[NCUC Finance] Hosting the NCUC E-Platform

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 03:52:52PM +0000, Milton L Mueller (mueller at syr.edu) wrote:

> [Milton L Mueller] Haven't seen the proposal yet, but from what I've
> heard the "e-team" is talking about BOTH more money AND more time.

Initially, yes.

> As Wilson said, the VSP requires sophisticated programming in the
> initial stages,

Nothing really sophisticated, we're just going to install
and configure common software. It will take some technical
skill but nothing extraordinary, and some time to get
everything up and running, but probably less than
we've already spent talking about it.

> whereas Ning is an established platform and one
> simply needs to add and manage content to it.

But Ning does not do nearly everything we want to do.
It does what it does fairly well, but it is very inflexible.
Even if we wanted to keep using it we'd want a VPS for
other purposes. We're already using borrowed resources
from several places, which makes things difficult to manage
and causes dependencies on individuals (notably including me).

> This is not to say that a greater investment isn't worth it; another
> $250/year is not a big deal imho. My main concern is being stranded.
> We have one historical episode of enthusiastic volunteers creating a
> web site and then losing interest and leaving us to start over again.

I have seen more such episodes than I care to count. Some I've watched
with pity from the side, others have landed on my lap and taken a lot
of myt time and effort to recover. I've even seen that in supposedly
professional environments, created by paid employees.

So, yes, that is a very valid concern.

But by the same token, I believe I have some kind of idea what
it takes to do it properly. In a maintainable way. In a way that
will survive people coming and going. I don't need to imagine
what it's like to take over quickly built and poorly documented
systems - I know. And I don't want to do that to anybody else.

And we have a good team now, I think. We can do it right.

(Incidentally, I have such experiences with organisations as well.
I've reconstructed membership databases from fragments of excel
files and sql dumps and reading years' worth of bank statements.
Which perhaps explains a little my obsession with institutional
memory and documentation.)

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen