While I agree with ross in general about suggesting technical solutions 
without suggesting how they are going to be maintained -- agree very 
strongly -- and would further re-emphasize that it's improtant to 
remember that ALL software installations are "living organisms" 
(Ranganthan represent!), and need ongoing labor not just initial install 
labor....

I don't agree with the conclusion that the _only_ way to do this is with 
a "central organization" or "my organization which has shown
  commitment through z"

I think it IS possible to run things sustainably with volunteer 
decentralized not-formal-organization labor.

But my experience shows that it _isn't_ likely to work with ONE PERSON 
volunteering.  It IS more likely to work with an actual defined 
collective, which feels collective responsibility for replacing 
individual members when they leave and maintaining it's collective 
persistence.

Is that foolproof? No.  But it doens't make it foolproof to incorporate 
and have a 'central organization' (still need labor, paid or unpaid), or 
to have an existing organization that commits to it (can always change 
their mind, or not fulfill their commitments even without actually 
changing their mind). There are plusses and minuses to both.

I am a firm believer in code4lib's dentralized volunteer 
community-not-organization nature.  I may be becoming a minority, it 
seems like everyone else wants code4lib to be Official?  There are 
plusses and minuses to both.

But either way, I don't think "officiality" is EITHER neccesary NOR 
sufficient to ensure sustainability of tech projects (or anything else).

But i fully agree with rsinger that setting up a new tech project 
_without_ thinking about ongoing sustainability is foolhardy, unless 
it's just a toy you don't mind if it disappears when the originator 
loses interest.

On 12/4/2012 11:08 AM, Ross Singer wrote:
> Shaun, I think you missed my point.
>
> Our Drupal (and per Tom's reply, Wordpress -- ...and I'm going to
> take a stab in the dark and throw MediaWiki instance into the pile)
> is, for all intents and purposes, unmaintained because we have no in
> charge of maintaining it.  Oregon State hosts it, but that's it.
>
> Every year, every year, somebody proposes we ditch the diebold-o-tron
> for "something else" (Drupal modules, mediawiki plugins, OCS, ... and
> most recently Easy Chair), yet nobody has ever bothered to do
> anything besides send an email of what we should use instead.
> Because that requires work and commitment.
>
> What I'm saying is, we don't have any central organization, and thus
> we have no real sustainable way to implement locally hosted services.
> The Drupal instance, the diebold-o-tron (and maybe Mediawiki) are
> legacies from when several of us ran a shared server in a colocation
> facility.  We had skin in the game.  And then our server got hacked
> because Drupal was unpatched (which sucked) and we realized we
> probably needed to take this a little more seriously.
>
> The problem was, though, when we moved to OSU for our hosting, we
> lost any power to do anything for ourselves and since we no longer
> had to (nor could) maintain anything, all impetus to do so was lost.
>
> To be clear, when we ran all these services on anvil, that wasn't
> sustainable either!  We simply don't have the the organization or
> resources to effectively run this stuff by ourselves.  That's why I'm
> really not interested in hearing about some x we can run for y if
> it's not backed up with "and my organization which has shown
> commitment through z will take on the task of doing all the work on
> this".
>
> -Ross.
>
> On Dec 4, 2012, at 10:41 AM, Shaun Ellis <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> Tom, can you post the plugin to Code4Lib's github so we can have a
>> crack at it?
>>
>> Ross, I'm not sure how many folks on this list were aware of the
>> Drupal upgrade troubles.  Regardless, I don't think it's
>> constructive to put new ideas on halt until it gets done.  Not
>> everyone's a Drupal developer, but they could contribute in other
>> ways.
>>
>> -Shaun
>>
>> On 12/4/12 10:27 AM, Tom Keays wrote:
>>> On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:53 AM, Ross Singer
>>> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Seriously, folks, if we can't even figure out how to upgrade
>>>> our Drupal instance to a version that was released this decade,
>>>> we shouldn't be discussing *new* implementations of *anything*
>>>> that we have to host ourselves.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Not being one to waste a perfectly good segue...
>>>
>>> The Code4Lib Journal runs on WordPress. This was a decision made
>>> by the editorial board at the time (2007) and by and large it was
>>> a good one. Over time, one of the board members offered his
>>> technical expertise to build a few custom plugins that would
>>> streamline the workflow for publishing the journal. Out of the
>>> "box", WordPress is designed to publish a string of individual
>>> articles, but we wanted to publish issues in a more traditional
>>> model, with all the issues published at one time and arranged in
>>> the issue is a specific order. We could (and have done) all this
>>> manually, but having the plugin has been a real boon for us.
>>>
>>> The Issue Manager plugin that he wrote provided the mechanism
>>> for: a) preventing articles from being published prematurely, b)
>>> identifying and arranging a set of final (pending) articles into
>>> an issue, and c) publishing that issue at the desired time.
>>>
>>> That person is no longer on the Journal editorial board and
>>> upkeep of the plugin has not been maintained since he left. We're
>>> now several WordPress releases behind, mainly because we delayed
>>> upgrading until we could test if doing so would break the
>>> plugins. We have now tested, and it did. I won't bore you with
>>> the details, but if we want to continue using the plugin to
>>> manage our workflow, we need help.
>>>
>>> Is there anybody out there with experience writing WordPress
>>> plugins that would be willing to work with me to diagnose what
>>> has changed in the WordPress codex that is causing the problems
>>> and maybe help me understand how to prevent this from happening
>>> again with future releases?
>>>
>>> Thanks, Tom Keays / [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>
>> -- Shaun D. Ellis Digital Library Interface Developer Firestone
>> Library, Princeton University voice: 609.258.1698 |
>> [log in to unmask]
>
>