September 2017 - Inkscape Board of Directors

Draft of 'call for hosting sponsors'
by Bryce Harrington 28 Sep '17

28 Sep '17

Hi all, As mentioned at one of the recent board meetings, I'm going to send out a request next week for sponsors to provide hosting services for us. Below is the initial draft of the request, which I'd appreciate your feedback on. I've collected a list of places to send it, and will also post to inkscape-announce@ and inkscape-devel@...89... If you can think of additional places, please let me know. Bryce ------------------------------------------------------------------------ == Would you be interested in hosting Inkscape as a sponsor? == Inkscape is seeking to improve its online service hosting. To this end we're soliciting proposals for donation/sponsorship of hosting services for the project. The Inkscape Project is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization that develops and maintains the popular Inkscape vector drawing software, provided freely to millions of artists, designers, and other drawers of lines. If you would be interested in sponsoring us through a donation of hosting service, we would be happy to add you to our sponsors page, with a mention & link on our main website's footer. Proposals can be sent to me as contact point. Our sysadmin team will review them and make a recommendation to the Inkscape board, who will make the final determination in about a month's time. == Background == We currently have various services hosted at a number of different locations with widely varying administrative capacities. We wish to consolidate these services to one platform where they can be centrally administered. Services high on our priority list to migrate soon include mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki. Bug tracking, web forum and gitlab are potential secondary priorities. Our Django-based main website may also be worth consolidating at some point in the future. Ideally we'd like two distinct hosts, with one serving as primary and the other as a backup/spare, preferrably in geographically distinct areas (e.g. Europe and Canada). == Requirements == Minimum Desired Required Ideal CPU: dual core quad core RAM: 4 gb 256 gb Storage: 500GB >1 TB (HW RAID-1) HDD SDD Bandwidth: 1 TB/mo 2 TB/mo OS: Any linux Ubuntu 16.04 * We prefer an actual machine (metal) rather than virtual hosting. * UPS power backup * 24h support at the datacenter -- A hardware technician would need to be available for handling hardware issues, to do OS installation/reinstallation, hook up KVM/IP if available, and to investigate faults that can't be diagnosed remotely. * Server would be under the administrative and technical management of the Inkscape admin team (about 6-8 people). We would have root access to the machine for doing system updates and to install/configure software and services. * We expect to be managing/maintaining our software ourselves. Items we anticipate migrating to this include (in rough order of priority): + Mailman3 + Mattermost + Wiki (mediawiki currently) + Forum (e.g. hosting for inkscapeforum.com) + Bug tracker (TBD) + Gitlab + Other project management tools + Website / Django * Inkscape does not handle anything particularly controversial. No copyright infringing materials, nothing political, nothing intentionally offensive. Our windows binary has been false-positived by virus software in the past, but we clear this up ourselves. * Currently our website hosting is sponsored and managed by OSUOSL. It's a root access virtual machine running postgresql, memcached, nginx and the django site itself. Memory usage is 450MiB per web host thread, currently 2 threads, plus 500MB for postgresql and 500MB for memcache. CDN is hosted by Fastly, currently serving 32TB per month for Inkscape (1:1.5 ratio US:EU, so more EU hits overall). There's enough dynamic content that we still see a decent load (1/2 TB/mo) on the server, notably around major releases (once every year or two); we are continuously tweaking optimizations.

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Bit of History
by Martin Owens 21 Sep '17

21 Sep '17

Hi board, I've put together all the elections (including the 2006 non-election) into the website, so we have a record of what happened in inkscape history. https://inkscape.org/en/*board See the links on the right. It took a while to piece together, although frighteningly the 2015 election is the one that is the worst in terms of data. We poured so much data into the conservancy site, that now that it's down, all those emails that link to it for further details are not useful. If there's any corrections let me know. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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[brett@...41...: Upcoming changes to the travel policy]
by Bryce Harrington 13 Sep '17

