Motivation...

[MrChaos]

I took a page from GPZs playbook and did the exact same thing.

I put up the cash, Baker, FreeBeer, and a late game replacement for RL afk, Peet, kept it running and healthy. I did this for the same reasons as Grim.

I trust all of them completely but sequestered my financial data for there sake more then mine. Baker is the one I know best given the previous projects we worked on, and Peet the least but all had never given me a reason to question their integrity. It was the smoothest running, least drama filled project in terms of people working to make it happen evah!

Now the community side... that's a completely different story all together and truthful TE's words to FreeBeer ring true to me. Sometimes I think everyone forgets that the salary people get paid for the grief that is heaped on them isn't worth it.

One thing though, all of others working on Solap felt that the final "voice" on a decision was mine even though I was by far the least qualified about servers. My keeping my ego in check and trusting them to do the right thing was a key reason for it working out.

Also no matter how many times I gave them credit, which they richly deserved, it was "MrChaos' Solap", "Thank you MrChaos", "$#@! you MrChaos", "your killing the game MrChaos". Wears on a fellows tits it does guv'nah.

MrChaos

[Orion]

QUOTE (Grimmwolf_GB @ Aug 23 2010, 05:04 AM) pkk and I are paying the bills, pkk is managing it. It works out just fine, since he knows his @#(! and I don't want to mess with it. For this kind of model, you need people you can trust. pkk and I have "known" each other since 2000, spent years as SL together and seen each other in RL a couple of times. How many groups like that of 2 or more can you findin allegiance? Since it comes down to handling money (sometimes considerable amounts), you really, really need trustworthy people. There are not many people in Allegiance I would trust with my cash or personal data (home address, bank account number).

That's definitely a fair point.. and I think a prerequisite of doing something like I suggest would be that each of the paying people would have to be known to the others, their real identities. Let's talk hypotheticals; suppose it's possible to find a group of 4-5 people you trust (I think TE trusts most of his ZLs, how far I dont know), and whose identities you know, do you think it could work? I definitely think people would be a lot more willing to share this load evenly if the option were available, you'd have more success going this route than expecting random donations. (not that the donations would cease either)

[lexaal]

QUOTE (Orion @ Aug 23 2010, 03:47 PM) That's definitely a fair point.. and I think a prerequisite of doing something like I suggest would be that each of the paying people would have to be known to the others, their real identities. Let's talk hypotheticals; suppose it's possible to find a group of 4-5 people you trust (I think TE trusts most of his ZLs, how far I dont know), and whose identities you know, do you think it could work?

Pro: GPZ-example.
Con: successor problems, finding 4-5 ppl.



I believe that our community will survive even if TE shuts down everything (altough i don't say it will be easy). I don't believe that this will happen, but that almost happened in the past and could happen again.

[minigun]

seems like we are using the direct teamwork approach.
appointing a leader who will focus and lead the team to success.
this can lead to a dysfunctional team structure.

could try collaborative teamwork...the splitting up of responsibility by catagory of work(no supreme leader)
must follow the ten commandments for collaborative teamwork though
1) thou shall have trust and confidence in team members
2) thou shall let go-the ego
3) thou shall not compete with each other
4) thou shall be committed to the common goal
5) thou shall communicate openly and directly
6) thou shall resolve conflict mutually & openly
7) thou shall empathize & understand to be understood
8) thou shall support & respect individual differences
9) thou shall take up responsibility & accountability
10) i forgot the tenth commandment....positive work environment? team spirit?

[MrChaos]

10) Thou shall remember it's for the game and not you

[Fell]

If the worst happens, Ill try to set something up with the other Dutch allegites (and a couple German as well, might even join up with Grimm and such) to pay another server.

[Bard]

QUOTE [23:14] <@Bard|Out> yeah
[23:14] <@Bard|Out> that's what I thought
[23:14] <@Bard|Out> no go there
[23:14] <@Bard|Out> it will never be permitted
[23:14] <ImagoWork> wait, what?
[23:14] <@Bard|Out> best to wait for CSS
[23:14] <ImagoWork> $#@! that you dont usderstand
[23:14] <ImagoWork> LET ME MAKE IT CLEAR FOR YOU
[23:14] <@Bard|Out> try explaining it to TE then[/quote]

QUOTE (pkk @ Aug 22 2010, 01:44 PM) For me it looks like Bard (a ZL) thinks, you are the highest authority.

That is a very short snippet from a very long and very heated IRC argument with Imago where Imago was doing something that was barely related to the allegiance code and refusing to tell me what, precisely, he was doing with the portions that did. I asked him quite a few pointed questions which he answered with swearing. Eventually I started swearing back. A lot. I'm not proud of that.

