MPKB talk:Server

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[edit] Who sees MPKB, and webstats

The following is a email exchange on MPKB's direction. At the request of Yongho, we agreed to bring it up to a public space at MPKB. We'll continue our discussion here. --Yonghokim 09:29, 25 October 2005 (MDT)

From Josh Jorgensen <jjorgensen@macalester.edu>
To: Yongho Kim <yokima@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 20, 2005 12:03 AM
Subject: Who sees MPKB, and webstats

Hi Yongho, hope you're doing great...

There was a meeting tonight of some students planning the new [[student forums]] (which you may have read about). One thing that was brought up was MPKB, which we're trying to really encourage, which you may also have noticed. The question was to what extent we want to tell administrators/staff/faculty about MPKB. I kind of didn't feel comfortable making a decision on that question at the meeting, mostly because MPKB is sort of yours, and I didn't know what your vision for it is with regards to who exactly utilizes it. Obviously, it would be great for people other than students to view what gets put up and to maybe contribute a little. But I worry, and I wonder if you worry, that since anyone can edit anything, we may have a conflict there between what students put up and what others want shown. Is this a concern of yours? What do you think about publicizing the site to everyone?

Thanks, Josh

P.S.--The webstats4u was what I was looking for, but they don't seem to work anymore. For the last week now they've shown very very low page views, but it's obvious from the "Recent Changes" and the fact that we've been telling everyone about MPKB that the numbers should be going up. Do you know what's wrong?

From Yongho Kim <yokima@gmail.com>
To: Josh Jorgensen <jjorgensen@macalester.edu>
Cc: server@mpkb.net [1]
Date: Oct 24, 2005 9:36 PM
Subject: Re: MPKB ownership

Hi Josh, here in Cali we're busy kicking Arnold's ass.. the Student Forum's questions brought to light something that should be cleared soon.

First, I need to make it clear that MPKB is not "mine", nor "sort of mine". If anything, procedurally speaking, it belongs to Adelante!. I happen to be the only one with enough technical experience to manage a web server in most of its aspects, and so I ended up having an administrative monopoly (which I hope ends soon) out of sheer geek power.

Second, ideally MPKB would be owned/managed by coalition groups such as the MN Activist Roundtable, some group that brought local organizers and student activists (not just Mac) together.

Third, on professors/administrators at Macalester... they already kind of know about it, and the vitality of an open wiki site such as MPKB lies on having a large user base that will make up for its intended scope.

After writing these three paragraphs, I was about to launch on MPKB's brief history and stuff like synergy out of being open etc etc.. but I have a better idea. Let's make this a wikithread at MPKB! Josh, if you let me, I'd like to put your and my email up somewhere at MPKB (possibly that "Talk:" page of MPKB:Server or something like that.) and continue the discussion from there, wiki-format. Would you mind?

Yongho

From Josh Jorgensen <jjorgensen@macalester.edu>
To: Yongho Kim <yokima@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 25, 2005 1:14 AM
Subject: Re: MPKB ownership

That sounds great. I meant that it's yours in terms of vision, in that you really established it and have an idea of where it is (or at least originally was) intended to go. Of course I agree that in terms of strict ownership, MPKB should belong to some large, representative group.

You can put this discussion up as a talk page, and I'll make sure people here at Mac chime in.

-Josh

[edit] Stats

When I upgraded MPKB with the official release of MediaWiki 1.5, somehow the HTML code for webstats4u got nonfunctional. After you sent me the email, I looked it up and fixed, and so it should be working now.

I think a better measure of MPKB usage is Category:Server's awStats. I've made links on a per month basis - check out the ones under "mpkb.net 2005" I've been making monthly copies of those records so that people without administrative access can see them,

but it's better to see the original thing because the page provides links for details and stuff. Log in to http://bluehost.com using the usual ID and password (email me if you don't know it yet) and on cPanel go to Web/FTP stats -> AwStats. And there's this scroll-down box for monthly records.

--Yonghokim 09:38, 25 October 2005 (MDT)

[edit] Purpose

Originally, this whole thing was adelantemac.org. I was creating a website for Adelante!, whose last version of the website looked like this. I was wary of how centralized the whole process of both web and general communication was inside the organization (e.g. if I din't understand what a specific message was about, it usually didn't go through the system because I generally re-processed the info) and so switched to the wiki as soon as I learned what wikis were all about. If you check the earlier versions of the Main Page, you'll see it was exclusively Adelante's stuff.

