[Strategic] Server hardware donation offer

Kai Krueger kakrueger at gmail.com
Sun Feb 20 09:09:39 GMT 2011


Hi,

On 20/02/11 01:26, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Kai Krueger wrote:
>> Perhaps it might be worth thinking about splitting and extending TWG
>> into a TWG-core and a TWG-auxiliary.
>
> [...]
>
>> 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.
>
> Bringing OSMF on board here has pros and cons. The only "pro" I can
> think of is that donating parties might feel better giving stuff to
> "official OSMF" than just handing the root password to the local OSM group.

The main pro's are efficiency gains to bundle resources, that not 
everyone has to do their own fund raising, that people can donate in 
smaller batches, that on their own are no use but bundled can benefit 
OSM, to make it easier for people wanting to do something interesting 
with OSM to obtain the necessary resources.

It also provides an entity to deal with bureaucracy. I don't know much 
about the negotiations between e.g. Strato and FOSSGIS (OSMF-German 
chapter) but from what I have heard, it involved a bunch of negotiations 
and bureaucracy as well. Not something you can expect from a random 
mapper or developer who just wants to try and do something cool with OSM.

>
> The cons are (a) that OSMF would have to do at least some book keeping,
> (b) that at least theoretically OSMF would be able to dictate what runs
> on these servers, and with that power comes the responsibility to look
> after them (imagine the hypothetical claim that porn was distributed via
> some OSMF-TWG-auxiliary server somewhere!), and (c) that OSMF is
> becoming more bureaucratic by the minute (before long, TWG-auxiliary
> would have to fill out budget forms and write reports), so anything that
> works without OSMF involvement should indeed do so.

a) and c) are disadvantages for OSMF but advantages for OSM as a whole. 
But then everything that OSMF does is a just more work for OSMF that 
could theoretically be done by a local OSM group. But isn't the whole 
point of having these foundations and local chapters to deal with 
bureaucracy where it is unavoidable and remove that burden from the 
individual mappers or developers? Isn't that the reason OSMF are 
thinking of setting up local chapters to negotiating for potential 
doners and dealing with book keeping?

So accepting hardware resources and organise that they are put to good 
use within interested groups of OSM seems like one of the core reasons 
to have OSMF. So I am always a bit surprised that parts of OSMF are 
trying so hard to push this responsibility back down to individuals.

b) well, it is obviously not going to be a free for all and ever thing 
goes services, but managed in some way. Dealing with this sort of abuse 
would be part of the the responsibilities of the admin team of 
TWG-Auxiliary. But anyway, it would probably be easier to distribute 
porn over the diaries, the wiki, the planet file, the tiles or what ever 
that already exists today than it would be via some of the other 
auxiliary services. So this would be nothing new.


>
> I agree that it would be good if people offering "auxiliary" services
> would talk a bit more to each other. But then again the people doing the
> best stuff are often idiosyncratic folks with some sort of communication
> deficiency and would rather just hack something on their own small
> server or at university or so than become part of a group...

Obviously, if people have the resources them selves and don't want any 
involvement or help from OSMF that is great, even preferred. But not 
everyone has a large server with fast disks to run planet sized dbs or 
similar available. That doesn't make them less valuable to OSM as long 
as there is a way to pool the existing skills and resources.

>
> On the whole, I don't think it is a good idea to add more and more
> services to the list of "OSMF operated services", auxiliary or not.
> Trying to bring together supply and demand is a good idea, but I don't
> see OSMF involvement as beneficial here - at least beyond setting up a
> mailing list or so!

What the exact best organisational form is, is obviously up for debate 
and should be something that SWG discusses and comes up with. But we 
have seen from FOSSGIS with the 3 Strato-servers, from "OSMF-France" 
with its donations of 20 servers, from OSMF-US with the wikimedia server 
donations, that there is both supply and demand for hardware donations 
and a need for formal entities to manage these.

Frederik, did you also take the stance that FOSSGIS shouldn't be 
involved in running the German dev servers because it is only a 
bureaucratic burden to FOSSGIS and that individuals should have to do 
all this them selves?

OSMF's involvement might end up being as little as providing an initial 
contact number for people interested in either donating or using donated 
hardware and delegate them on to the appropriate local chapters who are 
best suited for the specific request.

However, these kind of development resources aren't directly inherently 
tied to a geographic region, so OSMF should at least consider 
organisationally placing this in the global rather than local chapters.

So the cons are all what OSMF is about and there are major pro's for OSM 
at large.

Overall, turning down generous donations to OSM just because OSMF can't 
be bothered to deal with bureaucracy seems unfortunate, where it 
constantly claims it is resource limited.

Kai



>
> Bye
> Frederik
>




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