Meeting minutes

Campaign strategies; how and where.

• The total fund collected will be to fill the existing negative balance and two year service expenses.

• There will be option to fund individual services or FSCI as whole.

• The fund collected for FSCI will be split and shared to individual services or for un attended renewals for domains. A formula for splitting has to be derived.

• The priority will be to get funding for next year and recover already negative amount.

• Domains funding will be seperate from general funding campaign.

• Unless there are no other platforms available, there will be a seperate funding web page for contributor to enter transaction ID and to where their fund goes.

• The possibility of using Open collective with the support of navodaya as host for collecting fund has to be explored.

• Following platforms can be used for campaigns

  • Advertising on our services

  • Peertube videos

  • Other free software groups

  • Asking people perosnally

  • Colleges and schools

• What to do with services that aren't funded enough has to be discussed.

Campaign targets; amount and time.

The campaign will run all through the year, where it restarts on next year

Targets for individual services (All amounts are in Rupees)

poddery.com

Negative balance: 28962

Average yearly expense (rounded off): 30000

Two year expenses (+ contingency + inflation): 75000

Total: 103962

lists.fsci.in

Negative balance: -

Average yearly expense (rounded off): 4000

Two year expenses (+ contingency + inflation): 9500

Total: -

codema.in

Negative balance: -

Average yearly expense (rounded off): 4000

Two year expenses (+ contingency + inflation): 9500

Total: -

video.fsci.in

Negative balance: -

Average yearly expense (rounded off): 5500

Two year expenses (+ contingency + inflation): 12500

Total: -

meet.fsci.in

Negative balance: -

Average yearly expense (rounded off): 5500

Two year expenses (+ contingency + inflation): 12500

Total: -

FSCI

Total: -

Account handling and distribution for FSCI services.

• The possibility for working with Navodaya will have to be communicated.

• Till then personal account(s) can be used.

• Kannan and Snehal volunteered to handle funding

Requirement for an organization for account handling.

• This can be filled by coordinating with Navodaya

Domains management

• Manu is handling 9 domains

• 7 .in domains (Rs. 640) and 2 .org.in domains (Rs. 460)

Todo

• Praveen will communicate with Navodaya team

• Migration and maintenance

  • 2 vps handles backup should be migrated to a new instance

  • codema.in migration to Hetzner

  • poddery.com audit and scaledown if necessary

  • monitor.fsci.in migration to meet.fsci.in server

  • saakhi loomio instance disposal

• Update current funding status on website

• Look at possibility for scaleway open source credits - https://www.scaleway.com/en/about-us/open-source-program/

• Setup funding website for fsci

Meeting minutes of 16/01/2022 

Agenda - Discuss resource usages and scaling down for services. 

attendees - Bady, Kannan, Pirate Praveen, Ravi, sahilister

Pointers

• Resources users for all the services discussed.

• Scale down meet.fsci.in to CPX21 from earlier CPX31. @sahilister to install jitsi.

• Merge codema.in into meet.fsci.in after scaledown. @Pirate Bady to do it. 

• Migrate camp websites to meet.fsci.in server

• @Kannan V M to contact scaleway opensource program

• @Kannan V M and @Pirate Bady to talk to Kiran for scaledown

• Moniter to be disposed.

we haven't shut down monitor service yet. in a recent discussion with @suman, he said he is happy to volunteer to maintain the service and also suggested the idea of enabling notifications for resource throttling. but if we're continuing the service, i think we'll have to migrate it to hetzner to reduce expenses.

Not sure this is the right place to report this, but: I was looking around and saw that https://wiki.fsci.org.in is someone's personal site. That doesn't look right.

This happened while the server was migrated. We are aware about it, but we could not fix it yet. In general, we don't have enough volunteers to take care of all the services we manage. We will have to on board more volunteers or shut down some of the services.

Specifically, the DNS seems to be misconfigured and multiple IP addresses are resolved for this domain making let's encrypt certificate process to fail. Volunteers to fix this welcome.

