[Chapter-delegates] make simple things complex again!

[Christian de Larrinaga]

Andrew -

The disconnect is more about model than size.

For instance the procurement you describe is "singular" perhaps "top
down" where requirements are taken as a snapshot of features that are
"complex" from a centralised perspective to a "set of requirements"
rather than universal, inclusive and iterative over time. The first
model is fair enough for a contiguous organisation. 

Yet the community that you are trying to assist often sees itself as a
collection of independent entities globally distributed coalescing
around a common principle and a set of shared objectives. But having 
to maintain their own ways, communities and legal requirements locally.

I remember ISOC NL perhaps with NL Net help working on an open source
chapter / ISOC community project with version control, branching and
with infrastructure services such as DNS, hosting, application
deployment and data management for membership services and so on. I got
the impression ISOC ignored this. Perhaps a "not invented here" issue?

With other options being possible and even in process at a far more reasonable a budget I would
expect. It is not necessarily necessary for ISOC to take the "singular"
approach. 

I am not saying you haven't succeeded or won't in having a workable
service but that the determinant for what is a success should integrate
the evolution of a changing global environment. A top down approach that
needs to meet its own local objectives finds it hard to serve a bottom
up organising principle of this community. That challenge is true even
for a singular organisation taking a flat earth snapshot in time. It is
even more so as "requirements" evolve in real time in different ways
around the world.

A singular model is not comfortable for a group who like to "eat our own dogfood"! As crazy as that
might sound to some. 

best


Christian


Andrew Sullivan via Chapter-delegates
<chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org> writes:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> I have been noting this conversation with interest.  I have an observation.

> On Tue, Jan 16, 2024 at 09:20:29PM +0800, Winthrop Yu via Chapter-delegates wrot>
>> ... money, reputation ... and privacy -- information on each and
>> every member, the officers of each and every chapter, all
>> emails/messages we may send, anything and everything on the new
>> Fonteva platform is now in Salesforces' hands. Not exactly
>> reassuring, is it?
>
> In the present circumstances on the Internet, it is not unusual to
> have other entities operate one's services infrastructure.  This is
> because, like it or not, operating services at scale on the Internet
> with the reliability and availability that people have come to expect
> is quite challenging, and requires expertise.  That expertise tends to
> concentrate in corporations that operate at large scale.  This often
> worries people, of course, because large-scale operations can mean
> that such organizations have too great a power advantage over their
> customers.  Yet, at the same time, without such scale certain things
> are not feasible.  It is worth remembering that you can rent, by the
> hour, from AWS today, capabilities that nobody in the world could have
> afforded to build 10 or 15 years ago.
>
> So, how does one address the privacy and information-handling concerns
> about large vendors?  With contracts and law.  There are restrictions
> on what our vendors may do with data we give them, and we are required
> by various privacy legislation around the world to have data handling
> agreements with our vendors for any personal information they receive
> from us.  This is also normal in current operations on the Internet.
>
> It is worth keeping in mind that our previous vendor was not a large
> operator, and that presented several problems.  Two of them were that
> they were often not able to accommodate our needs, and that their own
> data handling was not really up to current best practices.
>
> The selection of Fonteva, which has always run inside Salesfoce, was
> the result of a rather long and extensive process that included a
> considerable amount of consultation with the community.  The Internet
> Society is a complex organization, and the process to select the
> software came to the decision that Fonteva was the best choice to
> address the Internet Society's needs.  I have every confidence that
> the legal and contractual terms that govern our relationship with
> Fonteva and Salesforce are appropriate and that they protect personal
> information of Internet Society members.
>
> Best regards,
>
> A


-- 
Christian de Larrinaga