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Comment by aurareturn

6 hours ago

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?

10 comments

aurareturn

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ndriscoll  2 hours 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!

  • justin66  18 minutes ago

    > Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am?

    Depends on the service, but any effort to maintain this daft "gosh, what are they worried about, it's just the internet archive" line of thought is going to depend on either trivializing the needs of their staff, their users, or their computer systems. Good on them for taking things more seriously.

    (3:00 AM on the west coast is work hours for some of their volunteers, users, and contributors across the globe)

    > My library is closed at 3am every day!

    A library will have IT staff on call. Staff need their computers to work when they come in in the morning, users need the infrastructure working in order to do pretty much anything - and why the hell shouldn't people be able to use an online borrowing service in the middle of the night?

  • aurareturn  2 hours 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  2 hours 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.

      3 replies →

egorfine  5 hours 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  5 hours 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.