Dear William, Dear Sage-devel, On Jul 30, 12:47 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: [...] > 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?
Well, I think that if, someday, you know you want to go AWOL for a while, you should think about it a long time before. Something like a year before. You should make sure that all the knowledge you have (right access to all the tools AND how to use them) have been shared to people in the community. > 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. > I was involved in the Fédération québécoise d'ultimate (frisbee) in the last two years and as a President for the last one until May 2009. Since I knew I was not going to renew my mandate, I was thinking a lot in all that year about how will the FQU continue its evolution without me. I must say here that the way I developped the FQU was a lot influenced by the Sage organizational structure and also by opinions written on sage-devel by the main developpers. I especially include here Michael Abshoff who always valued dicussions done openly on sage- devel instead of hidden in an email between two developpers. This is what allowed me to learn a lot about Sage and to eventually give back to Sage. I followed this principle for FQU by adding the executive committee or the quebec ultimate associations in CC to every single email I was writting as a president. This is a very efficient way to share the information (and also some values and vision thinking...like sage-main-developpers do on sage-devel) to the community. When people know what is happening, they can, months or years later, become involved and help... Open communication is good for the community growth but this is the base of the pyramide. Other things must be done at the top of the pyramide (like passwords for admin) and those will not really be seen on a list like sage-devel. I don't know how it is done for Sage, but for FQU, I made sure to share the rights to more than me (the blog www.fqu.ca, google calendars, google docs, files on ftp servers, mailling lists, and others) and made sure that those people are able to use those tools. I saw yesterday that there is a wiki page about the Release Management. This is very nice. This makes me think that I could become the Release Manager one day in the next year or later. The more people are able to do the Release Management and other job high level in the pyramid, the less we will suffer from a Release Manager or a high-sage- developper that leaves. So, dear William Stein, how much do you know that nobody else know?! Sébastien Labbé PhD Student LaCIM, UQAM, Montréal > Thanks! > > -- William > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
