Re: [Leadershipgroup] Mickaboo's IT strategy

I hadn't thought of bringing it to the board for official consideration but now that you mention it, if it's appropriate, It would be nice to say that we have an official board-sanctioned strategy for the IT stuff. Heather Hohlowski wrote:

Hi Matt,

I can't disagree on anything in your email. In my opinion, the priorities make sense, and I think the goal of making tools easier to use for all of our volunteers is definitely priority #1. I think the online asm has been a gigantic step in that direction as we have had some potential volunteers in the past who were unable to install the software for whatever reason and now I think this online version will make it a lot more likely that we'll get more people to help out with data entry etc. Michelle, do we want to add this email to our agenda for the board meeting wednesday?

Heather

--- On *Wed, 2/11/09, Matt Linton //* wrote:

From: Matt Linton Subject: [Leadershipgroup] Mickaboo's IT strategy To: leadershipgroup@mickaboo.org Date: Wednesday, February 11, 2009, 10:33 AM

Hi all! First of all, surprise! There's a leadershipgroup email list. Yeah yeah, "another mail list!?" but I wanted to email you all and I kept forgetting exactly who was in this group, so I had the wiki dump the members of the 'executive commitee' group into a list.

I'm about to get into a discussion with the members of the tech team about how to continue implementing the new website and, before I get too far into it, I wanted to make sure everyone on this team knows what exactly my vision on our IT infrastructure is -- and make sure they agree with it!

Although we're very IT-dependent as an organization, our core mission is not IT or even IT-related - and it's the job of technology to support the real mission of bird rescue. As such my *highest* priorities for our technical infrastructure are:

* /*Data Integrity*/: My #1 concern is that the data we gather and use be *correct* and *useful* * */Stability/*: The tool should remain available as much as possible to those who need it * /*Security*/: Our tools and data should not be subject to interference from disgruntled former volunteers, people rejected for adoption, bored teenagers, etc. * /*Consistency*/: Our tools sometimes have a high learning curve. They should not change rapidly/unexpectedly/frivolously. A working tool that everyone uses is FAR preferable to a new and flashy tool that may be "better" but no one knows how to use. New tools should come into place gradually and only to *fulfill a need*.

For the near and medium-term future I am going to place the highest priority technically into the following areas:

* Integrating our current tools as much as possible so they become easier to manage and work with * Cleaning up and auditing our existing data sources * Splitting all "development" and "testing" activity out onto a different physical server from our "production" (ie, every-day use) server to promote stability. * Auditing and tightening any lax security I find on our production server

There are a lot of potential tasks within the tech team being proposed and worked on (new website, consolidation work, new dev server, etc) so I want to make sure that I have concurrence on these priorities from the leadership group so that if one project gets a lower priority than another, I am not playing it by ear or seeming to play favorites.

So, given that, any thoughts I should consider?

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