By instant messaging conference, 7:00 PM Pacific Time, October 22, 2003
Operations Advisory Committee Meeting Agenda
1. Welcome
2. Approve Agenda
3. Committee Responsibilities
4. Financial Report
- Quick Summary Report
5. Services
- Services:
A. Email
B. Email list hosting
C. Website hosting
D. Domain registrations
E. Colocation services
F. Technical consulting
G. Educational training
H. Computer refurbishing/donation
I. New services
- Infrastructure:
J. Task Manager
K. Upgrades
L. Redundancy and Security
6. Outreach
- Prioritize clients to publicize in media releases
- Prioritize clients to publicize in OPG ENEWS
7. Legal
- Representation
- Terms of Service Policy
- Privacy Policy
8. Human Resources
- Volunteer recruitment (regular weekly project meetings)
- Intern recruitment
9. Vacation and travel schedules
10. Next meeting(s):
- 7:00 pm, Wednesday, September 17, 2003
[OPG Board Meeting
- 12:00 noon, Saturday, September 20, 2003]
- 7:00 pm, Wednesday, October 15, 2003
- 7:00 pm, Wednesday, November 19, 2003
- 7:00 pm, Wednesday, December 17, 2003
-end-
Operations Advisory Committee Meeting Minutes
1. Welcome
Attending:
Will Doherty (Board Member),
Roger Klorese (Board Member),
David Weekly (Board Member)
2. Approve Agenda
Agenda approved.
3. Committee Responsibilities
4. Financial Report
Will provided brief report.
Donations looked like they are at about 57% of where they
should be for the year so far, but that's partially because
Will hasn't taken care of this action item below.
Action Item: Will to fix financial goals page on website to ramp up as in budget approved by the Board.
Will reported that fiscal year to date we are probably about even in revenue vs. expenses. Over 25% of donations are now by PayPal subscriptions.
6. Online Services
- Services:
A. Email
Roger reported that we are slowly moving email clients from gopostal, a proprietary product, to mailbox, an open source one. We have pop + ssl, imap + ssl, and secure (https) web access to email, plus transport layer security (TLS) between hosts or clients and hosts and SMTP AUTH is available. A vacation facility is available but forwarding must be set by domain admins, not end users, so we need a day's worth of volunteer PHP programming.
B. Email list hosting
Backlog of email list requests almost gone.
Action Item: Roger and Will to come up with email list categories and a pull-down for those categories on the email
list request forms. [5x renew, already done for organizations that have multiple lists]
C. Website hosting
Backlog of website hosting requests almost gone.
Action Item: Roger to investigate file ownership issues on webs.onlinepolicy.net
with respect to mass virtual hosting.
Action Item: Roger to investigate whether OPG can make MoveableType available to clients so they can set up blogs.
[Can't have centralized MoveableType install due to licensing issues: "hosting or offering to host" is not allowed.
Drupal is an alternative that is centrally installable. Roger will investigate Drupal further, especially
implications for Calliope-related functionality. Volunteer Sid Salvi will set up Drupal master for individuals installs. 4x
Renew]
Action Item: Roger to set up auto-generated email list of website-owners. [Renewed x6, need to put script into /usr/local/bin and cron.]
CCCP doesn't host gaming clients, but OPG has virtual hosted gaming websites.
Roger asked if we should continue to do so and the committee decided to continue
but also to focus on how to attract more of other types of clients.
Action Item: David to figure out how to gather email addresses
for Plesk clients perhaps into vps-owners-* lists. {Done}
Action Item: Roger to
send update-list-owners script to David. {Done}
Action Item: David to check with Shinns about how to get accurate count of websites hosted using Plesk.
D. Domain registrations
Action Item: Roger to set up domain-registrants-* lists. {Done}
Action Item: Will to fix web, email, and email list
hosting forms so that domain registration can be requested from those forms.
