Infrastructure merit & barriers

[Carl Trieloff]

On 11/14/2011 02:30 PM, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
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> On 11/13/2011 11:52 PM, Ofer Schreiber wrote:
>> I don't mind taking care of mailman administration.
> Great, thanks! I have an sshkey from you already, so I can setup the
> access later today.
>
> Folks on this list, we have some things to think about:
>
> 1. What is a good process for bringing on new system administrators?
>
> Meaning, since we're giving limited-to-full sudo access, we want
> appropriate barriers in place so we can create the trust before we
> give out the keys. In Ofer's case, the trust exists by being part of
> the original RHEV team. :)
>
> So at a minimum we should extend that same courtesy to people from our
> various organizations - anyone can gain an entry via organizational
> association.
>
> 2. What are ways to get proof that people are able to do the job?
>
> We all like to think we know how to admin our Linux systems, but doing
> it for a project moves from "my laptop is broken, darn it" to "the
> servers are broken and the mission is in peril, oops."
>
> Think of this as, "What is the merit in a meritocratic Infrastructure
> team?"
>
> In the Fedora Project, new people to the Infrastructure team go
> through a probation period. They are given one or a few relatively
> minor tasks - ones that must be done according to the established
> procedures, but not anything that will break important systems in the
> event of a mistake. Success in those tasks helps someone get on to a
> specific team that handles a sub-system of the overall infrastructure.
>
> Any other ideas on how to handle establishing merit?

Good question. let's jump and #asfinfra on freenode and ask as I believe
the ASF team has mostly worked through this question in a lot more
detail than we will need over the years.

Carl.