3 ms·

Pick 2 out of 3 for these kinds of volunteer work: - Capable - Reliable - Free You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free?

egorfine 1mo ago
> You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free? Yes. For the Internet Archive I totally would. As responsible as I do my main job.
- aurareturn 1mo ago
  You should definitely apply and sign a contract. They should charge you money if you don't show up at 3am in an outage. All it takes is one emergency and the volunteer person doesn't show up for the non profit to want to hire a full time person. This event has likely already occurred at Archive.
  - egorfine 1mo ago
    This is a genuine consideration.
- insom 1mo ago
  The work required to keep IA infrastructure operating is full time: these are full-time positions. IIRC they were at ~70 racks of stuff just in the California locations and apart from on-call and emergency response there's growth to keep up with, future planning etc. There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the Guardian newspaper -- never mind that Wayback is only a small portion of what they do. (Book scanning, inter-library loans, paid services for other GLAM organizations and governments etc.)
  - egorfine 1mo ago
    True. It is also unreasonable to expect a lone full-time employee being the only one available at 3am every single day.
ndriscoll 1mo ago
Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? This isn't a hospital here; it's more like a library. My library is closed at 3am every day!
- aurareturn 1mo ago
  Ok how about 6am? 7pm? The point is that someone needs to bring the service back up and they can't rely on volunteers to do it whenever they feel like it.
  - ndriscoll 1mo ago
    My local library isn't open at 6am either (opens at 9, or 10 on Sat and 1 on Sun), and closes before 7 on Fri-Sun. > someone needs to Do they though? Why is there some assumed urgency? What happens if they don't do it "whenever they feel like it" (e.g. normal hours)? Computers also generally don't randomly just stop working, and if they did in this case (network engineer), it's almost certainly the ISP anyway.
    - aurareturn 1mo ago
      Archive is likely one of the top traffic destinations on the internet. Your local library is likely not. Maybe they want to hire someone full-time is so they don't have to have a policy of whenever they feel like it? Having a reliable service is likely one of the reasons why their donors donate in the first place. Why do organizations and wealthy people still want to donate if the service goes down for 2 days and no one cares? Why would this kind of non-profit attract top volunteers in the first place?
      - ndriscoll 1mo ago
        High traffic doesn't mean high urgency. New York Public Library is huge and looks to have even more restrictive hours than mine. They're closed on Sundays! People donate because they believe in the mission, and most of the money probably goes to the actual storage (making the cost of an employee probably pointless to care about, of course). It would attract top volunteers in the first place because they'd think "I want this to exist, and perhaps they need some help." No one's going to think "wow the wayback machine was unavailable for two days? What a bunch of amateurs." Actually even if they paid me $200k, I'd assume they have some priority issues if they wanted me to be on-call and couldn't convince me of why that's necessary. That'd be a huge red flag for some nightmare mismanagement.

egorfine 1mo ago

> You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free? Yes. For the Internet Archive I totally would. As responsible as I do my main job.

aurareturn 1mo ago
You should definitely apply and sign a contract. They should charge you money if you don't show up at 3am in an outage. All it takes is one emergency and the volunteer person doesn't show up for the non profit to want to hire a full time person. This event has likely already occurred at Archive.
- egorfine 1mo ago
  This is a genuine consideration.
insom 1mo ago
The work required to keep IA infrastructure operating is full time: these are full-time positions. IIRC they were at ~70 racks of stuff just in the California locations and apart from on-call and emergency response there's growth to keep up with, future planning etc. There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the Guardian newspaper -- never mind that Wayback is only a small portion of what they do. (Book scanning, inter-library loans, paid services for other GLAM organizations and governments etc.)
- egorfine 1mo ago
  True. It is also unreasonable to expect a lone full-time employee being the only one available at 3am every single day.

ndriscoll 1mo ago

Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? This isn't a hospital here; it's more like a library. My library is closed at 3am every day!

aurareturn 1mo ago
Ok how about 6am? 7pm? The point is that someone needs to bring the service back up and they can't rely on volunteers to do it whenever they feel like it.
- ndriscoll 1mo ago
  My local library isn't open at 6am either (opens at 9, or 10 on Sat and 1 on Sun), and closes before 7 on Fri-Sun. > someone needs to Do they though? Why is there some assumed urgency? What happens if they don't do it "whenever they feel like it" (e.g. normal hours)? Computers also generally don't randomly just stop working, and if they did in this case (network engineer), it's almost certainly the ISP anyway.
  - aurareturn 1mo ago
    Archive is likely one of the top traffic destinations on the internet. Your local library is likely not. Maybe they want to hire someone full-time is so they don't have to have a policy of whenever they feel like it? Having a reliable service is likely one of the reasons why their donors donate in the first place. Why do organizations and wealthy people still want to donate if the service goes down for 2 days and no one cares? Why would this kind of non-profit attract top volunteers in the first place?
    - ndriscoll 1mo ago
      High traffic doesn't mean high urgency. New York Public Library is huge and looks to have even more restrictive hours than mine. They're closed on Sundays! People donate because they believe in the mission, and most of the money probably goes to the actual storage (making the cost of an employee probably pointless to care about, of course). It would attract top volunteers in the first place because they'd think "I want this to exist, and perhaps they need some help." No one's going to think "wow the wayback machine was unavailable for two days? What a bunch of amateurs." Actually even if they paid me $200k, I'd assume they have some priority issues if they wanted me to be on-call and couldn't convince me of why that's necessary. That'd be a huge red flag for some nightmare mismanagement.