{Done}
Action Item: Will to put possibility of using OPG as agent on domain registration form so that clients may stay out
of whois database. [Done except for changes Roger requested by email]
The committee discussed changes to the domain registration policy from registering a domain for almost anyone who requests one for nonprofit purposes
in .org, .net, .org.uk, or any other top-level domain for which OPG
is authorized, but steer clients away from .com domains. We provide
domain registration whether or not we provide other services to a client
and we only register one domain per site or service.
Roger's concerns with the policy are the following:
- $10/domain internal cost is high.
- Some people just come to OPG for free even though they can
register a domain for less than what OPG pays and don't want to
use any other services provided by OPG.
- Some organizations want to register multiple
TLD versions of their domains to prevent people from squatting
on the domains or using them as a vehicle for opposing their point of view and
to receive the traffic from just typing in the website name without the TLD suffix into a web browser.
Roger proposed the following new policy positions:
- Domain registration offered only as an add-on to other virtual
hosting services, i.e. with email, email list, or website hosting.
- Only register multiple domains on special request and with
notification of cost impact to OPG.
Action Item: Roger to investigate permitting clients to register
domains through GoDaddy with one domain paid by OPG and any
additional paid by the client.
Action Item: Will to move domain registration and other forms into
a web subdirectory with a robots.txt file that prevents spidering
by most search engines.
E. Colocation services
Action Item: David will set up a verifiable and automatically generated email list of CCCP clients. [close to completion, 2x renew]
Colo growth in SF Bay Area slowing, although there are now 128 colo clients runing 13.1 Mbps at 95th percentile over last 30 days.
Roger has been meeting with folks in Seattle about the
Seattle colo facility and provided a summary of developments there.
Action Item: Roger to either fix problem with PayPal project
designations or send Will the documentation on how to do it. {Renew x2}
Action Item: Will to contact Roger this weekend about how David
can help me get the server. {Done, server moved}
F. Technical consulting
Mitch and his team are still consulting for various clients and
organizing volunteers at the SF LGBT Community Center CyberCenter.
G. Educational training
Possibility of doing trainings at computer classrooms
at SF LGBT Center in cooperation with Harvey Milk Academy.
H. Computer refurbishing/donation
Mitch is providing monthly report reports on computer refurbishing.
I. New services
- Infrastructure:
J. Task Manager
Action Item: David to verify that RT backups are happening daily. {Done, Mike Shinn set up RT backups.}
Action Item: Will to add default support queues for email lists, web hosting, and domain registrations. [Will to
instead put links to the general support form at top and bottom of
page with not to "try to locate the task below and if you
don't see what you are looking for or already have service and
need help then use this form", 5x renew]
Action Item: Will to set up twice weekly aggregated automated RT email reminders. [5x Renew, requires further research to find existing perl code, so Will will give to Gabriel volunteer to check with rt-users list]
K. Upgrades
Consider RT upgrade after verifying EFF install of new version of RT works.
Action Item: Roger to schedule downtime to move some VMs from the
slow server machine to the fast one.
Action Item: David to create an account for Roger on server1.communitycolo.net
L. Redundancy and Security
Action Item: Roger and David W. to do a written redundancy plan including mail server (MX2), local backups, remote
backups, spam block recovery, web server failover, crash notification, DNS redundancy, and get in touch with Micah
of Tech Fed. [3x Renew, Update: just need to set up disk-to-disk backups at HE without MX2 or remote backups, but
still considering spam block redundancy, web server failover, crash notification, DDOS recovery, and DNS redundancy.]
Action Item: David to inform CCCP ops team of wiki on redundancy and security. {Renew}
6. Outreach
- Prioritize clients to publicize in media releases
- Prioritize clients to publicize in OPG ENEWS
7. Legal
- Representation
- Terms of Service Policy
Need to make sure our warranty also covers
refurbished computer donations.
Action Item: Will to integration comments from new attorney about warranty update.
- Privacy Policy
8. Human Resources
- Volunteer recruitment (regular weekly project meetings)
- Intern recruitment
9. Vacation and travel schedules
- David in Seattle August 22-24
10. Next meeting(s):
- 7:00 pm, Wednesday, November 19, 2003
- 7:00 pm, Wednesday, December 17, 2003
-end-
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