On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:47 PM, William Stein<wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, >
... > ------ > > As some of you may have noticed, Sage recently had a similar situation, in > that in late May Michael Abshoff went AWOL -- he posted one message in May > that he was taking a break for a month, and has not been heard from since. > Since he was doing essentially all release management, porting, trac > account creation, etc., we are fortunate that him going AWOL hasn't impacted > the Sage project very badly, in that with a bunch of work we were able to > adapt. That said, I think it would be really beneficial for people > involved with Sage to think through other scenarios and come up with a way > to make our project more robust. For example, what if *I* was AWOL for a > while? There are about 3-4 other people with admin privileges on most of > our hardware resources, and they are physically in the UW math department > server room (so professionally hosted and unaffected by me being AWOL). The > DNS stuff (sagemath.org) is all 100% admin'd by me via godaddy.com, so I > should find a way to fix things so that if somebody else needs to manage the > DNS stuff that is possible (any volunteers -- Harald?). Several comments: I think Minh is doing a great job! It is fascinating to me that when a structure (like the Sage organization) changes (like Michael's void), how someone (eg, Minh) of really remarkable organizational abilities emerges. But maybe it's just me, and my admitted abundance of disorganization, but I think that phenomenon is really interesting. I totally agree that there should be several people for each job, so if there is anything one you (or someone else) does, it would be good to find others to share the load. On the other hand, despite the many amazingly talented people involved with Sage, IMHO there is only one person at this time with (1) a strong technical grasp of the global structure of Sage, (2) a true dedication to keep Sage going. If you went AWOL, servers might keep running and code trickling in, but what about funding and the interest generated by your talks? > > Anyway, I would appreciate people sharing their thoughts about how to make > the Sage project more organized with respect to key people vanishing -- > either temporarily or permantly -- from the project. If you have relevant > experience with other projects, or know of good articles about this sort of > thing, etc., please share. > > Thanks! > > -- William > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washington > http://wstein.org > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