I can take a look, but I am new here (which means I am yet to establish trust with everyone here and I am very unfamiliar with the processes) and someone will have to onboard me. Presumably that someone who will onboard me should be able to fix the problems quickly on their own, no?

If an additional pair of hands is welcome regardless, I'm available. :-)

It seems that https://git.fosscommunity.in also is broken, with 500 errors. Both wiki and git sites are prominently linked from https://fsci.org.in, so this is less than ideal. If they are unused and unmaintained, perhaps it might be better to retire them both?

git.fosscommunity.in issue is new (I will check). And about expertise, it not only about if one person can fix, but availability of time is an issue too. So more hands is always welcome.

Not running any service is the 100% guaranteed way of not having problems :) Only when things don't work people come up and volunteer so having things not working for some time is unfortunately required for us to get new volunteers :( but yes, we should think, plan and shut down services when we don't have enough volunteers.

For git.fosscommunity.in, the disk was full. It should be back soon.

We can discuss more about the wiki.fsci.org.in migration at https://codema.in/g/0HObsDec/free-software-community-of-india-fsci-fosscommunity-in-wiki-admins

Just for the info, the wiki still shows some one else site

Because it is not fixed yet.

With so much negative balance and its continued increase, I won't be able to keep paying. I think I will stop paying if we don't see a significant change in negative balance in coming four months. So unless more people donate or new persons step in to pay, we will have to shut down poddery completely.

> I think I will stop paying if we don't see a significant change in negative balance in coming four months.

Are there any specific dates for this? Like domain expiry, vps billing dates etc...

Hetzner charges for VPS every month. I amd paying from my personal account for over a year already.

I would prefer to keep diaspora running since it has many public and historic data, so a scaled down server will be better than a complete shut down, so I propose to shutdown matrix and xmpp and scale down it to a smaller vm (if we can get a static export of diaspora and setup a simple static archive, that will also suffice).

FSCI's IRC channel can be advertised as a preferred way to communicate for all users. almost every chat provider supports irc bridges. So users can join the channel from their preferred chat client.

So this implies we don't really care about chat history? Or it is expected that it can be accessed out-of-band using IRC log services?

See how #guix (libera chat) logs their public chats http://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/

I liked it. I anticipate similar in case of #fsci

Who will drive it? I think Subin wanted to drive the campaign. I can help @Subin Siby .

@Pirate Bady @Subin Siby When should we meet?

@Kannan V M what is the status?

https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_motd
https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_welcome

This is one of the way to send default or welcome messages to users through prosody config
so that users will be reminded to pay for the services.

I think diaspora has this option too, don't know haven't used diaspora much.

https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/servernotices.html
not sure if this feature is available now

https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/admin_api/server_notices.html

These options can be used to send messages to users to donate to run the services

Wiki is now being migrated to meet server. @Manu Krishnan T V has shared the data, bady has pointed the wiki domain to server and now @Ranjithsiji will do the migration and updation.

Is channeling funding to some non-individual entity required? Some of you have been footing bills, and you can't really overstate the costs so there is no trust problem in transferring contributions to your respective individiual accounts.

We can offer this as an additional option, like we can allow easy online payments in addition to bank/UPI transfer we offer currently. That would also automate generation of funding status and reports, which are done manually now. Navodaya.world has offered to host our funds, but we are still waiting for them to setup payment gateway (they are a new organization and some of our community members like GN and Abhas is part of it).

Going off-topic now, but loomio is a hammer for me now and I wonder why the new organization needs an article-and-comments interface at all - it could just be an organization on codema, or its own loomio instance, articles would be threads and e-mail-authenticated members would provide the comments. I am assuming they want unhindered participation on all content.

About payment gateways, I am not sure why one is needed in the age of NPCI infrastructure.

