SoylentNews

Reply to https://soylentnews.org/~janrinok/journal/14821

"This is what I'm responding to"

### This is my response

=============

"You may think that the Board is there to look after your interests, but nowhere in the founding documents or bye-laws does it say any such thing. One of its primary duties is to look after the interests of the shareholders."

### Public benefit corporations are a little different. The have a stated purpose which doesn't have to be directly to the share holders. There is a "public benefit" that the corp is too support

"Kolie approached, or was approached by, the Board to be contracted to provide new hardware to host a containerised site. He is for the moment a contractor. He has been generous in providing the hardware that has been gathered so far for free. Nobody other than the Board or kolie himself knows what exactly is in that contract. They are not obliged to reveal it to us, and this is perfectly normal and legal. I am not suggesting that anything otherwise."

### Without getting into the specifics - I basically do technical things to meet requirements for NC's comfort - and SN continues to exist and I get to sit at the table. We are always discssuing further steps even now.

" but it is being moved later on this month. I do not know where to. "

### Staging is setup in akamai now. I intend to setup staging in cogent facility in southern california and I'd like to move production there as well. I would foot all hosting costs on this equipment into perpetuity contract or not personally. I mentioned my background with ennwise not because it was involved but to provide context on what I've done.

"As a contractor kolie is perfectly entitled to keep the details of his contract private. He does no have to share it with anyone. But to be a valid contract I believe that there must be a payment of some kind - either monetary or in kind. Otherwise it is not a contract but an obligation or promise. If it is monetary then it might have been paid for by your subscriptions. Although that places no obligation on the Board I would have hoped that, being the community that we are, somebody would have at least mentioned it. They do not have to seek your approval for a payment but it would seem to be a reasonable action to be made aware of it. This is purely a personal view. If it is not monetary, then what is it? What reward will kolie receive for the expensive hardware that is being procured to run the site? I have acknowledged that so far it appears to be costing us nothing but that does not guarantee it will always be that way in the future. I will return to this point later."

### I Don't want money - I don't expect money - and I fully expect that my involvement with SN will cost out of pocket. I get the continued existence of this site. I see it as philanthropic donation of my time and resources - I do it for the existence of SN but it is selfish in that I want SN to be around and persisted. I also again get to participate in the PBC. My actions are directly tied to making sure SN is sticking around.

"kolie has told us that there are 'milestones' built within the contract that trigger the next stage of activity, and presumably a partial payment"

### No money will be coming to me from anything I'm doing. I don't want it. I want the site to not shutdown and my work and my dealins with NC are basically - I stick around and help and the site doesn't shut down and I get continued involvement.

" 'I am closing the site down' to 'the site will continue and I am planning for the next 5 to 10 years'. And with each change we do not have to be consulted, your views do not matter, and it is causing a lot of damage to our community."

### I get the view - I think his point is - this is what I see happening for this place to be successful in 5-10 years. I know for a fact he DOES want community consultation and participation . His views for the 5-10 years werent meant to be dogma - it was a starting point for a conversation of what he sees as necessary items to be addressed and a possible direction. Let's talk about that vision and hash it out as a community - or drop it and replace it with our own

### Community governance is the way forward. I'm on board with this and I will do what I can to implement this at every level. NC is also on board with this direction.

"1. At the end of the month the new hardware is stood up and the site switches over to it. We don't know where that hardware will be, how secure an environment it will be in, what is the expected up-time, and how much it will cost to run it."

### I've said several times what and where the new environment would likely be. The cost to SN is 0 - I'm donating it if it's used for SN.

"3. One person, now a Board member, has total control over the hardware. But unlike in the past where the access has been shared between the sysops team, which resulted in checks and balances, there is no indication that such access will be granted. We have been told by NCommander that there will be NO shell access to the new hardware. If the cost of access to the hardware for the community increases - perhaps a form of compulsory subscription fee - then there is little more you can do except to pay up or leave."

### The way forward is community governance. There will be sysop roles for staff. The infrastructure will be managed and that will be delegated - how it will be managed is changing. I think the quickest way to address this is for the PBC/Board to assign a CTO position and create a Tech subcommitee with the CTO and certain staff chairing the subcomitee.