It finally came out that he was using some sort of information from ASGS logins but he wouldn't tell me what. (At first he tried to tell me he wasn't using anything at all, he finally backpedaled after I cornered him on a very simple factual error)
He refused to explain himself, choosing instead to throw a very long tantrum, and when I finally did get out of him that it was using something that was somehow ASGS-related but still unexplained he told me that it was "@#(! I didn't understand" and I told him to try explaining it to Tigereye (as you can see there).

ASGS is not part of the Allegiance Codebase and it is not under the purview of the Development Zone Lead or the Dev Team.
That is why Tigereye's name came up.

[Tigereye]

So I've reread this topic, and some valid points have been made. There are still things that I can do to make the community more self-sufficient. However, I'd like to ask those who see themselves on "the other side of the fence" from me to take a look back over our history.

When I was given the 'job' the community already had a bottleneck. The first thing I did was create the ZL structure so that responsibility was distributed over a set of people instead of one.
I also created a set of tools for those ZLs to use which gave them the ability to do the things Pook used to do around here without requiring "one man."
Then when Thalgor told me he would no longer be hosting ASGS, I migrated the entire system over to my server which required a lot of little changes to get it to work right. (There is no "ASGS Installer" or other simple tool to put things where they need to be. It's a custom system which requires specific knowledge).
After the migration and the training I received from Pook, I realized how specialized the knowledge was, and how necessary it is in order to keep things running the way they are today. So I then worked to separate everything that ASGS does into one standalone virtual machine image so that future moves would be drastically simplified: shut down a VM, copy it to the new server, then start it up.

Now I realize that none of this is "special" and I didn't "create the keys" and that some of you feel I'm hindering progress more than I'm helping, but I want you to look at my actions since I became admin here. Every step along the way I have made the conscious effort to distribute the responsibility and access to other people so the community could be more self sufficient and would not rely on one man.
As long as Allegiance has existed there has been some form of bottleneck at the top. Before me there was Pook, before Pook there was the collective KGJV/Vencain, and before them was Microsoft. Complaining about these "bottlenecks" is nothing new and is frankly a waste of energy and time. If you look at *ANY* organizational structure from corporations to charities to countries you will see the same issues we have here.

Now I don't claim to be perfect - I never have. What I have claimed is the same thing that Pook claimed before me, and KGJV/Vencain claimed before him. Allegiance is fun as hell, and I'm going to do everything I can to keep this game playable and if possible, foster progress along the way. Some of you may be concentrating on specific issues infront of us today, but I'd like to remind you that these issues are here because we've come all the way here from where we were yesterday. We wouldn't be ABLE to deal with these issues today if we were stuck dealing with yesterday's problems.

As we exist today, with the auth system we use, there cannot be any more ASGS administrators. I can't just share the keys with anyone that asks due to code licensing issues. It's Pook's code, we don't have access to it, and there are valid reasons for it. It's a closed system, and our community has been like this since day one with Microsoft. This isn't a bad thing: there's an entire principle of security dedicated to this fact: the principle of Least Privilege. It loosely states that by minimizing access, you minimize risks of problems. I'd like to ask you to consider what any corporation/group/community would be like if everyone had full access to its resources. I'm sure you can see that such a model may sound ideal in theory, but in practice it would be a nightmare.

One day we'll have a full-fledged ASGS replacement and the ability to have more administrators with both the knowledge and access to help out at the top. But even then, we'll still have debates on whether or not some NewFeature should be added or not, or if soandso is doing a good job as suchandsuch. It's like commanding in Allegiance - someone will always bitch at you no matter what tech you research or strategy you try to win the game. History repeats itself.

When I was thinking about our community last night I realized I have never publicly stated exactly what I'm going for around here; I have no Mission Statement. It's understandable to be critical of someone if you don't know what their intentions are.
So I'm going to write a formal one up soon that will outline the following rough points:Keep the game playable by allContinue to work towards a more distributed communityEnsure the community has 'disaster recovery' scenarios for all machines and humans involved in #1
The only motivation I need to do this is (in my opinion) the most important one: the hope that the next time I play Allegiance, some commander will choose BIOS and buy us Assault ships, and allow me to pilot one up the enemy's backside... because I sure as hell don't get my motivation from the peanut gallery here on the forums

As an afterthought, BIOS Sup with adv figs and minepack2 is an equally motivating thought

See you all ingame,

--TE

[Freyja]

Well that sounds reasonable.

I do think a semi-formal set of written guidelines and procedures for how to appoint and maintain 'staff' would be proper and good, how to replace and maintain people in roles such as HQ ZL Alleg.

Personally I've always thought of the community as more or less of a constitutional monarchy, it would be nice to have the former written.



P.S. Your assault ship is waiting.

[Imago]

my pm's and emails to administrators remain unanswered - TE produces a long post for you all to see. *applause*