[TOS] TeachingOpenSource.org - Infrastructure Plans

[Karsten Wade]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:19:27AM -0700, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
> Chris, thanks for bringing this to the list.  I've added some comments 
> below.

For complete transparency I want to add this at the top.

During the week around OSCON, and our team's visit to Oregon State, we
discussed very positively the idea of OSUOSL hosting tos.org for the
foreseeable future.  The biggest potential drawback I've seen so far
is that other schools might not feel as neutral about tos.org being
"at" OSU, but the OLS has done a good job of being a neutral steward
and I'm not very concerned.  (Cf. how people react to a Red Hat
sponsorship, etc.)

I consider OSUOSL to have an upstream role, that is, being a common
watershed that we all benefit from using and supporting.  We also need
to do our due diligence, which means we'll start a thread to lay out
current and future needs (from features to access) and make sure that
we have a plan to cover them.

> On 07/15/2010 10:49 PM, Chris Tyler wrote:
> > - Hosting for TeachingOpenSource.org would be community-managed. In
> > order to bootstrap the admin team, Karsten Wade will be appointed
> > initial leader, and will oversee the task of putting together an initial
> > team and the development of procedures so that other qualified community
> > members can become involved.
>
> +1 -- More on this below.

Thanks, I'm happy to do this work to help bridge and grow capacity
through teachingopensource.org, and am definitely pleased Red Hat
wants me to do it as part of my job role this year. :)

> > - Hosting arrangements will be selected and negotiated by the initial
> > admin team. OSUOSL has offered to host TOS.o, and I anticipate that
> > other institutions may be willing to help; commercial options may also
> > be considered.
>
> Yes, we would be very happy to host this at OSUOSL.  In my opinion, it 
> would be ideal to have TOS hosted at a university for both technical 
> (ie. Internet2 connection) as well as political reasons.  We are very 
> flexible in the types of services we can provide including having OSUOSL 
> handle much of the base system administration and leaving TOS 
> responsible for more of the application-level administration.  This is 
> all stuff we should discuss with the initial infrastructure team.

Exactly, let's lay out the needs on list here, and you can assist with
that while providing the corresponding OSUOSL details.

For example of where my thinking comes from, consider the Fedora
Infrastructure methodology.  The team is a mostly volunteer, 24x7
group that has built really smart solutions based on Fedora
technologies that are decentralized.  It all started on Red Hat hosted
systems, then duke.edu and others were added.  Currently, a release of
Fedora barely touches the bandwidth that redhat.com needs for itself,
and if Red Hat went away tomorrow (along with the two folks paid to
work on Infrastruture), the remaining people and systems would have
all fedoraproject.org processes running at a reduced capacity within a
very short period.

That scale is needed for a project the size of Fedora, and nowhere
near what tos.org needs right now.  But clearly people appreciate the
idea of a community admin team, and organizations like to donate to
projects via Internet resources (mirrors, hosting, etc.)  For a
neutral upstream such as tos.org, it behooves us to build with an open
future in mind.  After all, if we're as successful as we'd like to be,
tos.org would rival a project such as fedoraproject.org in terms of
contributors, participants, and users.

> > - Red Hat has generously offered to fund hosting, in return for
> > recognition as a sponsor of TOS.o.
>
> My offer to host TOS is not contingent on funding; it's something that 
> we can provide at no cost.  If Red Hat has funding they are willing/able 
> to contribute, then I would gladly accept it to help cover our costs.  I 
> see no reason that RH (and others) shouldn't be given recognition 
> somewhere on the website; in fact, I'm all for it and think that it's 
> good for TOS to advertise these supporters in hopes of drawing in more 
> down the road.

Thanks, btw, for being gently persistent in offering OSUOSL resources
for tos.org.  I'm proposing that we "start with" planning a move to
OSUOSL hosting for tos.org, based on some specific goals we'll figure
out on this list, and contingent on us agreeing (generally) to my
points above about building with awesome scale in mind.

> > - Red Hat has also proposed managing the TeachingOpenSource.org domain.
> > After considering this, my strong preference is that I will continue to
> > manage the TeachingOpenSource.org domain registration on behalf of the
> > community until such time as we form a independent legal entity to
> > manage it (such as something along the lines of freedesktop.org LLC).
>
> I agree.  If we want TOS to continue to grow and gain acceptance by 
> other learning institutions, then I think it is important to show 
> support by corporation (as per above), but not to be too closely tied to 
> any given corporate sponsor.  Ownership of the domain name may give some 
> people the wrong impression.  This is also something we can 
> host/maintain at OSUOSL if you would prefer.

To M J's point (iirc), my biggest concern is the single point of
failure.  A short term solution could be to move the registration to a
shared account that a group of us have access to.  Another is to have
OSUOSL hold it for the time being.  If we get to the point of
TeachingOpenSource.org-the-legal-entity coming in to being, we can
move the ownership over there.

In terms of recognizing the intended ownership of the domain, perhaps
it would suffice for Chris to state that he intends it to be
controlled by the TOS project and demonstrate that by sharing the keys
to a neutral registration provider?  A page on the wiki, for example.
(Chris specifically because he is the registrant on record.)

- Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41
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