"Your data, which we have protected for over 9 years, has also moved completely under the same person's control. We cannot copy it, you cannot change it, you have simply lost the right to control your data. In the EU this is already illegal, and it doesn't matter where the data is held. If it contains the data of EU people there are already existing laws in place. Once that data is gone, this site can never be recreated."

### Pretty sure we can/do comply with any data laws. No one has made any requests under these laws that I am aware of. There is no provision that prohibits data moving from datacenter to datacenter under the same legal entity owning it.

"I repeat, I haven't got a crystal ball and cannot say what will happen. But I can say that once it has happened you have already lost everything. How that data is used will be for the Board to decide, not you. If they want to monetize it they can do so providing that they do not break US law in doing so. If they want the site to be covered in advertising they may do so. If they want to invite other 'investors' to join the Board they can do so. Unless community members are on the board then it is all over."

### I will not be monetizing user data - ever. Flat no. If I have a seat in the board I will do everything I can to make that happen as well. Anything involving funds and raising money would go directly to the community to decide.

"I have no reason to doubt koli's sincerity today, but I also never imagined that NCommander would just shut the site down as he intended to do. If koli's interests are rather more monetary than community spirited, then he may view things differently in the years ahead. Today he is working hard to create a site, and giving generously of his time and money, but it might not be the site you imagined it would be."

### If I wanted to make money - I wouldn't be asking to run an existing news / community driven site. I have the tech and the means to grow a new community over night and properly monetize it without fighting the uphill battle I have infront of me. The quickest route to $$$ is green field development of a new brand. If it was about money there was much quicker easier ways directly to that. Literally the cost to me to run a news site would be ~ 100$/mo + another 100$ in advertising. I could run ads, subs, etc, and easily make that monthly invest back to feed into more advertising. That's not the play here.

"How can I install my management software (e.g. sock puppet detection and blocking etc) if I cannot have access to the machines I am trying to protect? It is what I had started to do in November when all of a sudden things changed. My software does some things automatically, but others have to be managed each day. How does anyone manage it if they cannot access it, or access the data that it is protecting?"

### Work with me and I can provide that data in a new format. I can give you api access directly to the things you need. There's many many ways this can work. If you do not want to put in the time to adapt them or streamline them than the offer stands that you can send me the high level workflow / scripts that show the process - NOT THE literaly fully working system with all your private libs and whatever else you have tied into it - cut all that out. That would greatly help me and be appreciated in making this happen quicker.

### I don't need your "working" script. I wanted to look at the high level workflow of your script to see how it functioned to replicate it. I don't need your custom libraries or whatever it depends on. I never asked for it to be designed to be moved. I just wanted to see the high level workflow to duplicate it. You have some workflow/algroithm that works. I know what I would do but I'm not sure if its effective and you've already proven to have a working algorithm.

### I detailed the exact steps I would take to detect the things we were discussing. I don't know if its what you are doing. I know my estimate to code that basic workflow is probably appropriate at 30 minutes. I would again like to see the workflow / process you've implemented if it works so well so I'm not needlessly doing things that A) Aren't proven and B) are duplicate effort.

"It isn't designed to be moved to another system without significant work involved - measured in at least days not minutes. Kolie has been given plenty of time to write a replacement but he has again made one excuse after another for not doing so. Apparently, it is my fault and I am not a team player..."

### See above - you can easily cut out your sensitive bits and show me the basic process / workflow of what the scripts do.

"How can we investigate bugs and faults without direct and full access to the database? How do we run SQL queries to provide the statistics and other data that we publish from time to time if we cannot have shell access?"

### With an interface to run sql queries. With API access to systems. With access to log aggregation systems. By running small containers that connect to the db and spit out the answer you want. There are many many ways to do the same.

"But it seems that I am wasting my time. The redirected comment that I am replying to does not provide a single answer to one of the many questions that I posed over a week ago. It is all designed, in my opinion, to waste time until it becomes a fait accompli. At which point it is too late."

