Talk:2017 Board Elections

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Revision as of 14:48, 10 January 2017 by Adriana (talk | contribs) (→‎President)

Nominations

President

Adriana Garcia - Accepted

Why does this role exist for ps1?


What types of things do you think people should do in this role?


What are your specific goals for the role?

If I were President, aside from leading the weekly member meetings (Justin's shoes will be difficult to fill), I look forward to learning about conflict resolution. I'd hope to help nurture an open and inclusive environment, where the softest voice has an equal opportunity to be heard. Since we are completely volunteer driven, I also hope to work on distributing the technical and emotional labor of a growing membership. I feel they are both equally important to the continued success of PS1. I would like for us to continue to make cool stuff, teach each other to make cool stuff, get more cool stuff to make even more cool stuff. These are things I am interested in happening as a member, regardless if I am on the board. Honestly, I wasn't seeking to be on the board, but with the current state of our country, it's time to put my money where my mouth is and get involved at the local level. I'd be more than happy to bow out if anyone else wants to take a stab at it. In the end, I'm here for the community.

Treasurer

Brian Chojnowski - Accepted

What are your specific goals for the role?

I hope to fulfill the Treasurer role not only by performing the regulatory required Treasurer duties, but also by trying to lay more groundwork to insure that PS1 will continue to provide our particular sort of service to our our local community, well into the future.

My long-term goal is to find a way for PS1 to own it's own space, or some solution like that. This comes with downsides of course, but the major perk gained by achieving this goal would be enjoying a sort of immunity to the fluctuations in the lease market. We enjoy a favorable relationship with our landlord today, not only because we are dutiful tenants, but also perhaps more critically, because we let to a landlord who believes in our mission. I feel that we could easily find life very challenging should ownership change. As we share some similarities manufacturing, I feel it would be a real challenge for PS1 to respond well to whatever market conditions prevail when our lease is up, as willingness and ability to relocate is a major part of a tenant's bargaining ability.

Chief Technical Office r

Jonathan Bisson - Accepted

What are your specific goals for the role?

Just to make a quick plan of what I would do as a CTO:

DISCLAIMER: I signed the http://neveragain.tech/ pledge. And my position is more extreme than that. I'll refuse to participate in any way on making a database or trying to use the actual data (including internet usage) of our members to profile, police/watch/survey, stalk, discriminate, sell/give to any other profit or non-profit organization any of our members or their usage of tools and resources at the space. That obviously doesn't cover infrastructure monitoring anonymous data requirements, but that will eventually imply working on what and how it is logged by our systems.

Now that it is said:

I want to pursue what Daniel started, making a clean plan (mapping what is used, where and why) and update the infrastructure (security, backups…). Then I would work on each different part individually to try to simplify and automate deployment (with systems like Ansible) so we can restore our systems in a working conditions easily even if someone drops thermite on the server rack and we have to buy new ones. I would also like to make a server monitoring system that would allow members to know what is working or not (even when space net is out, or almost out, there are solutions for that based on free/really cheap GSM systems that can send status when something gets bad), and have procedures in place so they know what they can do and how to do it. That would avoid some of the problems we had in the past. One thing that I would also like to see done is a clean up and eventually reduction of power usage from our systems, I noticed that our server rack runs really hot, and if we can find ways to reduce our power consumption and associated cost, that would be great. But I have no idea yet if this is something achievable or not, so that will require some digging first.

Obviously, that's not something that I can do alone, and would be happy to have Daniel transfer me his knowledge of the systems and even better work with me from time to time, Hef to help me with the historical aspect of the systems and anyone that would be interested in participating. The plan is not to do system administration courses in the first place, but once our infrastructure is cleaned and running, that could actually be the occasion to revive Hef's systems office hour.

Also, if you have anything you would like to know my position about, feel free to ask (in private to avoid messing with that thread: [email protected]). I'll try to publish my answers on a wiki page for future reference.

Well again that's all campaign promises, trust me if you can ;) I'm not promising that I'll do all of that, but that I will try my best to do it.