HCoop Git - hcoop/zz_old/ikiwiki/blob - AdminPolicies.mdwn

   1 If we want to scale up to a larger member base and high reliability, then we need to know exactly what is expected of people who volunteer for particular duties.  That way, someone can turn down a role if he knows he can't meet the time requirements, and he knows exactly what is expected of him if he ''does'' sign on.  This page is our scratch pad for ideas on formal guidelines in this direction.
   2
   3 See the TaskDistribution page for an in-progress assignment of people to jobs.
   4
   5 = Policies deserving their own pages =
   6
   7  * VolunteerResponsePolicy
   8
   9 = Summaries of official roles and their duties =
  10
  11  * '''President''': Mostly general moral leadership :-)
  12  * '''Treasurer''': Manage that money!
  13  * '''Secretary''': Keep official records
  14  * '''System administrator''': Both plan and set up technical infrastructure and keep it running on a day to day basis
  15   Note that the President/Treasurer/Secretary are officers on the board of directors, and have legal decision-making power defined under Pennsylvania law and HCoop's bylaws and articles of incorporation.  System administrators, by contrast, have only powers delegated to them by the board of directors.  Despite this, sysadmins may act quite autonomously and may be more involved with the day to day operations of HCoop than directors, though they are ultimately subordinate to and acting on behalf of the board, which in turn is elected by and represents the interests of the membership at large.
  16
  17 = Requirements of anyone in an official role =
  18
  19  * Respond to e-mail to his HCoop e-mail address within 24 hours of when it is sent, barring extreme situations, whenever that mail makes it clear that it expects a response from the particular person
  20  * Make an official notification to the co-op when he won't be able to meet the above requirement, because he goes on vacation or for whatever other reason
  21    * Send e-mail to a list containing just people in special roles?
  22    * Post to a wiki page?
  23
  24 = Sysadmin stuff =
  25
  26 How many sysadmins (all with root access) should we have?  4 seems like about the right number.  It would be nice if we could somehow pick admins with good spread across the different time zones, to give us more times when one is likely to be awake and able to handle emergencies.
  27
  28 It might be nice for each sysadmin to have brief "office hours" each week, where he agrees to be on IRC answering questions and helping people in real time.
  29
  30 = Official list of tasks =
  31
  32 We should try to come up with a list of task types that covers everything expected of people in special roles. Each task should have an associated list of people in charge of it, listed in a total order.  At any time, the first person on the list for a task who is not "on vacation" via the above allowance is responsible by default for handling it.  Of course, it's always possible to make special arrangements for some tasks, but the lead person for the task will be in charge of arranging them.
  33
  34 I expect that the tasks of the officers (president/secretary/treasurer) will almost always be performed by single officers, since they will tend to be less time-critical.  The sysadmin tasks should probably be spread evenly among the sysadmins.
  35
  36 Let's list the tasks, organized by which role we expect to handle them.
  37
  38 == President ==
  39
  40  * Schedule meetings
  41  * Run meetings
  42
  43 == Treasurer ==
  44
  45  * Process new member payments and alert sysadmins when someone has paid and can have an account created
  46  * Process ongoing payments by updating the portal's financial records
  47  * Hunt down people who are behind in payments
  48  * Do physical payment processing for rare people who aren't willing to use Pay``Pal
  49  * Handle support tickets in the Financial category
  50
  51 == Secretary ==
  52
  53  * Keep meeting minutes
  54  * Maintain the board's [http://hcoop.net/board/ webpage]
  55  * Keep files of all HCoop-related paperwork, and post scans or transcripts of any particularly important documents to the board's webpage
  56  * Conduct all elections and official membership votes, report and archive their results
  57
  58 == Sysadmins ==
  59
  60  * Add new members who have been approved and have paid
  61  * Process specific support requests:
  62    * Requests for a domain in DomainTool
  63    * Requests for apt package installation
  64    * Requests for Mailman lists
  65  * Process other support tickets, differentiated by category on the portal:
  66    * Web
  67    * E-mail
  68    * Server Misc (possibly add more categories, since this category is used fairly often...)
  69    * Meta
  70  * Periodically update packages through Debian apt
  71  * Manage the firewall
  72  * Manage relational database servers
  73  * Advising the board as to policy matters, or setting policies as enabled to do so by the board.
  74  * Maintaining and auditing the security of HCoop's servers.
  75  * Protecting and respecting the privacy of HCoop members.  Abuse of superuser privileges to view private member files or communication (except to the extent necessary in the course of legitimate sysadmin duties) is strictly forbidden, and is ground for immediate termination of sysadmin status and also for termination of membership, in the same way that use of HCoop services for cracking is grounds for expulsion.