[Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion

[Samuel Klein]

I always read Domas's posts, because they raise my spirits :)

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Now, for those who fail at reading comprehension, let me point out to
> the report from ED to board:
> "a desire to defer equipment purchases while various donations and
> sponsorship deals were under negotiation"
>
> We had major sponsorship deals pending, which didn't happen because,
> dear oh dear, bad economy.
> Thats why we stretched a bit, and were doing hardware acquisitions
> next FY.
>
> If you think it wasn't worth getting to those talks and trying to get
> free hardware (or second datacenter, or multi-petabyte storage
> expansion, or ...), you seem to be one in the mood of wasting money.
> Oh well, we also did some optimization work (volunteers mostly ;-)
> that allowed us to grow a bit longer.

Why are we revisiting something from 2007-08 financial planning two
years after it happened and 15 months after the final report?

Putting aside the unnecessary bad faith and challenges to the
foundation's integrity:   I find this all exciting - planning for
significant tech budget support, possible major sponsorships (I've
always hoped we would one day find multiple sources for long-term
in-kind support of servers and bandwidth), &c.  I would simply like to
see more open discussion of what our perfect-world tech dreams are,
and how to pursue what sorts of sponsorships.

We're going to get into a lot of these issues as a community, during
the Strategic Planning process this year, so it will be especially
helpful if people who've worked on Plans and related prioritizing +
analysis are willing to share their knowledge of how the planning
process currently works.

Measuring project health, and being able to compare monthly or
quarterly projections against actual measures, would be helpful for
all sorts of feedback within the projects.


> Do note, our major capacity benchmark is September-October season,
> summer season allows us to restructure lots of stuff.

Cool; what's the best way to observe the high water mark, and how the
systems are holding up?

SJ