[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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