Technocrats

Standing Technocrats Committee: Mission: The selection or creation, maintenance, and technical security of hardware and software used at or installed by Free Geek.; Programs: Liaison with Coders group, liaison with ASS group, liaison with Distro group, selection of software commonly used at Free Geek, computer security, technical infrastructure.; Email: technocrats at freegeek.org; Likely Suspects: Ryan, Vagrant, Paul, Sean, Jason

Current Members

Ongoing Areas of Concern

Server Room (no longer new, still does not have a page of its own) Phone Infrastructure (this is just as important as the rest of our infrastructure, if not more!)

Budgeted Expenses

(Your actual expense budget goes here, along with explanatory notes, for example notes indicating which months expenses are expected to happen in,.)

$575 every February for new UPS batteries

UPS batteries get used up faster than expected.

Nonrecurring expenses

(This is where one time expenses would go. Yearly or more often go above.)

Cabling expenses

We regularly need supplies to fuel our ongoing cabling parties.

We've had good luck with the Sewell 1000-ft boxes of cat5e, and they're available in all the colors of the rainbow.
Keystone jacks are necessary for in-wall (or on-wall).
D-rings keep our cables from falling on the ground. Historically, we've just bought locally, but when we get low we should buy online.

Related Items

(This is for notes that indicate expenses that affect your committee but are actually classified under a different committee.)

Are these still needed?

line identifier (better than our current one, which doesn't work): $50(?)
special punch-down head for phone blocks: $5-8 * YES, LOOK ABOE * -Jared

Meetings

We meet weekly at 2:00 pm on Friday in the Meeting Room. Meetings are open, but participation is generally limited to members of the Technocrats. If you're interested in joining, the best way would be to listen in on the meetings and join either server build or tech support.

Technocrat Priorities

Here is a list of what Technocrats should prioritize when making decisions

Communicate effectively with your users. Communicate with other Technocrats about what you're doing.
Maintain effective security; stop people from doing things that they shouldn't be doing.
Maintain data integrity for our users and our systems.
Do not violate or let be violated the privacy of your users.
Keep all your services in working order (e.g. research a new version before upgrading to it)
Minimize and mitigate any downtime that happens or is necessary to have.
Be efficient, paying attention to requests of more importance before minor issues.
Uphold our local organizational policies as well as the accepted laws related to your work.
Do not abuse Free Geek's resources, and help to prevent others from doing the same (excessive network traffic, excessive printing).
Try not to be annoying; people will complain much sooner and louder if something bothers them than if something is just broken.
Do what it takes to understand the implications of your actions before taking them, so that you can knowingly apply these priorities.
Always document your work. At the very least update tickets in a timely and informative fashion. If you think this will need to be repeated consider the best way to document it elsewhere. (added by paulm 01:24, 29 January 2012 (UTC))