Re: [gentoo-project] Infra Kickstarter?

[Pavlos Ratis <dastergon@gentoo.org>]

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On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 5:47 AM, Robin H. Johnson <robbat2@gentoo.org>
wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 07:10:53AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 4:01 AM, Robin H. Johnson <robbat2@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > If I could afford to spend the more than just volunteer time on Infra,
> > > yes, I'd love to have few full 40 hour weeks to put into cleaning up
> our
> > > cfengine and puppet to where it's significantly easier to manage.
> >
> > The one thing I was trying to avoid doing was giving an impression
> > that the infra team isn't busy doing work that helps everybody around
> > here.
> >
> > You summarize the problem well here.  You're too busy due to a labor
> > shortage to do the sorts of things that would help reduce the labor
> > shortage.
> Of infra staff, in 2014 antarus left infra, and we gained dastergon
> prometheanfire redlizard. bonsaikitten turned us down again, as he's
> busy running the gentooexperimental infrastructure.
>
> > I don't mean to trivialize the problem, either.  Gentoo has a lot of
> > donated infrastructure, and a decent amount of cash when you're
> > talking about replacing hard drives and such.  The problem is that we
> > really don't have the kind of money it would take to take on even a
> > single employee.
> I've wondered in the past, about doing a Kickstarter/IndieGogo to pay me
> for spending a month or two on Gentoo, based on the model of the very
> successful Django kickstarter:
>
> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migrations-for-django
> (there have been other open source kickstarters since then, but the
> Django one was one of the first that delivered just open source
> software).
>
> If I wanted to do it full-time, for the cost of living (with my wife and
> 10 month old daughter) in Vancouver, at a bare minimum, I need it to be
> at least $6000CAD/month before taxes.
>
> Potential major projects for it, in a rough priority order:
> - Get rid of cfengine
> - Migration of services off some of our oldest servers
> - Split-model Puppet (like Wikimedia)
> - Projects Hosting (mostly repurposing 'kup', but needs some dev work)
> - Split mail & dev.g.o
> - eu.dev.g.o box (post-split of mail)
> - Official Gentoo cloud images, from releng (because they'd make infra's
>   life easier too).
> - List Archives
> - Website revamp
>
> Stuff that is NOT on the table (and why)
> - Git migration
>   - We're actually just blocked on a specific new sponsor for more than
>         month now, they bought a nice new box, and they have to fix
>         something in their network.
>
> This also needs to have a self-sustaining result, not an expectation
> that it will be repeated in future.
>
> --
> Robin Hugh Johnson
> Gentoo Linux: Developer, Infrastructure Lead
> E-Mail     : robbat2@gentoo.org
> GnuPG FP   : 11ACBA4F 4778E3F6 E4EDF38E B27B944E 34884E85
>
>
A Kickstarter/IndieGogo fund-raising campaign would be great for these kind
of time-consuming efforts.
I had asked in trustees' IRC channel about that topic last August and they
replied that there isn't any issue on running such campaigns with a
specific objective.

Although a remote full-time job is ideal and irreplaceable, an alternative
solution would be a Sprint like Debian DSA team[1] and KDE[2] did in the
past.
More specifically, KDE ran successfully fund-raiser campaigns for Randa
Meetings in 2012[3] and 2014[4].
In addition, instead of increasing expenses for booking a place to organize
the Sprint, a company could provide a room to hold the sprint, like SUSE
did to KDE Plasma developers[5].

Of course the alternative option needs more planning since the infra team
is distributed around the world and most of the members have already a
full-time jobs and obligations.
However, since a Sprint was discussed in the Gentoo Dinner in FOSDEM I
wanted to mention it as an alternative solution for potential organization
in the future.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/06/msg00164.html
[2] https://sprints.kde.org/sprint/all
[3] https://pledgie.com/campaigns/18045
[4] https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/randameetings2014/
[5]
https://news.opensuse.org/2010/02/11/meet-the-kde-plasma-developers-at-suse-feb-22/


Best regards,
Pavlos Ratis

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