Re: [Foundation-l] Is the WMF spending its (our or our donors) money irrationally?
On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 8:57 AM, Jon Davis wrote: > On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 07:59, emijrp wrote: > >> What about hurricanes? ; ) >> >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Florida_hurricane_%28pre-1900%29_tracks.jpg >> >> > Maybe that's why the new Datacenter is being built in Virginia [1]? The > reality is that no where is safe from natural disasters. Everywhere you go, > there is going to be some new and creative way for nature to level your > datacenter (Hence replication). > > > -Jon > > [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Center_Virginia A particularly nasty hurricane could level Florida and continue on to do damage to Virginia as well, but Virginia is more structural damage resistant (peak winds drop rapidly inland). However, odds are low. As someone who does DR and IT dependability professionally, you get the level of redundancy you can reasonably pay for. Nothing can be 100% sure not to have failures. You're more likely to have outages and lose data due to people than anything else. Software failures less than that, Hardware failures less than that. Environment is statistically the least, below 10%. Very complex environments with multiple sites and failover generally don't have single-cause attributable outages, though in rare cases engineering and design missed something and a single point of failure remains and fails. Everything only being in Florida was a major risk factor, but we're long past that. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is the WMF spending its (our or our donors) money irrationally?
On 03/04/2011 03:47 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote: > creating a secondary datacentre an expensive but logical one. I agree. Wikipedia's server infrastructure is crazy if you compare it to any other major site. Any effort to professionalize it and make it more reliable (not only in terms of preventing frequent short-time outages, but also in terms of rare events with the potential to bring down Wikimedia for a longer period) is a good investment. That being said, my subjective impression is that the function f: #Employees → "Amount of work that gets done" is increasing significantly slower than a linear function – which is of course to be expected in any kind of organization (both to the fact that there's overhead and that with few employees you can pick low-hanging-fruits and don't have to tackle projects that are more likely to be difficult or fail). I could however imagine, that this leads to some frustration in the community. --Tobias signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is the WMF spending its (our or our donors) money irrationally?
On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 07:59, emijrp wrote: > What about hurricanes? ; ) > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Florida_hurricane_%28pre-1900%29_tracks.jpg > > Maybe that's why the new Datacenter is being built in Virginia [1]? The reality is that no where is safe from natural disasters. Everywhere you go, there is going to be some new and creative way for nature to level your datacenter (Hence replication). -Jon [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Center_Virginia -- Jon [[User:ShakataGaNai]] / KJ6FNQ http://snowulf.com/ http://ipv6wiki.net/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is the WMF spending its (our or our donors) money irrationally?
What about hurricanes? ; ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Florida_hurricane_%28pre-1900%29_tracks.jpg 2011/3/4 Tim Starling > On 05/03/11 01:47, WereSpielChequers wrote: > > As for the big financial decisions, I tend to the view that locating > > our sole data centre in a state known for its Earthquakes was a brave > > decision, and creating a secondary datacentre an expensive but logical > > one. > > Our main data centre is in Florida, which is one of the safest states > in the US for earthquakes. Only the office is in San Francisco. > > -- Tim Starling > > > ___ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is the WMF spending its (our or our donors) money irrationally?
On 05/03/11 01:47, WereSpielChequers wrote: > As for the big financial decisions, I tend to the view that locating > our sole data centre in a state known for its Earthquakes was a brave > decision, and creating a secondary datacentre an expensive but logical > one. Our main data centre is in Florida, which is one of the safest states in the US for earthquakes. Only the office is in San Francisco. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Is the WMF spending its (our or our donors) money irrationally?
Re the "numerous complains from other volunteers who thought that WMF is spending its money irrationally." that vvv has heard. Any charity has pretty much by definition an obligation to use the money it is entrusted with rationally and appropriately. In the case of the WMF there has been a lot of flak on this list because of a rather trendy sounding job title and a vague job ad. Personally I think that vague job descriptions are a mildly questionable but routine tactic that many not for profits use to maximise what they can get their staff to do. As for the big financial decisions, I tend to the view that locating our sole data centre in a state known for its Earthquakes was a brave decision, and creating a secondary datacentre an expensive but logical one. I take some comfort from the fact that the debate about use of funds has mostly been about relatively small parts of the budget, and that the big important decisions are mostly uncontentious. Though I welcome such globalisation measures as the Indian and possible middle East offices, I do wonder at the planned total headcount, and I hope that of all the things that came out of the Strategy project, one featured proposal http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Keep_the_servers_running is given due pre-eminence in all WMF planning. But overall my impression is that the WMF spends money rationally, I do see quite a few tests, innovations and new ventures, which I consider a healthy sign. The acid test will be whether the foundation is able to work out which of those are worth continuing, which merit expansion and building on, which need tweaking and which need to be closed down and learned from. WereSpielChequers > Message: 2 > Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 15:17:33 +0300 > From: Victor Vasiliev > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia "Storyteller" job opening > To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List > > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 11:26 PM, David Gerard wrote: >> You appear to be generalising from your personal preferences to the >> world here. This is a common fallacy and a really bad idea in general. > > I have heard numerous complains from other volunteers who thought that > WMF is spending its money irrationally. So I believe those "personal > preferences" are widespread enough. > > --vvv > > > > -- > > Message: 3 > Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 13:41:06 +0100 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
