sac Digest 26 Oct 2006 14:36:25 -0000 Issue 33

Committees SAC mailing list
1

Hello all,
I am Swapnil Hajare from Indictrans (www.indictrans.in). I, along with 2 more fellows from Indictrans (Kanhaiya and Gupteshwar), will be working on various activities of OSGeo with help of you all. This will include website development, maintenance, helping sysadmins as well as some other general Opensource GIS tasks such as maintenance of GDAL/OGR and similar tools. Frank Warmerdam had written a mail to the list about this few days ago. We could not start working immedietly because of long Diwali vacation here. Now we are back and ready to work.
As a satrting point, me and others have subscribed to community portal of OSeo and sac, webcommitee MLs. Our skillset include php, drupal, use of free/opensource tools such as UMN mapserver, postgis, GRASS, chameleon, kamap etc.
We hope to contribute well and in the process also learn lot of new things from you all in future.

thanks and regards,

Swapnil Hajare

2

Swapnil Hajare wrote:

Hello all,
  I am Swapnil Hajare from Indictrans (www.indictrans.in <http://www.indictrans.in>). I, along with 2 more fellows from Indictrans (Kanhaiya and Gupteshwar), will be working on various activities of OSGeo with help of you all. This will include website development, maintenance, helping sysadmins as well as some other general Opensource GIS tasks such as maintenance of GDAL/OGR and similar tools. Frank Warmerdam had written a mail to the list about this few days ago. We could not start working immedietly because of long Diwali vacation here. Now we are back and ready to work.
  As a satrting point, me and others have subscribed to community portal of OSeo and sac, webcommitee MLs. Our skillset include php, drupal, use of free/opensource tools such as UMN mapserver, postgis, GRASS, chameleon, kamap etc.
  We hope to contribute well and in the process also learn lot of new things from you all in future.

Swapnil,

I've taken the liberty of adding a more meaningful subject line.

Over the last week we have had some refinement of the transition plans.
Autodesk is looking to contract a system administrator for 3 months to do the
bulk of the transition work, and Bob Bray at Autodesk has agreed to act as
project lead on the transition.

The contract sys admin will likely be taking care of the OpenLDAP setup
rather than Howard having to do it. So we will need to consult actively with
Bob and the system administrator before we can deploy the Membership
Application and other permissions management stuff I spoke about earlier.

I do think it still makes a lot of sense to go ahead with a preliminary
design. We are still planning to use Drupal for the portal, and I assume
it will be an evolved form of the current instance. So arranging access to
that with Tyler would still be good.

Bob - please consider the Indictrans team a resource, especially for technical
Drupal work. On the conference call there was also some discussion of having
the contract system administrator spend some time educating us on how the
new system works. I hope this will include the Indictrans team who I hope
will be an ongoing resource for administering OSGeo infrastructure.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org

3

Frank,

This sounds great. Our contractor is primarily a sys admin, so content and app development is not his thing. If the guys from Indictrans can migrate content from the OSGeo,org site to Drupal, create the Drupal style templates, and focus on the Membership Application development etc for the main site that would be an excellent complement to the skills we will be bringing to the table through our contract.

Bob

Frank Warmerdam wrote:

Swapnil Hajare wrote:

Hello all,
  I am Swapnil Hajare from Indictrans (www.indictrans.in <http://www.indictrans.in>). I, along with 2 more fellows from Indictrans (Kanhaiya and Gupteshwar), will be working on various activities of OSGeo with help of you all. This will include website development, maintenance, helping sysadmins as well as some other general Opensource GIS tasks such as maintenance of GDAL/OGR and similar tools. Frank Warmerdam had written a mail to the list about this few days ago. We could not start working immedietly because of long Diwali vacation here. Now we are back and ready to work.
  As a satrting point, me and others have subscribed to community portal of OSeo and sac, webcommitee MLs. Our skillset include php, drupal, use of free/opensource tools such as UMN mapserver, postgis, GRASS, chameleon, kamap etc.
  We hope to contribute well and in the process also learn lot of new things from you all in future.

Swapnil,

I've taken the liberty of adding a more meaningful subject line.

Over the last week we have had some refinement of the transition plans.
Autodesk is looking to contract a system administrator for 3 months to do the
bulk of the transition work, and Bob Bray at Autodesk has agreed to act as
project lead on the transition.

The contract sys admin will likely be taking care of the OpenLDAP setup
rather than Howard having to do it. So we will need to consult actively with
Bob and the system administrator before we can deploy the Membership
Application and other permissions management stuff I spoke about earlier.

I do think it still makes a lot of sense to go ahead with a preliminary
design. We are still planning to use Drupal for the portal, and I assume
it will be an evolved form of the current instance. So arranging access to
that with Tyler would still be good.

Bob - please consider the Indictrans team a resource, especially for technical
Drupal work. On the conference call there was also some discussion of having
the contract system administrator spend some time educating us on how the
new system works. I hope this will include the Indictrans team who I hope
will be an ongoing resource for administering OSGeo infrastructure.

Best regards,

4

Who is responsible for tasking and managing the Indictrans team?
I assume that one person is responsible for spending the budget and being accountable for how the budget is spent?

Robert Bray wrote:

Frank,

This sounds great. Our contractor is primarily a sys admin, so content and app development is not his thing. If the guys from Indictrans can migrate content from the OSGeo,org site to Drupal, create the Drupal style templates, and focus on the Membership Application development etc for the main site that would be an excellent complement to the skills we will be bringing to the table through our contract.

