On Wed, 30 Nov 2022 03:39:51 -0500 Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 7:37 PM Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 27/11/2022 21.01, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote: Along with other AGM business, we will be discussing how GTALUG goes forward with our online services. I'm glad we're going to have this discussion. Chris Browne's untimely passing two years ago showed how heavily GTALUG relied on the work of a very few volunteers. And we do have a lot of online services, including:
- the website; - the mailing lists and their various archives. Maintaining and moderating a mailing list is no trivial thing; - GTALUG Wiki — https://wiki.gtalug.org/start — which I don't think anyone's touched for over two years.
It might be worth re-evaluating what resources we need. Could we make do with a hosted WordPress instance and move the lists to groups.io? All ideas are welcomed.
to admin a vps or two with apache/nginx and mailman with a few thousand? subscribers is, imnsho, not a major thing and in terms of vps costs is maybe like 10 bucks a month (for two vps) if even two is really needed I have been on the mailing list for ten? years now and I do not remember any month where gtalug had any volume that exceeds what a five bucks per month vps can carry and a properly configured mailman (which is very mature and can be battle hardened) cannot take more than an hour or two per month to admin. (that said, depending on configuration it can be a full time job - but of course, I am basing the hour or two on hardened configuration with some additional scripts, to do stuff automagically - as I am very lazy)
Anything we host ourselves bears both admin resources and financial hosting cost. Right now we're using mailman and frankly, I see the bounce messages and it's almost impossible to keep track of. (Hint: I tried mailing this Sunday night but that bounced). I really don't like mailman anymore. There are better ways to filter spam.
if your own email to mailman is bouncing, this is probably not what you think it is :)
Is GTALUG Inc a qualifying non-profit?
Yes. We've already been vetted by TechSoup *and* approved by Google. In fact we've had access to the Google nonprofit package for almost a year and could move things over to it at any time. The discussion at hand is whether we want to start really using it.
What happens when Google decides to stop providing this free service?
Google had indeed been known to axe products and projects that didn't pan out as they'd hoped (I particularly mourn the loss of Google Cardboard and Google Reader). Google for Nonprofits <https://www.google.com/nonprofits/> is unlikely to be one of them; it's actually very popular. A great many NPOs -- some of which are household names -- depend on that service. And with Alphabet being as insanely profitable as it is, the company is unlikely to jettison its primary CSR <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility> tool.
That said, I'm in no position to guarantee anything.
and this sentence is the crux of it. personally I do not trust google. very frequently the left hand and the right hand are independently arguing with the right pinky toe over something the left ear heard the mouth whisper while a strong wind was blowing. it would be far easier to pay 10 bucks and get three sysadmins to each donate an hour a month (and their scripts :) ) so, if you decide to continue having an emailing list and self hosted services I would gladly donate some of my time (at least four hours a month), providing that there is at least one (or two) other high/senior skill dev/sys/ops also?
Where does our data go? “If you are not paying for it, you're not the
customer; you're the product being sold.”*
In this case, it's not the case.
When you use basic personal GMail and Google Docs, you are most certainly giving up privacy in return for "free" services. But that's not what's on offer here. We have access to Google Workplace <https://workspace.google.com/> (formerly known as G Suite) which is the commercial service that businesses use as a subscription-based productivity suite. In return for companies paying for Google Workplace, the company does not scan your data and it's subject to both Canadian and European privacy laws (after all, the apps themselves are pretty much the same as the free ones, what Workplace customers are paying for is privacy and support). What GTALUG has is a no-cost commercial license for Google Workplace (as well as other stuff including $10K worth of Google search advertising per month). So we have access to the commercial non-snooped service at no cost.
- Evan