[Strategic] Server hardware donation offer

[Kai Krueger]

On 11/02/11 12:17, Tom Hughes wrote:
> On 11/02/11 11:12, Eugene Usvitsky wrote:
>
>> As far as I understand, the decision is"Will OSMF use these servers?".
>> The real usage is not so important - you better know how and where
>> core services and supporting services should be hosted. But the
>> situation "Rambler provides official servers for global OpenStreetMap
>> project" differs from "Russian OSM community is hosting something on
>> Rambler's servers". We should understand that PR and promotion is
>> currently the only one thing Rambler can really get back for its help
>> and thus official support form OSMF would be much better.
>
> We, the TWG, don't really want to be involved directly with the day to
> day running of things like lots of tile caches and XAPI mirrors.

Perhaps it might be worth thinking about splitting and extending TWG 
into a TWG-core and a TWG-auxiliary. TWG-core would be responsible for 
the core database, the website and everything that is critically 
necessary for editing and for OSM to exists. TWG-auxiliary on the other 
hand would manage those resources that are not critical, but hugely 
benefit the wider OSM community and can support the eco-system 
surrrounding OSM. For example things like dev-servers to support 
developers do exciting and unexpected things with OSM-data, rendering 
servers so that people can play around with style sheets, servers 
converting the data in a variety of formats and extracts to make the 
data more accessible, xapi and trapi server, projects like maposmatic, 
things like tagwatch, services like routing, data quality tools like 
keepright.

There have been several cases in the past, where people would have liked 
to do interesting, cool or useful things with the data but couldn't 
because they were told the necessary resources aren't available and 
couldn't provide them them selves. At the same time, there have been 
several companies or individuals, like the current case who would have 
liked to donate hardware to OSM, but were rejected as it didn't fit into 
the concept of how to sensibly manage the mission critical core 
services, neglecting that there are many other non-critical services 
that could benefit.

Imho, we need a way to bring these two parties together to utilise 
resources efficiently and a TWG-auxiliary could possibly play this role.

By splitting these two aspects, one would not load any more work onto 
the current admins who can concentrate on continuing to do a great job 
at keeping the db up and running smoothly. TWG-auxiliary on the other 
hand could be more open and less conservative in accepting hardware 
donations as is necessarily the case for core resources.

As TWG-auxiliary would only run secondary services a screw-up would not 
be able to loose data that can't be reproduced. Also it would not have 
access to users private data, so again it might be able to be more open 
and less conservative in accepting new sysadmins than what would be 
acceptable for TWG-core and is current policy.

So imho TWG-auxiliary could play a valuable role in supporting the 
OSM-eccosystem. It might need a bit of experimenting what the best way 
is to organise things, but OSMF really should find a way how to 
incorporate these kind of generous donations by companies and 
individuals in the interest of OSM as a whole.


Kai