# SysAdmins Conversation

### What do we need to discuss with sysadmins

#### Why we are doing this conversation

* The goal of his conversation is to let you know how much we appreciate you and the work you do, and to hear from you what you think the Board should do to support you.
* OSM continues to grow, to evolve, and with that growth, the workload has grown, including the sysadmins' workload.
* We have the impression that the sysadmin workload as changed from a parttime hobby to a partime or even fulltime job. Is that an accurate assessment?
* What do you want to talk about with the Board? We want to hear your views on what the Board should do.

~~* OSM Continues to grow~~
~~* You are doing great work~~
~~* We are wanting to supporting you in the best ways we can~~
~~* Have a better dialogue between sysadmins and board~~
~~* Support the sysadmins better~~
~~* We are also concerned about capacity and burnout~~

### Questions to pose

* What would be useful outcomes of this conversation for you?

* Workload is variable
* Tiles are biggest challenges for Grant and I. You might optimize that with a lot of time so it ran more smoothly
* London marathon was example of load spike
* Other load is vehicle tracking companies doing reverse geocoding

* Change ussage policy, just serve friends, make users use other services

_MM: can we pop the conversation out of tiles specifically?_ +1 (gunner) +1 (pn)
_MM: gunner, if you had an idea how to steer the conversation, i think it's appropriate to jump in_
Will do, I think this is converging on a useful agreement (MM: ok)

RORY has a question

Top 60 sites https://gist.github.com/Firefishy/25e76d128ab94ff9350b4181a1b1e96f
Top 10k websites https://gist.github.com/Firefishy/076cca798e0d1f947c3e5c99f1b9141c

Allan, perhaps we go to the "What can we take off your plate/what don't you want be doing "

And also back to the "who else do trust to work with you"

_MM: we haven't asked if they would want to be hired to focus on this and many other problems"_
Gunner asks: Guillaume, do you think that's productive question?

_MM: i don't think we're going to get much resolution in this hour. how do we keep this discussion open and going?_
_AG: I think we ask permission to follow up with summary of what we have heard and proposals for next steps, and request a next discussion?

what can board do?
* make policy decision on who our "friends" are for tile usage
* join call with grant and tom, to help bring on more help. could even be someone to organize to discuss.
* even Tom(!) says that occassional online meetings might help with growing the team
* **OWG needs a chair**

what can others do?
* answer emails / ask tile overusers to stop
* help closing accounts
* need way to look up users by email
* long term planning
* manage contractors
* enumerate manual administration tasks
* then develop backlog for grant/tom, or look for volunteers, or contractors
* OWG onboarding
* Role(s) description? (gunner question)
* Document
* Explore more granular access to systems
* Testing framework not working reliably
* Hitting some bug with github,
* ACTION ITEM: Pay for testing account on github(?)
*
* Get "people to come forward more on..."

working on OSMF stuff?
* Grant needs to think about it more. he's $$ through [his employer](https://www.paconsulting.com/)
* Grant is happy as a volunteer, neutral on whether they are paid or volunteer.

* How would you ideally want to spend your time on OSM sysadmin stuff?
* What stuff do you currently do that you don't enjoy doing or find boring?

* Very roughly, how much time do you spend on sysadmin stuff every quarter, and on what? Do you other things do you do in OSM outside of sysadmin?

* How do we recruit more sysadmins to share the workload? Do we need to hire staff you would supervise? Would you want to supervise people at all? Should we find a project manager/assistant? Move to the cloud (be specific in the question, that's a wide term)? Another solution?

* Are you for or against the idea of paid sysadmin help and why? Permanently, or consulting/project? If yes, how would you want to relate to them? Would someome getting paid for that work, cause you to stop/quit?

> * if this was a commercial organization, we have a full time on call team to manage just tiles

* Would you be interested in being a full-time (or part time?) paid sysadmin?

* Do you need hardware/software/consulting resources beyond what the OWG asked for in its budget? Would you like the board to look into that?

* Software deployed on OSM.org. Would you like the board make decisions, and take the blame for, any decisions, e.g. version of iD deployed?

~~~~* What can the Board do more of to build your trust, and keep an open line of communication?

* What does OSM infrastructure ideally look like and what kinds of things would it do?

* Would you like us to support efforts on CI/CD/testing? How?

* How much time on tiles relative to other stuff? Would a (different, wider) mandate help?

* Set expectations: Tom isn't someone who talks a lot :). He's afraid he'll be bored in our meeting, because meetings are boring. *(If only we could have this conversation in a pub over a pint!)*