As the wiki grew larger, I felt, myself, or the 10-20 of us members of Adelante!, would not be able to cover the vast variety of stuff I wanted our wiki to cover (I didn't just want to link to other places, because of our specific politics), such as, Need-Blind Admissions, the Multicultural Sampler, Latin American Studies, Financial Aid, to just name a few. At first, I thought we could expand it to all the cultural organizations. But that was still a lot of work. So I just kept expanding the scope till I figured at the scale of the state, it was a big enough constituency to eventually generate a critical mass. So I went around and talked with people from PIPE, Bridges, QU, MULCH, asking them if they would be willing to share the wiki space with us. They were a bit wary of the adelantemac.org domain name, so I came up with the name. This was mostly all done inside my head, during the last week of April of 2005.

So yes! In exchange for sharing a chunk of MPKB's "ownership", I wanted to lure you all to contributing to making this more accurate and potentially useful. Also, I figured the noncentralized nature of wikis may lure the anarchic-inclined bunch of the Mac radicals (for example, I feel they are strong in numbers among the Mac Hegemon writers, and having a somewhat centralized administrative structure would turn them off.

What I'm looking for the long term for MPKB to accomplish is the role of a reference guide, which partially is now accomplished through Campus Programs/SSC, some more via senior/junior leaders, and the rest if just not accomplished. So once people find out that the Board of Trustee's Environmental Impact Committee (I just made up this name) is appointed by the Vicepresident every September, it would be good to keep a record of that so that the VP might not get away with a small clique of hand-picked loyals to their agenda. Or if you compile a list of all media contacts in the Lake St area for a particular outreach program, you can have a fairly stable place to share it with other orgs doing similar stuff in the future. That's the "knowledge base" part of it.

Right now I'm a bit concerned I never managed to mobilize my non-Mac contacts to bring them to the site, but I've started seeing people from time to time to stop by the site and leaving their marks (We just got an email sent to Mac-PESJO today)

that's about it on the purpose of MPKB. As for the other two..

--Yonghokim 21:43, 28 November 2005 (MST)

[edit] on "who sees MPKB"

as I said, several may already be aware of MPKB. I've seen hits coming straight from the Financial Aid Office back in April of 2005 (it could have been anyone in the FinAid, though - a student worker, the Dean, who knows.. who obviously googled for "Macalester Need Blind Admissions" and found us. MPKB's pages top the google search results for most of its student and faculty profile pages, as well as a number of issues specific to Mac (Gender Open Housing, Need-Blind Admissions, etc) so anyone googling those will come to us, and find out. I don't think it's practical to any degree trying to "conceal" MPKB. We have also started being cited as a source in random MN progressive websites here and there. I think there is much more synergy to be gained from allowing everyone in than any dispute-settling energies that may be used later. Just look at how Wikipedia handles their armies of biased political beliefs. I think we can do it too.

--Yonghokim 21:50, 28 November 2005 (MST)

[edit] Budget

[edit] 2007-09


[edit] 2005-2007 discussion

(This is a follow-up from Yongho's suggestion)

Let's start billing hosting fees to co-hosted organizations for the 2006-07 year.

The following organizations and individuals need to be billed $16.68/year for the usage of mpkb.net's server. mpkb.net's hosting costs are $166.80 for two years. The first year, I was unable to bill the organizations properly because I was in the middle of setting up the website. All said organizations are paying for domain name costs ($9/year) on their own - the $16.68 is just the hosting costs.

TodayWeAct will be moved to another server in about 1 month, therefore I ask for exemption from hosting payments.

Should this happen, mpkb.net's maintenance costs will be lowered to $16.68/year (domain name costs for one domain name are included in the server fees) for the 2006-07 period. (And you will have greater leverage when negotiating with MCSG)

--Yongho Kim Talk 10:20, 9 April 2006 (MDT)

