PSC Vote: Budget revision 2025

I've added one more line item to the SysAdmin budget -- contract to upgrade
MailMan and any unforeseen issues.

I figure we should ask for it now so we don't have to request for it when
it's too late. We will probably be turned down anyway.

I ask everyone to vote again and I will send to board for approval after.

https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/SAC:Budget#2025

+1 from me

+1 from me, thanks Regina. Happy 2025 everyone!

Il 19 dicembre 2024 21:18:49 CET, Regina Obe <lr@pcorp.us> ha scritto:

I've added one more line item to the SysAdmin budget -- contract to upgrade
MailMan and any unforeseen issues.

I figure we should ask for it now so we don't have to request for it when
it's too late. We will probably be turned down anyway.

I ask everyone to vote again and I will send to board for approval after.

SAC:Budget - OSGeo

+1 from me

--
Sent from hand-held device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

+0 for me

The budget succeeds in communicating expectations - but does not provide information to guide planning.

  • As an example line items that can be used by board to limit scope; to understand what it is possible to give up to reduce costs. Or line items that could be added to improve usability.
  • The wiki page could do a better job of capturing in-kind contributions of time from the SAC committee; or opportunities for participation (if our service providers wish to volunteer in-kind or financial support)

Jody,

Not following what you mean by these two.

Item 1: Items that can be used by board to limit scope? How would we detail that exactly.

I think at a certain point you end up spending more time itemizing things, which takes time away from actually doing things.

Like I think all the SysAdmin stuff we itemized needs to be done eventually, sure we can keep pushing things down the road, but things will eventually blow up.

Sure we can not pay hosting fees to OSUOSL and sure they won’t kick us out, but I think that just makes us jerks.

Item 2: What are in-kind contributions from the SAC committee? Is that like time volunteered that could be used as sponsorship instead of money?

e.g. if my company Paragon were to pay for my SAC time, would that constitute the equivalent of sponsorship and Paragon would be listed as a sponsor on osgeo.org site like other sponsors?

I actually like that idea and I think something we should do for others who do volunteer a lot of the their time to OSGeo and such time is under-appreciated, because we never put a price tag on those things.

I presume for the other “opportunities for participation”, you are thinking providing more detail as Json had mentioned of where he would serve best and how can we utilize his services?

That piece I honestly haven’t given much thought to. I’d rather leave that to other people to decide for themselves, as many have e.g. you volunteered to administer discourse, website administration, and repo.osgeo.org and that has been helpful.

Jsanz does a lot of the mailing list stuff.

From my point of view, I’m more concerned with having 3 people who are familiar enough with our infra that they can backup each other. Building that level of trust takes time so I wouldn’t leave that up to casual volunteering.

That is ultimately not a nice to have, but a must have if we are to stay afloat.

Thanks,

Regina

I should probably grab a new discussion thread (sorry).

Here is an example from the marketing committee, outlining a goal and what part requires financing and what part we are dependent on community in-kind input. It also outlines a task requiring collaboration with the SAC committee.

For SAC moderation of discourse presently is done by volunteers. It is part of the operating effort required to host the forums. Sometimes this can be met with funding, sometimes it can be met with policy (example requiring project leads to volunteer as moderators).

Because OSGeo infrastructure is not generally visible it is hard to include sponsors in these activities. It is worth stating that clearly in the budget - that it is a choice SAC is making. Still if there are specific initiatives (such as migrating to forums, or usability improvements) that could benefit from sponsorship; and you have a way to recognize sponsors over the course of the activity - make sure to ask for sponsorship.

Please share your ideas about recognizing in-kind contributions of companies with the board, if you review recent meeting minuets ideas on how to better resource OSGeo are being collected.

I’ve added a line item in there for General In-kind support and what I consider the hours based on the volunteer time I devote to those things multiplied by the extra people I know work on those things.

The mailman piece I honestly don’t know how much moderation that takes, probably varies based on project. On postgis side moderation required is pretty low, then again postgis-users /developers is pretty low traffic too.

e.g. the Mantra moderation I put at ~90 hrs

cause I think I spend about 5 minutes per day on that and I know that Lnicola and Angelos spend at least as much time as I do on it, and that I don’t put under my contract.

The discourse I put at 25 hrs, cause I think every other day I scan the general etc, to see if someone posted to general instead of a more appropriate category and to approve/reject posts that got caught by suspected spam word filters.

I think there are at least another 3 or so people that do that too so I think our total for the year would be 25 hrs or more. I expect that to increase overtime and improvement in our mail server and other spam upgrades to discourse to help with that.

