[theforum] Zombie!

William Anderson neuro at well.com
Mon Jun 24 20:10:07 CDT 2013


On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 8:34 PM, Luther, Ron <Ron.Luther at hp.com> wrote:
> Martin Burns noted:
>>>Happy with
>>>1) weo as static archive
>>>2) lists ongoing
>>>3) Cloud hosting (we've tried 'mates hosting' as primary before, and suffered pain. Happy for mirrors, but not as the >>authoritative) - AWS sounds fine - and tron dumpage
>
> +1!

Thanks for chiming in, Ron!  The more voices we get, the better.

This is another long reply, sorry, and I'm afraid the tl;dr boils down
to "let's get shit done, with focus".

I'm of the opinion that this twitter account is a nice aside, but the
priority has to be - must be - archiving weo, organising the hosting
transfer, decommissioning tron, and starting work on collecting
tributes/memories/testimonials/whatever-we-want-to-call-them to corral
into a new static archive home page for evolt.org.  I also agree with
Adrian that the twitter account thing needs a head of steam under it
so that it can actually take flight and stay aloft rather than just
sputtering off the ground then splatting back into the ground and
continuing onwards in a state of non-motion.

So, that said, can I suggest the following tasks that need to be
quickly scoped out, planned and have people sign up to work on them
please?

1) archive weo.

For now, genghis, emkay and I are working on this, and can I remind
them both that the ec2 instance set up the other day is costing me
money? :)

2) prepare new hosting.

Dave K holds our pursestrings, so I think it is prudent at least that
we figure out how to get ec2 set up formally for evolt the
organisation.  I'd recommend initially (and please, someone jump in
and tell me what I'm saying is bullshit, unless it isn't) that we open
up an AWS account in evolt's name, and use AWSes IAM authentication
thing to set up accounts for authorised volunteers to manage the
infrastructure (once organised, this is probably a discussion that
needs to happen on -sysadmin, but I imagine at very least me, genghis,
dmah and dave will need access to be getting on with to pay for stuff
and spin up appropriate authentication credentials and an EC2
instance).

3) migrate hosting.

The current plan, unless anyone has any objections, is for weo, leo,
et al to be migrated to an EC2 instance.  This, in quick terms, means
an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS instance running Apache, MySQL, Postfix and
Mailman as a base minimum.  We need to verify our mail flow in terms
of message throughput, as Amazon don't like the appearance of spammers
or bulk mailers.  Worst case, we'll need to "sign" a form on the AWS
site in which we state we're not spammers, but we're going to be
punting mail around.  There may be rate limits associated with this,
so this is an important thing to research before we proceed.

Note that the kids over in css-discuss land need to be made aware of
this, so someone needs to own that liaison process.

beo will go to my Kimsufi box in Montreal to keep bandwidth, storage
and IO charges to a minimum on the EC2 instance, and it'll let me (and
anyone else interested) faff around with the archive pending a
complete overhaul (very quickly, I want to have a Wikipedia-like entry
for every browser in the archive to accompany the download links, so
that it becomes more of a museum than a dumping ground for exe, zip,
bin.hqx, dmg and tgz files).

Again, this is all unless anyone else has anything they'd like to
propose as an alternate.

4) prepare the weo archive, anniversary and tribute thingies

This needs to be more fleshed out, but basically I envision the front
page of weo becoming a one-shot page similar to info.cern.ch.  Someone
needs to own the corralling of testimonials, even if the contact
processes are farmed out to loads of people.  This is the really
important bit, as it's the content we want to leverage for EVOLT15.
We're kinda focusing on the technology side a little bit (well, I am,
at least), but the 15th birthday of Evolt is what has lit up this
process, and the content needs needs NEEDS to be the most important
part, otherwise we might as well just punt thelist to google groups
and shut everything else down.

Adrian, you were first to suggest this notion, which I love to bits.
At the risk of shanghaiing you, do you fancy starting the ball rolling
and sketching out what we need to do and who we need to talk to?

5) get the word out.

Evolt will be 15 in December, people.  This is, in web years, a
particularly fantastic thing to celebrate.  We need to let people know
this is happening, and I don't just mean punting links onto reddit,
hackernews or slashdot (although when the time comes, I think reddit
could be a useful jumping off point, if there can be enough attention
drawn from there).  I'm thinking engaging outfits like The Verge,
Wired, etc etc.  I'm sure there are better people than I that can
figure this out without making us look like lunatics or amateurs.

Of course there's no point in doing #5 until #1-3 are done, and #4 is
well underway.  I kinda said that I thought June should be the
discussion period, and July should be the migration period.  Aug-Sep
should be our content collection and build time, and making sure
everything's working time, with November the pre-birthday buildup
where we try and get the word out about what's about to happen.
Again, I'm sketching here, so let's get all of this at least nailed
down in broad strokes, and tighten everything up as we go.


... that's all I have for right now.  Please, everyone: do make
yourselves heard if you think any or all of this is a load of crap and
could be done better and/or differently.  Please also make yourselves
heard if any of the above is something you want to help with, although
I think really #4 and #5 are the ones most suited to the wisdom of the
crowds in terms of execution, and in the great scheme of things,
probably the most important ones to get rolling.

-n


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