[ckan-dev] Who is in charge of the Colorado instance?

Mon May 9 09:32:59 UTC 2011

Hi,

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Seb Bacon <seb.bacon at okfn.org> wrote:
> On 9 May 2011 10:00, Friedrich Lindenberg <friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:
>> I get that we need to work out better processes but I think we're
>> getting a bit eager here: I moved this instance to a new server last
>> week, did some sanity checks but apparently I fucked up somehow. There
>> is nothing in all of this that concerns the Colorado instance owner
>> (Sean Hudson <sean.hudson at opencolorado.org>). I will inform once I've
>> fixed the issue, or if fixing it takes longer than the expected 4
>> minutes.
>>
>> Do we really need to embed API calls and write CREPs here?
>
> Too late ;)  CC'ing this to ckan-dev.
>
> But yes, I think so.  Since I've started at OKF this conversation has
> come up several times, either in "who is the maintainer of site X"
> (sysadmin-type questions) or "how many instances do we have of CKAN"
> (marketing-type questions).

Its true these two questions exist and they both have answers in
different places (internal GDoc vs. Wiki page). I think that the first
question (who is the maintainer?) is more complicated and includes the
following points:

* Is the instance under our control or who is managing it?
* Is it still alive in our opinion?
* Are we looking for new maintainers or do we need to get in touch
with existing ones to motivate them?
* What level of support do we want to provide, what is of strategic importance?

None of these questions are things that I'd like to discuss in a
public wiki. Thats why I started the internal sheet and I'd like to
defend it for these purposes.

> There are at least two different manually-maintained lists of
> instances, possibly more, and no agreement on which one is the
> "master".

None is, they serve different purposes: the internal one is for
structuring our work, the second one is, as you say, marketing.

> It seems in this case you can fix it, but if you were on holiday that
> would still not be apparent, and we'd be waiting around a bit until
> someone decided to step forward in the absence of a clear answer.  If
> it's possible to look it up, see it's you, know that you're on holiday
> so it's OK for someone else to do it... that's more efficient.

I don't fully follow you? I sent around an email on friday (?) saying
I'd migrated these three instances. The same moment one of them begins
malfunctioning - I know its bad style to screw up things and then
leave for the weekend but I just didn't see it (filtering my mail,
tbh). I'm not sure how this would be prevented by call-home features?

> As a side effect, having a way of contacting administrators about
> security-related updates is potentially useful.

We do.

> I could just do that... or we could have a discussion about it first.
> You can always ignore the discussion if you're not interested :)

I'm interested its just that I see this pattern evolving that whenever
we have any problem in OKF at the moment we all stand up and have a
big debate about how this is a consequence of us scaling and how we
need to develop more procedure for fixing things. My whole point is:
thats often right, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a bad
CNAME is just a bad CNAME. (Problem fixed btw.) We should have
meta-discussions, but we also need to select the right places for them
to happen.

- Friedrich