[Linux-aus] Candidacy Support Statement - President or Ordinary Council Member

[Anthony Towns]

On Sun, Dec 04, 2016 at 11:14:12AM +1100, Paul Wayper wrote:
> On 03/12/16 00:21, Russell Coker wrote:
> > On Friday, 2 December 2016 7:46:18 AM AEDT Anthony Towns wrote:
> >> On Sat, Nov 26, 2016 at 02:45:10PM +1100, Kathy Reid wrote:
> >>> Response #1: Transition from MemberDB to CiviCRM at a cost of approx
> >>> $23k AUD, with ongoing opex of around $2.5k AUD annually and have a
> >>> custom voting module developed to facilitate Elections (cost not yet
> >>> estimated).
> >>
> >> That seems kind of gold-plated, especially if the $23k doesn't include
> >> the custom development that will actually let it do the one thing memberdb
> >> actually does... Why so much?
> >>
> >> Is the admin team not happy to maintain an instance of civicrm directly?
> > 
> > It is a lot of money and Linux sysadmin is something that many volunteers can 
> > do.  But there aren't many people with CiviCRM skills and such projects can be 
> > complex.
> Of course, if AJ is volunteering to do the conversion, maybe we could save
> that money!

So I've done the "count-to-ten" thing before replying to this (and
thrown away a previous draft), because the whole "let's mock someone by
sarcastically suggesting they should volunteer" gets on my nerves.

I've volunteered to help out LA in the past; the most recent major
contribution I did was back in 2008ish getting LA's accounting records
into a self-maintained open source system, ready to pass on to a new
treasurer. The incoming council junked it immediately, in favour of
switching to a proprietary SaaS solution, Xero.

I don't think there's any point volunteering to help if the powers that
be are going to oppose your efforts. I was caught by surprise at that
being the case previously in regards to managing our accounts with open
source stuff. I'm trying to avoid being fooled in the same way again,
given that it looks to me like it's also true now: Kathy is VP and on
(or head of?) the membership committee, and already has a definite plan,
and over the past couple of years that plan doesn't seem to have budged
much at all in response to any of the concerns I have.

For instance (quoting out of order):

> So I'm really wary of us ordinary members saying "the admins should totally do
> X" or "Linux Australia should implement Y" or "why are we spending money on
> doing Z when we can do it ourselves?"

("Why are we doing X instead of Y?" seems like it's *always* a good
question for members to ask and the council to be able to answer, to
me. Modulo rate-limiting in extremes, I guess)

The alternative to "let's pay someone to do X" isn't "let's demand
someone do X for free", it's "let people who want to do X, Y or Z do
a demo and then evaluate the results and pick one or more of them".

I proposed that at the start of the year [0] but got shot down by Hugh [1]
in favour of having a committee that can work out which themselves. Kathy
then formed that committee, and within a week the requirements doc was
updated to talk specifically about CiviCRM, and within about a month the
committee was working on "understanding the scope of .. a Drupal/CiviCRM
implementation" [2] and two months after that, was getting CiviCRM quotes
[3].

Maybe there was some detailed review of concerns and alternative options
that took place sometime in that period but never got posted to anywhere
I've seen; but to me it looks more like it was all about getting to the
already chosen solution.

That's not necessarily a bad thing: I don't know Kathy at all well,
but she seems pretty impressive to me, so "Kathy has a plan, let her
execute it" is probably a fine way to run an organisation. Certainly other
successful organisations have some form of "supreme absolute benevolent
dictator for life" approach to leadership -- Linux kernel development,
for example.

But in any organisation that's run like that, if you have concerns about
the plan, and don't have the ear of the leader (and don't want a drawn
out fight that you're likely to lose), it's not a good idea to spend
much energy or time on the organisation.

