[OSM-talk] 2013 fund raising drive

[Simon Poole]

It may have gone slightly lost in the iD announcement and the flurry of
discussions in the aftermath, but we kicked off our 2013 fund raising
drive this week.

The donations will help finance a new database server and upgrades of
other hardware. As you probably have noticed, we have had more than our
fair share of issues with the current main DB server ramoth over the
last couple of months and urgently need a further server with the same
or better capabilities both as a replacement, to cater for growth and
for redundancy. Luckily during most of the longer outages this year we
were able to fall back to read-only mode, which while not perfect, is a
lot better than what we could have provided even half a year ago. Moving
to a configuration with two servers that both can handle the full load
will greatly reduce the likelihood of longer outages, which given our
ever increasing contributor base and expectations, have become less and
less acceptable.

And I may add: having more redundancy will reduce the stress and the
unplanned, out of work hours, emergency calls on our admin team members,
which have spent more than enough weekends this year working on broken
hardware. 

Details can be found on this page
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/New_server_and_fund_raising_drive_2013 ,
and you can donate here: http://donate.openstreetmap.org/server2013/

On behalf of the OSM community, the admin team and the OSMF, I would
like to thank you in advance for your generous contributions.

Simon Poole
Chairman, OSMF board