That sounds like good news, I think. So, Yongho, could you please contact those 4 other organizations and see if they want to keep their sites, and if so if they will pay? And are there still any issues from the 05-06 year, or is that all taken care of? Thanks a lot, Yongho. --Josh J. 10:44, 9 April 2006 (MDT)
sure, I'll contact the orgs ASAP. My "05-06 issues" was that maybe mpkb could bill them for the use during 05-06 year, but that's a bit tricky (argument wise). Personally I'm up for paying my share during the 05-06 year, but I don't know even how I would approach orgs about paying back fees that we didn't discuss about when setting the server up. --Yongho Kim Talk 19:32, 9 April 2006 (MDT)
okay. well, i'm assuming that payment has already been made through adelante's budget. In that case, if adelante doesn't mind, the solution may be just to let 05-06 go and plan to start dividing the costs in the future. --Josh J. 23:21, 9 April 2006 (MDT)

[edit] Billing Status 2006-07

I will contact the persons below and post billing status updates here. --Yongho Kim Talk 18:43, 15 April 2006 (MDT)

Billing Status Template:

=> Candidate (candidate to be incorporated to mpkb's server)
=> Incorporated (already on server)
=> Discussed (talked about paying $16.80/year)
=> Agreed (billee agreed to pay)
=> Billed (bill sent)
=> Paid (bill paid)


[edit] mpkb.net

Comment: if we are to bill other organizations, we need to come up with an institutional structure soon. Whom should they write their checks to? --Yongho Kim Talk 20:24, 16 April 2006 (MDT)

To whom does mpkb.net/Adelante write its checks? I really don't know as much about the whole system as others, but I would think it would be easiest to have our companion organizations write checks to whatever company owns the server. Another solution would be for MPKB to have a bank account, but I doubt we want to go that route. --Josh J. 00:44, 17 April 2006 (MDT)
Maybe it can be to the MCSG FAC Chair. There is only one BlueHost.com account, and they can't take checks from 6 different organizations for minute amounts (although I haven't checked..) It should be a specific person who is a current Mac student, and who can get the money together and give it back to MCSG. Plus, the entire bill for 2006-07 has already been paid by Adelante! using MCSG funds. (So maybe do you want to postpone this for next year?) --Yongho Kim Talk 09:37, 17 April 2006 (MDT)
Hmm.. please find a billing point person. Even I can't pay when there is no designated Macalester person to whom pay. The bills for 2006-07 has already been paid by MCSG on behalf of Adelante to Bluehost. --Yongho Kim Talk 09:49, 7 May 2006 (MDT)

Billing Status: Paid (5/25/05)

Bill to
Yongho Kim
Web Technician and Ex-Treasurer
¡Adelante!
Macalester College
1600 Grand Avenue
Saint Paul MN 55105
Phone: 651-696-6932 #1
Fax: 651-696-6447
Email: adelante@macalester.edu

[edit] mnftc.info

Billing Status: Candidate (4/14/06)

Bill to
Octavio Ruiz
Executive Director
Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition
c/o Resource Center of the Americas
3019 Minnehaha Avenue
Minneapolis MN 55406
Phone: 612-276-0788 #19
Fax: 612-276-0898
Email: oruiz@americas.org

[edit] macmmuf.org

Billing Status: Incorporated (5/18/05)

Bill to
Peter Rachleff
Director
Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program
Macalester College
1600 Grand Avenue
Saint Paul MN 55105
Phone: 651-696-6371
Fax: 651-696-6498
Email: rachleff@macalester.edu

[edit] mnfr.org

Billing Status: Incorporated (10/1/05)

Bill to
Martha Ockenfels-Martinez
Program Coordinator
Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network
2500 University Avenue, Ste. C8
St. Paul, MN 55114
Phone: 651-287-0660
Fax: ?
Email: freedomnetwork@gmail.com

[edit] yokim.net

Billing Status: Agreed (4/14/06)

Bill to
Yongho Kim
900 Crenshaw Bl
Los Angeles CA 90019
Phone: 323-244-5309
Fax: None
Email: yokima@gmail.com

[edit] TodayWeAct.org

Billing Status: Incorporated (4/4/06, but will be moved out to another server by May 1st) Moved out on May 10th, 2006

Bill to (if it were to stay at mpkb's server)
Mary Gutierrez
Communications Committee, We Are America Coalition
Communications Director, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO
2130 West James M. Wood Boulevard
Los Angeles CA 90006
Phone: 213-381-5611 #14
Fax: 213-383-0772
Email: mgutierrez@launionaflcio.org

[edit] JLUF

Billing Status: Candidate (4/13/06)

Bill to
Yongho Kim is discussing the issue with the person.
Email: yokima@gmail.com
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