[NCUC Finance] Hosting the NCUC E-Platform

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Feb 20 21:22, Milton L Mueller (mueller at syr.edu) wrote:

>  Another item to be sure to address is how much manual maintenance
>  and updating the new arrangement will require, who will - with
>  ABSOLUTE reliability - take those responsibilities, how you will
>  migrate all current materials to the new platform, and the absolute
>  need for continuity, so don't create a technically demanding
>  platform that no one will know how to deal with when this specific
>  crew is gone.

While there's no such thing as ABSOLUTE reliability (even
now we don't have any good recovery plan in case Ning goes
bankrupt or kicks us out - they've done such things in the past),
you are quite right that we should avoid building hard
dependencies on individuals who come and go.

But don't worry, we are acutely aware of that and are definitely
planning to use common tools and platforms that don't require rare
skillsets or much work in everyday maintenance, and to document
everything well enough that even if current e-team in its entirety
dies at once in a plane crash, it shouldn't be too hard to find new
people who can take over with minimal disruption.

We are also going to make migration plans, not only for
existing materials to the new platform but also from it --
which in this case is mainly documenting things, as
one major advantage of a VPS that's completely in our
control is that we won't have to fight to get our data out
in whatever form we want.

We've already made some progress in that the DNS registration
of ncuc.org no longer depends on Brenden alone, although it's
still in his name (ideally it should be owned by NCUC itself,
but I believe that'd require legal incorporation first).

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen