[steering] proposed letter to theforum

[Marlene Bruce]

Hey Martin,

Thanks SO MUCH for filling the letter out. Below is the letter with
all changes incorporated (I changed the header on the "MEO" section
to "MEMBERS.EVOLT.ORG (MEO)."

You mentioned:

>'approval' changed to 'agreement in principle'. I would guess we'll be
>going back for a final approval on whatever the more definite, detailed
>proposal is.

I guess so. I'd envisioned that we'd take any discussion on the
forum, incorporate it into our plans, and then theforum would vote on
the revised scope. Does that sound right to you? I hadn't thought
about doing a more detailed proposal for theforum to vote on.

Or do we just need agreement in principle to get things moved to the
committees for further action?

Thoughts?

Marlene

--- REVISED LETTER ---

Subject: evolt.org revamp comment period open

Everyone,

Over the last month or so the Steering Committee has been discussing
a major upgrade to evolt.org's site, lists, and services.

We want to improve many aspects of what we're currently doing, including:

* providing better content and services to our members and visitors,
* coming more into alignment with our open-source philosophy,
* better facilitating community ownership, participation and communication,
* revamping our back and front ends,
* dramatically lowering our costs, need to fundraise and resulting
risk, increasing the certainty of evolt.org's continuation,
* and more...

As you can imagine, this is a major undertaking. Come this December
evolt.org will be celebrating our 5th birthday, and we'd like to
unveil a dramatically improved evolt.org prior to and in anticipation
of this milestone.

There are several steps that we have already identified, though this
list may not be comprehensive:

HOSTING:
Hosting with Ron has been very good for evolt - he took us in and
provided a highly effective place for us to host our 5 boxes, and he
has very kindly not as yet billed us for any of the ~140GB a month of
his that we chew through. However, he's rightly moving towards
invoicing us for the bandwidth we use, and this will bring costs of
US$3.50/GB.
We propose:
* To move to an environment such as http://www.rackshack.net with
data costs of ~US$0.30/GB (nb this is where eouk & css-d are hosted)
* To reduce the number of boxes required to 2 (likely one for leo,
and one for all the web content & apps)
* To use managed hosting (rather than owning our own boxes in co-lo)

TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE:
As the above setup is unlikely to be able to run Oracle as the
back-end db, and we don't currently have the documentation required
to satisfy a license audit on Oracle or CF, we propose:
* To move the backend db to another technology (either an OSS
solution such as Postgres or MSSQL). MSSQL will likely require a
Windows-based provider who will also supply necessary license for
operating system and DB. To maintain the current CMS will also
require finding a CF license supplier.
* To make such changes as are necessary to the CMS layer to cope with
that change. This will be a major undertaking as it has a large
amount of Oracle-specific code.

MEMBERS.EVOLT.ORG (MEO):
* At present, meo provides the same facilities as f2o, but f2o does it better.
* Because it's free, we have to come down very hard on anyone using
it as a production hosting service as we can't afford the bandwidth
* It doesn't provide much in the way of community building,
integrated with the other things we do
We propose:
* To kill meo as is - stop taking new accounts immediately, and give
existing members time to migrate elsewhere if necessary
* To develop a hosting environment which will provide pre-built
applications for members to host content such as photo albums, wikis,
blogs, event-diaries ("Next month's beervolts...) etc.
* To charge a small monthly fee for this. This will balance
affordability with helping the rest of evolt.org to be financially
self-sufficient, and shouldn't be much above US$10 a month in the
first instance. If we got 50 accounts, this could fund evolt.org
*entirely*.

FRONTEND & CONTENT:
We propose:
* To improve the site's IA & usability in the light of our experience
with it over the last 2 years, based on Javier's work at
http://freezope2.nipltd.net/acorn/evolt/InformationArchitecture
* To revisit the visual design & coding standards
* To add a general-purpose wiki, starting with much of the content on
freezope2.nipltd.net/acorn/evolt/

What we need is agreement in principle from theforum to start
pursuing the upgrade. A comment period will extend until [one week(?)
from when this email is sent, unless the need for a deadline
extension becomes apparent.]

If you want to read the discussion we've had on Steering, you can see
the full text starting at
http://lists.evolt.org/steeringarchive/2002-December/000163.html and
continuing until the present. If you're interested in commenting on
what we (on steering) propose, please read the discussion first.

Voting will commence at the end of the discussion period, and last
5(?) days. I will send specific details about voting just before it
commences.

Thanks,
Marlene