Regarding your line item to redo the “OSGeo UserID Creation” form. What did you have in mind for that?

My annoyance is still too many people are asking for mantras that don’t need them and those accounts languish.

I’d like to reduce that especially until we upgrade our LDAP and institute account name length, expiration, and password policies

Thanks,

Regina

On Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 9:18 PM Regina Obe <lr@pcorp.us> wrote:

I've added one more line item to the SysAdmin budget -- contract to upgrade
MailMan and any unforeseen issues.

I figure we should ask for it now so we don't have to request for it when
it's too late. We will probably be turned down anyway.

I ask everyone to vote again and I will send to board for approval after.

SAC:Budget - OSGeo

+1 from me

+1 Markus

---- On Thu, 19 Dec 2024 21:18:49 +0100 Regina Obe wrote ---
> I've added one more line item to the SysAdmin budget -- contract to upgrade
> MailMan and any unforeseen issues.
>
> I figure we should ask for it now so we don't have to request for it when
> it's too late. We will probably be turned down anyway.
>
> I ask everyone to vote again and I will send to board for approval after.
>
> SAC:Budget - OSGeo
>
>
> +1 from me
>

+1 Jorge

Just to mention we do need sysadmin work and cutting into that budget would be ill-advised. I’m just trying to upload a new GDAL release candidate to upload.osgeo.org and upload speeds are peaking at a sluggish 24 KB/s currently … and no, it is not my internet connection is not terrible.

Even

Le 08/01/2025 à 19:02, Brian M Hamlin a écrit :

logged in directly to osgeo3, I am getting 100MB/s transfer speed right now between OSGeo-SAC hosts locally

Retrying just now, I'm at 1.8 MB (upload). I've observed, for many years, sudden drop in transfer speeds. That used to break GDAL CI automated tests that relied on downloading from download.osgeo.org and thus timed out (so this is not about my internet connection at all). I suspect there are at some times heavy jobs running on OSGeo servers that make things slow down to death.

--
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.
Butcher of all kinds of standards, open or closed formats. At the end, this is just about bytes.

logged in directly to osgeo3, I am getting 100MB/s transfer speed right now between OSGeo-SAC hosts locally

fyi --Brian M Hamlin / MAPLABS / Berkeley

Le 08/01/2025 à 19:02, Brian M Hamlin a écrit :
>
> logged in directly to osgeo3, I am getting 100MB/s transfer speed
> right now between OSGeo-SAC hosts locally
>
Retrying just now, I'm at 1.8 MB (upload). I've observed, for many years, sudden
drop in transfer speeds. That used to break GDAL CI automated tests that relied
on downloading from download.osgeo.org and thus timed out (so this is not
about my internet connection at all). I suspect there are at some times heavy
jobs running on OSGeo servers that make things slow down to death.

--
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.
Butcher of all kinds of standards, open or closed formats. At the end, this is just
about bytes.

Even,

Can you do me a favor and ticket this one.
I know we've had issues in the past, and it often had to do with OSUOSL connectivity to Europe network providers.
I suspect that is what's going on here.

There have also been embarrassing cases, totally my fault where nginx ran out of disk space, though I recall that only being on osgeo3.
So that also caused downloads to crawl to a halt on that server.

+1 from Vicky

On Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 2:18 PM Regina Obe <lr@pcorp.us> wrote:

I’ve added one more line item to the SysAdmin budget – contract to upgrade
MailMan and any unforeseen issues.

I figure we should ask for it now so we don’t have to request for it when
it’s too late. We will probably be turned down anyway.

I ask everyone to vote again and I will send to board for approval after.

https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/SAC:Budget#2025

+1 from me

I’m marking this Vote passed with

Regina +1

Sandro +1

Jody +0

Markus +1

Jorge +1

Sandro +1

Vicky +1

Even +1? We shouldn’t be cutting SAC budget

Thanks,

Regina

From: Vicky Vergara vicky@erosion.dev
Sent: Thursday, January 9, 2025 9:45 AM
To: Regina Obe lr@pcorp.us
Cc: System Administration Committee Discussion/OSGeo sac@lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: PSC Vote: Budget revision 2025

+1 from Vicky

On Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 2:18 PM Regina Obe <lr@pcorp.us> wrote:

I’ve added one more line item to the SysAdmin budget – contract to upgrade
MailMan and any unforeseen issues.

I figure we should ask for it now so we don’t have to request for it when
it’s too late. We will probably be turned down anyway.

I ask everyone to vote again and I will send to board for approval after.

https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/SAC:Budget#2025

+1 from me