rolls up and
packages all the legal, <br>
labour and human messiness and hidden costs of
employing an actual person.<br>
<br>
Hiring a company has the added advantage that it
forces us to write a <br>
clear SMART job description, forces us to limit the
scope of work and it <br>
encourages us to do an unemotional assessment of
performance against <br>
that clear job description.<br>
<br>
I also think that a company performing a set task will
be focused on the <br>
work, will be less involved in the totality of the
OSMF and will have <br>
less inclination to mess with our internal politics.<br>
<br>
Craig ALLAN<br>
<br>
* My mapperId is cRaIgalLAn<br>
* SMART is an acronym for "Specific,
Measurable,Attainable, Relevant, <br>
Time-bound"<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 2020/05/06 22:24, Tobias Knerr wrote:<br>
> Hi all,<br>
><br>
> the OSMF Board wants to think about a general
framework to hire people<br>
> to fill in the gaps that volunteers can't fill.
We believe that, given<br>
> good practices and firm boundaries, hiring people
would be worthwhile.<br>
> It could ensure the continued stability of the
OSM platform (servers,<br>
> integral software) among other things, and
augment the currently<br>
> overworked volunteers and under resourced efforts
in the face of<br>
> continued growth.<br>
> ...<br>
><br>
> Feel free to share your ideas here or send them
to <a href="mailto:board@osmfoundation.org"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">board@osmfoundation.org</a><br>
><br>
><br>
<br>
<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
osmf-talk mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:osmf-talk@openstreetmap.org"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">osmf-talk@openstreetmap.org</a><br>
<a
href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk"
rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk</a><br>
</blockquote>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
</div>
_______________________________________________<br>
osmf-talk mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:osmf-talk@openstreetmap.org" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">osmf-talk@openstreetmap.org</a><br>
<a href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk</a><br>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
<fieldset class="mimeAttachmentHeader"></fieldset>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">_______________________________________________
osmf-talk mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:osmf-talk@openstreetmap.org">osmf-talk@openstreetmap.org</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>