Just as an FYI, anyoneϕ with a GitHub account and a university affiliated email address (e.g. @*.edu†) can get $50 worth of Digital Ocean credit. You just need to get a promo code and sign up to Digital Ocean using it. To do that:
When you get your pack, you should see a Digital Ocean promo code. Create a new Digital Ocean account using this promo code (requires a credit card) and you should have $50 of credit to donate to OpenMRS .
ϕ In theory you have to be a registered student.
† Any university email address will work (including outside of the US), the @*.edu addresses just validate automatically.
Is there a method to make requests for additional needs, such as server space? It seems like we should have a process for this and a process for evaluating the request and responding to it - would that be the inc that decides that?
We are in the process of getting more server resources. The way to go about it would be to request helpdesk and then we’d figure out where to host it.
BUT there’s a monetary issue at play here. We (the infra team) can decide what to do and where to put it, but we can’t spin up new servers without asking for the money to pay for it.
Looking just at the question of server space, I would not expect OpenMRS Inc to be directly involved in individual requests.
At a governance level I would expect:
“the community” should have a vision (written down) of what infrastructure OpenMRS should be supporting, and how to prioritize requests within this vision. Writing this down and updating it would be done by the infrastructure lead in collaboration with other leads.
there should be an explicit (public) budget line item for this, leaving some headroom for adding new servers over the course of a year.
requests to raise this budget would go to community leadership (who would potentially pass them on the Inc as fiscal sponsor, or try to get resources donated via some other mechanism)
it’s the infrastructure team’s job to carry out the community vision (which includes making initial decisions about prioritization)
any disputes would go to community leadership, for a standard dispute resolution process
I think the general template applies for other areas with resource needs.
Key point, though, is that it should be community leadership who takes incoming requests for more resources, and prioritizes any asks to the Inc, in the context of the operational plan. (E.g. it should be community leadership’s job to prioritize between $x of additional server hosting vs $y of additional travel grants.)
Where are these documents? I have seen zero work done towards this. The fact that this isn’t made clear is what has bugged me. I was hoping by now there would be progress, but there is no work done towards this. I’ve had to bug @burke recently to renew one of the services we rely on for DNS. It should be clear who to speak to. For infra – @burke can be the point-person – that’s fine with me, but there needs to be a clear hierarchy of who to go to first, second, third, etc.
I have very little interest in putting together a budget. Also, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to spread our servers out in different data centers/providers. Why? Remember when IU was performing network maintainance and a large chunk of the community grinded to a halt? We have all our eggs in one basket and this is bad. We need to some redundancies in place.
We should in theory be able to run the entire community for very little, couple hundred thousand a year. Most (probably say 70% or so) should go towards infrastructure. Could be far less if we were careful about how we did things.
.