Damn Kasper, how do you do those quotes?
Thanks 
For your information: this is an extract of the original post by Kasper (http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2008/01/14/ill-communication/)
Thomas said:
It would be nice if Diederik could speak up about his experience and his own evaluation of the CS organisation.
@Diederik
A (small) word of warning: Speaking out against CS will almost automatically get you lumped in with the “OCSers”, even if you specifically state that you aren’t.
Well, to be honest, I probably already am. Some months ago, I had some posts, also on my own website. Seems that the communication went dead afterwards.
Let’s start at the beginning. I think this gives a better insight in my current feelings towards the Techteam, and in general: the leader of it, and Casey (ok, here comes my ban…)
My CS experience started at my former employer. Walter was a programmer then. I and Walter could (and still can) get along quite well, and I was invited in his house.
There were several great people, which had the same “frequency” (another word of saying we could get along, but that sentence would became corny ). I met Duke, Aldo, Tiina, Paul and some others I forgot due to the use of ethanol 
My current position then was system engineer, and I was asked for that position at couchsurfing.
That would become handy, because of the start of the Rotterdam Tech Collective. Some several others were there too. Anu* (love!), Weston, Naz (great friend), Chris where several of them.
I got introduced with Nicco and we had great chats about the code (I’m not a programmer, so having some insight is perfect for me), system engineering, the couchsurfing system etc, etc. At that time, there were several things an issue. Nicco and I (as the only admins, besides some Indian people) started to work.
We had an agenda, and could start.
Several issues were addressed quite quick. Most of them are not-to-be-disclosed, but several were visible from the outside:
- Lesser downtime because of an OSS loadbalancer
- Monitoring
- More webservers which run an *UP-TO-DATE* OS (Visible through the headers of Apache)(I believe that this was an great deal, yeah, check http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/wiki/Security_Concerns).
That time, the collective was already 3 months (or something like that) in the past. Several people came to become “sysadmin”, Nicco was degraded as leader, while Weston became TT-Leader (managing dev and sysadmin). Communication became less and less. From some times, we couldn’t reach Casey, which was our first contact for the code. At that time, my irritation began (my irritation towards the OCS was already there ). Could some parts from OCS be *INDEED* true?
(Anu isn’t really stupid, you know, and Daz is just Daz and should drop dead, etc etc ) At that time, it seemed to *ME* that some people were only busy programming, and not with management.
We had a great CSInterklaas weekend, and the Thai-collective started. We had several “incidents” before and after that (not-to-be-disclosed), and my irritation was at top. When I decided to resign (1 week ago) at the same time the poweroutage at the datacenter happened. Bad timing… Or probably not, because there were some more “incidents”.
This morning, I pulled the plugs from cs-sysadmins, cs-erc, cs-devel(|public). At my desktop is a Freemind scheme (http://freemind.sourceforge.net, go get it) with my thoughts, idea’s and remedies. I had the idea to post it in the CS-Sysadmin group for learning. If only someone would not only *READ* it, but also *REPLY* to it. Therefor, I decided not to do so. I have the feeling that I’m being ignored, so why should I put more energy in it?
From my opinion (an censored version of the mindmap):
- Where’s the communication?
We are having more and more people, which asks more communcation to happen. The group only has 3 or 4 skype-meetings, and no real agenda. LT has, I believe that dev has. Why doens’t sysadmin have one?Miscommunications happen too often. Get a good IRC channel, AND STICK WITH IT. Use it like SVN, and make sure that you are the only one working on one problem. - Weston should resign from being a techteam-leader.
Weston is a great guy (as well as Casey btw), but he is a programmer (as well as Casey). I believe that Casey and Weston should either resign from sysadminning and start programming OR do resign from both, and become a real manager (that is: delegate and check). - Get things prioritized
Sticks with the communication part. Changing passwords is not an problem, but if changing OSes is having an higher priority, get that done. - Have more communication between CS-Sysadmin and development
Commit often
Commit the build to the webservers *NOT* often, but on an weekly base, and *COMMUNICATE* what the differences are. This ensures that everyone knows what is going on, and can act upon unexpected behaviour… - Learn from mistakes
D’oh
Let’s end with some positive notes:
- I met all those great people. Some of those I want to mention: Nicco (thanks mate), Anu, Naz, Aldo (thanks a lot with the thinking), Martine (hug), Stijn, and all those others. Not to mention all those people that we hosted, will host, and I blatantly forgot.
- I still believe that CS works. It needs to change. An negative one here is that I don’t believe that that will happen in the near future.
- I still will be hosting with my girlfriend. We have a lively community in Rotterdam, which I love.
- I seem to understand better and better where this OCS is all about. I only hope that I won’t reach the cynical level of communication that some of OCS have. At the same moment I feel that I will become only more bitter.
I guess that the post shuld be called “Casey Love”, the feeling that you were loved, but the other end just decides to move on to the next one.
Love from Rotterdam!
Diederik (And Frank Sinatra… “The best is yet to come”)
p.s. When resigning from cs-sysadmins this morning, I saw the description of the group. Guess that this one is not NDA bound:
“Description: This group is free from political agendas and personal ideologies. It is a place to serve the one of the core needs(server administration) of the CS Organization in order to make sure that the members have access to the site at all times so that they can experience inter cultural understanding.”
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