On Jul 30, 9:47 am, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There is an article on slashdot today about the CentOS project admin being
> AWOL:
[snip]
> As some of you may have noticed, Sage recently had a similar situation, in
> that in late May Michael Abshoff went AWOL -- he posted one message in May
> that he was taking a break for a month, and has not been heard from since.
> Since he was doing essentially all release management, porting, trac
> account creation, etc., we are fortunate that him going AWOL hasn't impacted
> the Sage project very badly, in that with a bunch of work we were able to
> adapt. That said, I think it would be really beneficial for people
> involved with Sage to think through other scenarios and come up with a way
> to make our project more robust. For example, what if *I* was AWOL for a
> while? There are about 3-4 other people with admin privileges on most of
> our hardware resources, and they are physically in the UW math department
> server room (so professionally hosted and unaffected by me being AWOL). The
> DNS stuff (sagemath.org) is all 100% admin'd by me via godaddy.com, so I
> should find a way to fix things so that if somebody else needs to manage the
> DNS stuff that is possible (any volunteers -- Harald?).
>
> Anyway, I would appreciate people sharing their thoughts about how to make
> the Sage project more organized with respect to key people vanishing --
> either temporarily or permantly -- from the project. If you have relevant
> experience with other projects, or no of good articles about this sort of
> thing, etc., please share.
There's the non-profit organization model (or at least one version of
it): you have a few paid employees, or in general responsible or
committed people, who maintain day-to-day operations, know the
passwords, know how to administer things, and (ideally) have this sort
of information documented so other people can take over with a little
coaching -- the way release management seems to be going these days.
Then you also have a volunteer "board of directors" who broadly
oversee things and make sure that everything is working the way it's
supposed to. In some of these models, the board of directors also
determines the mission and future directions of the organization/
project; in the case of Sage, the mission has been in place for a
while ("a viable open source alternative to ..."). The community in
general (with William's strong influence) has been determining the
short-, middle-, and long-term goals, and this seems to be working
okay right now, right?
John
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