Bob

Frank Warmerdam wrote:

Swapnil Hajare wrote:

Hello all,
  I am Swapnil Hajare from Indictrans (www.indictrans.in <http://www.indictrans.in>). I, along with 2 more fellows from Indictrans (Kanhaiya and Gupteshwar), will be working on various activities of OSGeo with help of you all. This will include website development, maintenance, helping sysadmins as well as some other general Opensource GIS tasks such as maintenance of GDAL/OGR and similar tools. Frank Warmerdam had written a mail to the list about this few days ago. We could not start working immedietly because of long Diwali vacation here. Now we are back and ready to work.
  As a satrting point, me and others have subscribed to community portal of OSeo and sac, webcommitee MLs. Our skillset include php, drupal, use of free/opensource tools such as UMN mapserver, postgis, GRASS, chameleon, kamap etc.
  We hope to contribute well and in the process also learn lot of new things from you all in future.

Swapnil,

I've taken the liberty of adding a more meaningful subject line.

Over the last week we have had some refinement of the transition plans.
Autodesk is looking to contract a system administrator for 3 months to do the
bulk of the transition work, and Bob Bray at Autodesk has agreed to act as
project lead on the transition.

The contract sys admin will likely be taking care of the OpenLDAP setup
rather than Howard having to do it. So we will need to consult actively with
Bob and the system administrator before we can deploy the Membership
Application and other permissions management stuff I spoke about earlier.

I do think it still makes a lot of sense to go ahead with a preliminary
design. We are still planning to use Drupal for the portal, and I assume
it will be an evolved form of the current instance. So arranging access to
that with Tyler would still be good.

Bob - please consider the Indictrans team a resource, especially for technical
Drupal work. On the conference call there was also some discussion of having
the contract system administrator spend some time educating us on how the
new system works. I hope this will include the Indictrans team who I hope
will be an ongoing resource for administering OSGeo infrastructure.

Best regards,

--
Cameron Shorter
http://cameron.shorter.net

5

Cameron Shorter wrote:

Who is responsible for tasking and managing the Indictrans team?
I assume that one person is responsible for spending the budget and being accountable for how the budget is spent?

Cameron,

I have instructed the Indictrans team to take tasks from Tyler or
Bob with regard to the Drupal site (and within reason).

I'd note that I've retained their services out of my own pocket. I'm
offering some of their time as an "in kind" contribution to OSGeo. If
they prove useful in the future, OSGeo may wish to retain them for
some system administration activities.

Likewise the three month system administrator position is being provided
by Autodesk as an in kind contribution.

Perhaps your question is who is responsible for making spending decisions?
Or who is responsible for ensuring expenditures are properly accounted for
and delivered?

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org

6

Frank,
I (incorrectly) assumed we were spending the OSGeo budget, in which case I'd be expecting some form of accountability. Since the paid positions are privately funded, then the accountablity (to OSGeo) is not needed.

Thankyou for your in-kind contribution. It is very grand considering how much personal time you dedicate to OSGeo as well.

Frank Warmerdam wrote:

Cameron Shorter wrote:

Who is responsible for tasking and managing the Indictrans team?
I assume that one person is responsible for spending the budget and being accountable for how the budget is spent?

Cameron,

I have instructed the Indictrans team to take tasks from Tyler or
Bob with regard to the Drupal site (and within reason).

I'd note that I've retained their services out of my own pocket. I'm
offering some of their time as an "in kind" contribution to OSGeo. If
they prove useful in the future, OSGeo may wish to retain them for
some system administration activities.

Likewise the three month system administrator position is being provided
by Autodesk as an in kind contribution.

Perhaps your question is who is responsible for making spending decisions?
Or who is responsible for ensuring expenditures are properly accounted for
and delivered?

Best regards,

--
Cameron Shorter
http://cameron.shorter.net

7

Cameron Shorter wrote:

Frank,
I (incorrectly) assumed we were spending the OSGeo budget, in which case I'd be expecting some form of accountability. Since the paid positions are privately funded, then the accountablity (to OSGeo) is not needed.

Cameron,

My email was originally considerably longer, going through a few examples
and discussing general principles of accountability. But I decided I was
jumping the gun, and in any event it ended up a bit murky.

I do think we need to keep accountability in mind. But I think a large
part of that is just ensuring that we do stuff as openly as possible, giving
folks a chance to comment, and have one person responsible for each
expendature/initiative.

We could take the acquisition of a server as an example. The board passed
a motion authorizing an expenditure for it, more or less implicitly putting
Tyler in charge. Since then the task was turned over to Jason who has a
good background in such things. He has went to substantial effort to solicit
suggestions and ensure there is consensus on a plan. I'm not sure how much
more we could ask for without really bringing the process to a halt.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org

8

Yes, I'm comfortable with what I have seen so far.

Frank Warmerdam wrote:

Cameron Shorter wrote:

Frank,
I (incorrectly) assumed we were spending the OSGeo budget, in which case I'd be expecting some form of accountability. Since the paid positions are privately funded, then the accountablity (to OSGeo) is not needed.

Cameron,

My email was originally considerably longer, going through a few examples
and discussing general principles of accountability. But I decided I was
jumping the gun, and in any event it ended up a bit murky.

I do think we need to keep accountability in mind. But I think a large
part of that is just ensuring that we do stuff as openly as possible, giving
folks a chance to comment, and have one person responsible for each
expendature/initiative.

We could take the acquisition of a server as an example. The board passed
a motion authorizing an expenditure for it, more or less implicitly putting
Tyler in charge. Since then the task was turned over to Jason who has a
good background in such things. He has went to substantial effort to solicit
suggestions and ensure there is consensus on a plan. I'm not sure how much
more we could ask for without really bringing the process to a halt.

Best regards,

--
Cameron Shorter
http://cameron.shorter.net