[Noisebridge-discuss] Virtualization resources

[Josh Myer]

First, I'm worried that the best and most involved hackers at
noisebridge are the ones who wind up building and running the
infrastructure.  It's noble and all, but you guys could be doing
cooler stuff that won't burn you out and makes noisebridge an even
more awesome place.  Other people can do that work, too, and I'm sure
they'd love the chance.  We just have to live with people in the
learning curve setting up our stuff, which isn't so bad.

More inline below.

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 03:23:55PM -0700, d p chang wrote:
 
> for the muralizer we're using bitbucket, but i (not speaking for josh or
> the muralizer) think it would have been nice to have 'local'
> infrastructure.
> 

If we can make things as reliable, restorable, and trivial to use as
other resources, I'd be glad to use them.  Until then, I'm likely to
continue farming out my projects to external providers, as it's less
overhead and lower risk.  Noisebridge is an infrastructure provider,
but it's best to focus on our strongest points and outsource the rest.

If git/hg/mailman/wiki is our strongest point, great!  I believe that
there are people willing to do most of those things incredibly cheaply
(usually free), but who still feel accountable to their customers
(even freeloaders).  That sense of stewardship is usually missing from
volunteer sysadmins, which isn't unreasonable: it's a bit burdensome,
and, honestly, anyone taking it on should be remunerated for it
somehow.  (NB: I was a sysadmin at ibiblio for the last year and a
half of college; any cynicism you might see here is basically realism)

For perspective: the noisebridge calendar.  A friend wanted to know
when the space was going to be full of people, so I set it up for her.
It took me about 15 minutes, most of which was spent scratching my
goatee and trying to remember what happens at noisebridge.  I've used
another 10 minutes or so adding 10 more admins to it.  And then I
spent 20 minutes writing an email much like this one.  There's no way
I could've gotten a mediawiki plugin installed, much less working
anywhere nearly as smoothly as the gCal setup, in 25 minutes.  I might
have gotten one installed in the full 45 mins that it took to keep all
the NIH/local-pride folks happy.  But, since then, the overhead of
gCal has been roughly zero, and there are almost a dozen people who
can maintain the thing in full: add new admins, etc.

Call me lazy, but I prefer to outsource administrative hassles.
-- 
Josh Myer   650.248.3796
  josh at joshisanerd.com