Draft of 'call for hosting sponsors'
by Bryce Harrington
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.
5 years, 6 months
Bit of History
by Martin Owens
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
5 years, 6 months
[brett@...41...: Upcoming changes to the travel policy]
by Bryce Harrington
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/783dcdd92fc61f3f150e1c65782c0f...>.
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/th...>
and the Git history
<https://k.sfconservancy.org/policies/changelog?branch=2017-08-proposed-up...>.
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 -----
5 years, 6 months
[brett@...41...: Rackspace OSS discount ends at the end of the year]
by Bryce Harrington
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 -----
5 years, 6 months
