On 04/15/2014 05:12 PM, David Gerard wrote:
Yeah, one of the first things to do is to talk to these partner organisations (because they are partner organisations) and ask what would actually be helpful, rather than helpy
One thing that Erik has not mentionned (probably because it simply slipped his mind) is that this is exactly what we have done for Freenode in the past six or seven months. They were aching for a couple extra nodes, and we are currently hosting one for them.
This was a one-off, and is not very onerous for us to provide (we already have the hardware and infrastructure; the only ongoing cost is bandwidth and a little bit of ops time). I suppose it can be seen as a contribution of the ops team itself -- we were pretty much unanimous that if a way could be found to help them in a way that would not impact production (it has), then contributing to a project we rely upon daily was a "no brainer".
FWIW, I agree with the general principle as well, and I don't even see it as a objective creep: the maintenance of the ecosystem of tools and infrastructure which makes Wikipedia possible is a necessary part of our mission. It does little help to have all the data if there doesn't exist an infrastructure of open source software to make running the projects possible.
-- Marc