[Noisebridge-discuss] Noisebridge.net on Google Apps

[Andy Isaacson]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 04:31:02PM -0800, Jeff Tchang wrote:
> I had a brief discussion with Jacon and Andy over e-mail and the
> possibility of having noisebridge.net use Google Apps. Right now our
> mail is being handled internally by noisebridge.net. (I am not
> entirely sure which box that is... the IP as resolved externally is
> 209.237.247.66...is this pony?).

noisebridge.net runs in a VM hosted by Cernio, a cooperative ISP with
facilities in SFBA and elsewhere in North America.  Our VM happens to be
hosted in their colo facility at 200 Paul in SF.

The hosting costs have always been covered by donations from several
Noisebridge members.

> Mail is not stored and the box only does does mail forwarding. No mail
> is kept on the system.
> 
> The advantage I see of using a hosted service is the ease of
> administration and being able to easily dole out @noisebridge.net
> email accounts to anyone that wants them. Of course we can do this
> today but in my opinion it is a lot easier to setup in Google Apps new
> email accounts than it is to configure the mail forwarding.

A long time ago we discussed and decided against having @noisebridge.net
vanity email addresses.  (Which is not to say that we can't change our
mind, just covering the history for people who weren't here then.)


> There are a ton of reasons why we wouldn't want to do this including
> privacy/security concerns and the support being handled by a 3rd
> party.  However Google does offer professional Google Apps for non
> profits for up to 3000 accounts for free (which is great).


The downsides of moving to a hosted service outweigh the positives, IMO.
Many of the downsides are much worse for a "free" service in which the
provider doesn't even have a contractual obligation to provide the
service.

On the plus side:
 + web UI for admin.  Some people like this.
 + scalable backend, ride G's infrastructure wave
 + lots of features
 + supposedly zero monetary cost
 + let the pros ride the security update treadmill for you

On the minus side:
 - web UI for admin.  Personally I find these difficult to use.
 - no CLI available.
 - suceptible to large scale outages.
 - loss of data ownership (G's Data Liberation Front nonwithstanding).
 - feature lock-in.
 - further privatization of the public sphere.
 - inability to debug the inevitable failures when they do happen.
 - first-class usage only possible with G's web apps, not with
   standalone UIs.
 - ad-revenue based business model.
 - added insecurity of being exposed to bad actors at the service
   provider.

On the whole, I don't see the balance as tilting towards hosted
services, for Noisebridge.  (If it were a business decision, I'd
probably go the other direction; but it's not.  The cost to Noisebridge
of the existing setup is zero, and the marginal cost of switching to
hosted services would be non-zero because the existing volunteers are
uninterested in volunteering to maintain a hosted service.  So
additional volunteer efforts would be needed.)


All that said, I have no problem with people using hosted services in
the context of Noisebridge.  If you'd like to set up a GApps instance
for Noisebridge, go ahead!  If you'd like a DNS name like
gapps.noisebridge.net, just let me know where we should point it.  Or if
you'd like to register a standalone domain like nbapps.net, I'm happy to
donate money towards the registration fees.


Frankly, I sincerely hope that non-noisebridge.net infrastructure
becomes a part of the Noisebridge ecosystem.  I think that the
centralization of more services onto a single point of failure would be
a design flaw, and we should, instead, encourage distribution and
resiliency.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Thanks,
-andy