User:Sj/Board projects

See also the set of community projects that can only be done effectively by the communities.

There are a number of core projects that can only be seen through the the Board of Trustees and the Foundation itself -- particularly those relating to the data, server farms, and infrastructure of the projects -- at least until each of these is robustly protected by clusters of trustworthy community groups. While the best possible way to ensure the longevity of the projects lie in this direction, the Foundation will have to see to such a transition; and until that happesn, it is directly responsible for these bits of infrastructure.

Reliability

• The projects should always stay up. They should be sustainable in the eventuality of technical failure, organizational failure, and global political or military failure. As long as we are developing and holding in trust 1% of the Web's content, we should make extra efforts to see to its preservation. This includes

  active promotion of mirroring by the most reliable partner groups and digital libraries; offering them free feeds, for instance, where possible

  aggressive maintenance of recent dumps, for our mirrors as well as for ourselves

  a well-defined contingency plan for loss of technical support or of the main sites -- including 6-month support by a single person without access to the primary data centers

  a plan for reconstructing key site data in the event of a loss of the main servers and backups

• The core of the organization should be permanently endowed or otherwise supported

  Core infrastructure maintenance and repair should be supported by an endowment, and not a rapidly fluctuating budget.

  It should not be possible to run the thought-experiment of the sites 'going dark' because we aren't able to find or raise enough funds; expensive research and development projets should be clearly separated from core operations, which cost should decrease each year, through hardware/bandwidth partnerships and improved system design. In three-year plan I recommended having a $50k/yr plan for emergencies, involving relying on friends and volunteers even more than we do now; I still recommend that.

• Budgeting : we should be careful in future forecasting to keep 6 months' budget on reserve, in addition to the permanent endowment of core operations noted above.

Communication

• Core Foundation messages should go out in all core languages

  This should ALWAYS be the case for important milestones, announcements, and updates; right now aside from election notices and a few official policies and fundraising notes, very little is translated.

  One way to highlight this is to actively solicit information/updates that are not natively in English, requiring the trasnlation team to work smoothly in order for English versions to become available.