First, I want to applaud the common-sense approach which you, Matt, bring to our technology needs - to solve business needs, rather than to exercise the latest / greatest / flashiest technology (which we couldn't afford anyway!)
 
Second, I'd be the first to admit I don't know all that is being proposed or done by the tech team.  The priority list sounds reasonable, but would it be easy for us laypersons to see that de-prioritized list?
 
Lastly.. there is a technical matter that's been hanging around since last year, which is in the critical path for some amount of grant application activity.  I'll email you about that offline.
 
- Pam
 
--- On Wed, 2/11/09, Matt Linton <matt@mickaboo.org> wrote:
From: Matt Linton <matt@mickaboo.org>
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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