13 Sep '17

FYI #2, this one does affect us but is good news: 1. More flexibility in selecting flights for time vs. lowest cost 2. Slightly higher limits for international flights 3. Bit more flexibility in approvals and reimbursement ----- Forwarded message from Brett Smith <brett@...41...> ----- Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 10:38:27 -0400 From: Brett Smith <brett@...41...> To: project-reps@...41... Subject: Upcoming changes to the travel policy Reply-To: policies-discuss@...41... Hi again everyone, Now for the good news. At their most recent meeting, Conservancy’s board approved the proposed changes to the travel policy that were recently submitted to policies-discuss. Let me give a quick recap of those changes so I can discuss next steps for PLCs. First, the new policy provides additional budget to book flights that save substantial time over the cheapest available fare. This was the most common request we heard, and definitely we recognize the value of saving people’s time. In order to keep the rules simple, the budget increases at specific time savings marks. You can see the new rules here <https://k.sfconservancy.org/policies/files/783dcdd92fc61f3f150e1c65782c0fe5…>. Second, the policy increases the cost of international flights that require preapproval, from $1,500 to $1,650. This change is just to keep pace with fares we’re seeing; the $1,500 limit has been in place since at least 2012, and of course fares have risen since then. This should reduce the number of flights that require preapproval. There are also a couple of changes that just provide additional flexibility in handling reimbursement requests. The new rules clarify that our 90-day limit on reimbursement requests starts from the last day of travel, not the day the expense was incurred. (This is how we’ve treated it since the 90-day rule was introduced, but now it’s official.) Expenses that require preapproval can be approved by any officer of Conservancy, not just the executive director. This should help us be more responsive to your requests. There are also non-rules changes, like updates to the currency rates we use (forced on us because the Bank of Canada stopped providing them) and Markdown formatting. For more background, see the messages to policies-discuss <https://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/policies-discuss/2017-August/thre…> and the Git history <https://k.sfconservancy.org/policies/changelog?branch=2017-08-proposed-upda…>. Next steps: We would like to make these changes effective in a week, on 20 September. The reason for the gap is we want to give you time to discuss them internally. Because these changes potentially mean increased project expenses, we understand you might not be prepared to take those on. If you would like to follow the old policies, or other rules that are stricter than ours, you can always do that. Just let us know through your project alias, and we’ll handle your reimbursement requests accordingly. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll follow the new rules for any reimbursed expenses incurred on or after 20 September. I really hope you all like these changes; our goal in pushing them forward was really to try to address head-on a lot of the feedback I’ve heard about flight reimbursements and preapprovals while I’ve been helping with our bookkeeping, and I’m optimistic we’ve made good progress there. If you have any questions about the changes, feel free to ask us through your project alias, or on policies-discuss if it’s appropriate for public discussion. Best regards, -- Brett Smith ----- End forwarded message -----

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[brett@...41...: Rackspace OSS discount ends at the end of the year]
by Bryce Harrington 13 Sep '17

13 Sep '17

FYI. Although, this doesn't affect us. ----- Forwarded message from Brett Smith <brett@...41...> ----- Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 09:46:41 -0400 From: Brett Smith <brett@...41...> To: project-reps@...41... Subject: Rackspace OSS discount ends at the end of the year Reply-To: Brett Smith <brett@...41...> Hi everyone, I have good news and bad news for you today, so I’ll start with the bad news. Many of you are relying on Rackspace’s OSS discount to host servers for your project. Unfortunately, Rackspace just informed us yesterday that they’ll be ending the program at the end of the year. The entire business is shifting focus away from running their own cloud infrastructure, to providing support in the Big Three clouds, so as part of that they’re ending incentive programs structured around their cloud. Conservancy hosts our own servers through this program, and so we’re already reaching out to other cloud providers to see if they might be willing to offer something similar. We realize it would be ideal if we could find a similar replacement program that covers each of you separately, and we’ll be trying to do that first. If you have contacts at hosting providers that we should be talking to about providing such a service, please let us know; this is a big enough deal that we’re eager to talk to anybody who might help. If they’re sufficiently generous, we may consider recognizing them as an in-kind sponsor on our web site. If you’re affected by this, it would probably be prudent to start planning how you’ll migrate your servers off Rackspace to another provider. I realize that’s difficult to fully plan without knowing where you’re going, but at least it would be helpful to review your system configurations and make sure you understand what you need to migrate. You might also consider if there are ways you could consolidate or streamline your servers. Rackspace’s OSS discount program is /extremely/ generous; we might find a similar program that is merely /very/ generous. Alternatively, if you’re willing to pay Rackspace for hosting, you can do that too if you have the funds. Your Rackspace bills (which are usually zeroed about by the discount) are in our Subversion server along with the rest of your financial records, usually under |Expenses/Rackspace/|. If you need help with accessing that, just let me know. If you don’t currently have an OSS discount account with Rackspace, but you were thinking about getting one, I’m afraid that’s no longer available. If you want to talk with us about this change for any reason, it’s probably best to do so through your specific project alias. I’m following all those conversations and can follow up there. I’ll keep you updated about our progress in finding a replacement program. Best regards, -- Brett Smith ----- End forwarded message -----

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Inkscape Board Meeting (note earlier time!)
by Bryce Harrington 02 Sep '17

02 Sep '17

A 2-hour earlier time is scheduled for this month's board meeting[1]. Friday, Sep 1st, at 10am Pacific time in #inkscape-devel. As always, all members of the community are welcome to participate. http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Board_Meetings Agenda: + GSoC 2017 wrap up + Sponsor acceptance/approval criteria + Board election status + Other business Bryce 1: The earlier time was discussed last meeting, so when we have development meetings after, we aren't keeping European folks up too late. https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/item/11250/

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