### "Fait accompli" man this is rich. I'm doing something about it. All the shit you are railing against - I'm literally here to make sure that A) SN remains the same B) it's arround tommorow and past C) the kind of shit you don't want - is not likely to happen. I'm also eager to grow and expand the community as it has dwindled making SN far less "valuable" in terms of what I get out of it as a participant of it and its articles. More people, more comments, more depth, more "value".

"In line with Kolie's salesman patter ("I'm in vc, tech, construction verticals") I am now a vEditor and I'm in story verticals. As for each member of the community, you and your comments are seen as being the product: ("basically [...] lessons learned in focusing on your product and not managing servers.") Welcome to the new world. I cannot be part of something which we all despise and have worked so hard against. It is the very reason that this site was created. And now people don't seem to care any more."

### I mean you really sound like you agree with everything I am trying to do - the problems you detail are the problems I'm looking to solve.

### I mentioned my background - not because it's a salesman's patter - but because it explains what I do, how I know it, and where I come from. VC is important because going from 0$, a demo, and whatnot to unicorn status - that takes navigating a lot of tough issues. It's not purely tech. There is business, there is working with people, etc. Any one who has taken a company from nothing to their first million will understand "Good ideas are like assholes, everyone has one". The difference is the entrepeneur figured out that it's execution that matters and proved they can take a good idea and do something with it. Also my background in vc and in general isn't strictly the tech aspects of it. Shaping organizations, fixing failing businesses, righting the wrongs of dead enterprises - this is my wheelhouse.

Hi I am kolie.

I've been working regularly on a few items. I want to start of by saying that I understand the issues on SN extend far beyond the tech stack and implementation details. I see the technical aspects of SN being a step 0 to a healthy positive future and am addressing those as such. To that end - step 0 is to document all the existing SN infrastructure and create configurations / scripts which document, automate, and describe exactly the environment and the operations of it.

The jist of the items that have been identified to be documented and configured are:
  - IRC *
  - IRC Services
  - Loggie *
  - DNS
  - Rehash / Varnish / Mysql
  - IRC Bounce
  - Media Wiki *
  - Monitoring Infra
  - Postfix / Dovecot / Roundcube

The items marked with a * have been more or less documented in a basic repeatable format. IRC Services & the IRC bounce are very low priority but also quick items to recreate. Rehash / Varnish / Mysql is making a lot of progress - we have a website setup in staging but has bugs that prevent this item from being totally completed. It's approximately 70% complete. I have been working on the mail server currently and have made good progress about 60% of the way.

Once all the basic scripts and systems are documented there will need to be a step where the configurations go through cleanup and are unified and consistently implemented. After that some thought and implementation will need to be considered for items necessary throughout all the services - things like backup and monitoring support. Once the full system is documented and committed in the code branch we will bring up a fresh staging environment and hit a button to "create the world". When doing so we will provide the system with fresh data backups from the current infrastructure. The expectation is that the full stack will come to life in a staging environment but otherwise functionally identical to the production system.

After staging is proven and loaded with "fresh" data an announcement will be made of a maintenance window for the site and services. During this maintenance window we will make final backups of the current environment, turn on temporary "Site is under maintenance", move data behind the scenes and "create the world" again but inside a brand new production system. The system would have been proven and tested once in the "staging" environment. We would expect then that this final copy to a production environment should go on without a hitch.

The rate progress is going I expect the basic services to be documented and essentially functioning in a stand-alone matter in approximately two weeks. At this point I feel that the code and recipes would be ready to be made "public" for outside participation.

Integration and cleanup of the services and further testing with backup data would probably take another week.
TBD is some of the auxiliary items like monitoring and automation of some system administration tasks. Another week or two may be appropriate here.

The result of all this work will be a fully tested, documented, repeatable infrastructure implementation of SN. Going forth it would be appropriate to maintain two live systems production and staging. Production would be the live system of course. Staging would be identical in every way except it would live at a subdomain - currently staging.soylentnews.org. Any code and updates/changes would be tested locally and committed to staging to see how it would impact the real environment. When staging passes all the appropriate checks promotion of that "blessed" configuration would be passed to production.