[Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion

[Anthony]

>
> > Still doesn't work.  And yes, it needs an executive level decision,
> > and it
> > needs a kick in the ass from the board to get the executive level to
> > make
> > that decision.
>
> That work is being done at the moment, I'd think that it is being
> handled properly. On the other hand, I'm no longer in position of
> judging that from above, and can enjoy fully not caring ;-)
>

I'll believe it when I see it.  AFAICT, the dumps still don't work, and you
still haven't hired a new CTO.


> > How many millions of dollars were left unspent by the tech team a
> > couple
> > years ago?
>
> How many?
>

1.7

Why are you looking for faults?
>

The first step in fixing a problem is identifying the faults.


> CTO had to operate under constraints
> set by financial management, financial management was done based on
> conservative non-profit operation model.
>

The CTO came up with a budget.  He submitted that budget.  That budget was
accepted.  Then the money which was budgeted went unspent, while glaring
problems which required spending remained.


> > You can't have a bunch of
> > people adding little things here and there and expect a working
> > product, and
> > it's unrealistic to expect someone to take charge of this sort of
> > thing for
> > free, especially in the current economy.
>
> You seem to have entirely failing understanding of motivation
> technology volunteers can have.
>

It's not a matter of motivation, it's a matter of reality.  If you're going
to limit your selection to people who are independently wealthy, you're not
going to get as many qualified individuals for the task.  If there are
people willing and able to fix the dumps for free, and you can find them and
give them the tools they need to do it, fine.  But that didn't happen, and
*in this particular case*, it's probably unrealistic.  Three years ago,
before the economy went into the crapper, you probably could have found
someone to do it.  I probably would have even done it myself, if someone had
given me access to the servers so I could do it.  What I remember from the
time is that the story was always "this is being worked on", not "we need
someone to volunteer to redesign this".  Actually I was under the impression
then that you didn't really want to fix the dumps - remember this was during
the beginning of the oversight days.  But today it's probably tougher
finding qualified individuals willing and able to do it for free.

Whatever.  Whether it's done for free or for a price isn't what's important.
 What's important is that it gets done.

We have amazing project work done on search by Robert, toolserver
> operation by River, do note, how much work on CDN infrastructure that
> was done by Mark, or simply all the work done before by Brion and Tim.
>

Have any of these people fixed the dumps?  Maybe if the current system
wasn't written in Python you could have found someone to do this, but as it
was, it simply wasn't a task which anyone was motivated to do for free.
 "Let's just wait a few years and see if someone turns up" isn't the answer
to that problem.  "Let's spend a little of this 1.7 million we have sitting
in a bank account doing nothing" is.