A web page that helps to make donations from a smartphone can effectively be just this much HTML:

<html>

<head>YunoUPI

</head>

<body>

Probably needed some formatting for the spaces:

<a href="upi://pay?pa=9876543210@upi&pn=secularinfra&am=100&cu=INR&tn=my2cents">Pay test</a>

</body>

</html>

If I put this in a HTML file in my phone and open the file in the Web browser, clicking the link takes me to the UPI-enabled app with account ID, amount and remarks filled.

Note that it won't complain if the ID is wrong, so care is required. But there are equivalent ways to put an IFSC code instead of UPI ID.

It is their choice. You can propose your solution to them if you like. For us, we only want to see if they can be trusted with our funds, since some of the long standing Free Software community members are present in the organization, that is reasonably good enough.

I mean, this is an additional option. No one is forced to use a payment gateway, if they don't want it. I don't use any UPI app as no Free Software UPI app is available. I'd very much appreciate an net banking option or card payment option.

a couple of good things have happened after the last meeting:

1. codema.in has been upgraded to v2.13.1, thanks to @Akshay.

2. wiki.fsci.in has been migrated from shared server to the meet server (the one which runs meet.fsci.in), thanks to @Ranjithsiji.

codema upgrade was blocked due to some database migration issues (which are mentioned in detail in the above link). now that we're on the latest stable available on docker hub, we can proceed with migrating codema.in to the meet server to reduce expenses as discussed before in the thread. if anyone is interested, let's talk in the codema maintainers matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/#codema:poddery.com

@Jyothis Jagan contributed 3000 and @Subin Siby contributed 5000 today. @Kannan V M pooled 2680 from friends last month. Any volunteers to update this on website?

Updated, see https://fsci.in/contributors/

@Kannan V M @Ravi Dwivedi @Vinay Keshava looks like the stripe link for donation is not working as reported by @Snehal Shekatkar . We will have to talk to Nagarjuna and setup a Razorpay link like we did for camp.

Nagarjuna replied that they are not going to use Stripe any more.

Have requested to create a razorpay link for FSCI.

Split-up for FOSS United fund spending

Sruthi's bank account

Handles: poddery.com, monitor.fsci.in (deleted)

Current balance for poddery+monitor: -51721

Expected expense for poddery in 2023: 37000

Funding recieved in 2022: 23050

Amount needed to cover negative balance and 2023 expenses: 51721+37000-23050 = 65671

Kiran's bank account

(meet.fsci.in details are not covered in this report because it had a different campaign for itself and the current funding pretty much covers for more than 2 years.)

Handles: meet.fsci.in, videos.fsci.in, codema.in (migrated)

Current balance for codema.in: -9738

Current balance for videos.fsci.in: -4419

Expected expense for videos.fsci.in in 2023: 9000

Amount needed to cover negative balance and 2023 expenses: 9738+4419+9000 = 23157

Abhijith's bank account

Handles: mail.fsci.in

Current balance for mail.fsci.in: 4794

Expected expense for mail.fsci.in in 2023: 6000

Amount needed to cover 2023 expenses: 6000-4794 = 1206

Total amount needed to cover 2023

Total for all bank accounts = 65671+23157+1206 = 90034

Rs. 34 is rounded off (on sruthi's account) to get a total of 90000.

Payment split up:

Sruthi: 65671-34 = 65637

Kiran: 23157

Abhijith: 1206

Note: Rs. 3000 has to be given to Kelvin from 2023's poddery expenses (from sruthi's account) since the hosting charges for January 2023 was spent from his account.

We have a draft blog post, thanks to @Karthik . Please review.

https://cryptpad.disroot.org/code/#/2/code/edit/wi5-mNSGXXCtxHBFXl6EMiJf/

We have to write a blog post about FOSS United grant, any volunteers?

@Kannan V M @Karthik I think we should add an option for people outside India in donate page - they can give to our Hetzner account (Sajith does that for Prav).

Link to https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq#can-i-add-credit-to-my-hetzner-account and mention our Client number as K0337063619. We should do this for durare and prav as well.