> >> I'm not sure if this actually makes sense to me -- trying to get new
> >> members only makes sense if being a member is actually valuable to people;
> >> and if being an LA member is valuable, then word of mouth is probably
> >> the best way of getting people involved anyway.
> What do you mean by "value" here?  To me the benefits of LA membership are:

The benefits of LA membership for organisers of open source events include:

 - a registered organisation for official-ness
 - hassles about getting insurance already dealt with
 - access to credit card merchant facilities
 - availability of substantial existing funds to ease cash flow problems
 - existing procedures for handling tax stuff, some of the bother of
   which is taken care of for you by other people
 - contacts with people experienced in running conferences, doing conference
   videos and networking, etc
 - long term hosting of conference materials like videos
 - some hosting and admin support
 - people with LA debit cards able to cover small expenses like DNS
   registration or meetup.org costs

Those are real valuable benefits, and if there's some collection of
Australian, open source related event organisers out there that don't
already have those things taken care of, a PR/recruitment campaign would
totally make sense.

> So I'm intrigued what you see the 'value' of a membership to be.  Why do you
> think that we _shouldn't_ bother with getting new members?

Outside of event organisers, I don't think LA currently provides much
value to members; and as far as I can see, there's no untapped group of
open source event organisers that a recruitment effort coule tap into.

I think LA could be valuable for more things than just organising events,
but until that happens, recruiting new members on that basis is just
selling vapourware.

> I don't know who's on the Linux
> Australia systems admin team - I'm not even sure it's shown on the website.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=linux+australia+admin+team

(to be fair, if you include the word "systems" you don't get a useful result)

> But you and I know that "the skills our members have at their fingertips"
> doesn't translate into "stuff actually gets done".  In Strine this is
> encapsulated in the word 'Aorta' - as in 'Aorta fix that'.

Even if you do have the skills, interest and motivation, without support
from the council things still don't get done. For example, back after
LCA in 2014 I was chatting with the Francois (then LA treasurer) about
using Xero's REST API to write some scripts to automate some of the
LA reports or similar. He got me setup with read-only access to the LA
accounts, and since that let me look into the details, we had ended up
having some productive discussions about how LCA2014 finances actually
went [4], but it turned out that Xero doesn't provide REST access to
read-only accounts (even if you only want to use read-only endpoints), and
Francois had other worries (particularly dealing with LCA2014 finances,
but also a server compromise, holidays, and other whatnot) so I never
got sufficient perms to do anything useful and let it drop.

> I think it's totally fair for Linux Australia to resolve to do something, and
> discuss it with the members (as they're doing now).

It doesn't really seem like a discussion at all to me; it seems to me
that setting up CiviCRM has been something Kathy resolved to do sometime
in 2014, and the public discussion since then has only been in aid of
making that happen. For example, in this thread there hasn't actually
been a response as to what the money's actually paying for, or why it's
not being self hosted, despite those things presumably having been known
by the council and membership ctte for seven months or more by now.

> And if Linux Australia
> decides, after all that discussion, that the best way of implementing what
> they want to achieve is by doing things a particular way and possibly paying
> money to have it done, then that's OK.

And sure, it *is* okay to be decide things with only limited consultation
in private and be kind of opaque about how and why the decisions were
made and then expect the community to just go along with those decisions,
even when those decisions involve lots of money -- that's kind of how
LCA gets run for example. If anyone doen't like it, it's not like they
have to be a member of LA or anything.

But honestly, I don't think that approach is a win here; it doesn't even
seem any faster or more efficient -- Kathy's been talking about this
for at least three years already [5] and as far as I can tell the only
practical progress that's actually been made in that time has been the
"confirm your membership" stuff a couple of months ago.

If Kathy had been just a regular member trying to help, and had made that
little progress on a very real problem, I'd be asking why the council
wasn't providing more support [6], or at least why they weren't making
it a lot clearer what the problems are, with some ideas on how to deal
with them (eg, maybe the money is a concern, in which case there should
be a solution to addressing that other than "become LA president and you
can spend as much as you like on whatever you want"). But Kathy is on
the council, so presumably already knows the answers to those questions
as well as anyone, even if I don't.

Cheers,
aj

[0] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2016-February/022584.html
[1] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2016-February/022589.html
[2] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2016-March/022626.html
[3] https://linux.org.au/meeting/2016-05-24

[4] resulting in 

    http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2014-June/021611.html

    (most of the text seems to have vanished from the archived copy of
    my mail in that thread, but still appears fine as quote in Sylvia's
    reply. weird)

[5] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2014-January/021367.html

[6] and I did kind of ask that of Hugh already,
    http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2016-December/022845.html