Posted by Matthew Bernardin in Question for the Candidates - Matt and D

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Election Coodinator) in Question for the Candidates - Matt and D
Hi Matt,

I have a question about this one sentence you wrote, when describing your governmental audit:

However, first to be audited are some of the legacy positions, such as Librarian, Dockmaster, GM Archivist. These positions have been around since EffWebb and will almost certainly be fully deprecated in Exodus.

I cannot speak to the Dockmaster or the GM Archivist, because I don’t have a good sense of what they do. But I’m very familiar with what the Librarian does, because I am the Librarian. And, as the project lead for Exodus, I know what exactly the capabilities of our new system are going to be. Given both of those perspectives, I find this statement to be highly perplexing.

You know for a fact that I wrote a new Library capability for Exodus; you’re one of the few people who actually cared enough to use it at any point during testing. Why do you think that the position of Librarian would suddenly become redundant and “fully deprecated?” I mean, why do you think I wrote a Library app if I thought there should be no Librarian? Why would we want to get rid of a Librarian?

I mean, yes, the new system makes things vastly easier; you no longer have to know DocBook XML and be capable of running XSL Transforms on your computer to be Librarian. But, we’re still going to have a centralized collection of content, right? And it makes sense to have a person responsible for administering that, right? And there is non-technical work associated with that, like checking things for accuracy, spelling mistakes, copyright issues, etc. If we don’t have a Librarian, who will be responsible for doing that work? Or do you imagine we’ll simply stop doing that work and do some other work? If so, what?

Could you maybe outline your thinking here a bit more explicitly?

Joe

Ok, so this is one of the let’s have this conversation with TECH and the departments to determine both feasability and desirability of implimentation. But how it worked in my head and the idea i wanted to discuss in depth is A. the Librarian position per say would role into TECH’s general resposnsibilities. TECH upkeeps the infrastructure and the Library is now direct infrastructure. As for the librarians duties with regards to content I was envisonaging an arrangement where TECH would perhaps setup books and the individual departments would have direct content control themselves. IE Edept would be able to maintain their own specs and technology articles. Or perhaps an expansion to the library’s permissions to enable access control. There are a few different ways to go about this persuant to that audit.

But at no point am I discussing, pitching or even contemplating just axing stuff and letting it fester.

– Matt

I have follow ups, some of which are in Rob’s line of thinking.

Your suggestion of integrating the Librarian into TECH does not understand the function of either or. The Librarian is not actually responsible for maintenance of its own software, TECH already is. The Librarian is responsible for going through STF and collecting important posts and documents for archival. Joe listed several other parts of this process such as spell checks and other accuracy checks. None of this is even remotely within the realm of what TECH was designed to do. TECH should not be going through and archiving posts and doing spell checks, as you well know we have bigger fish to fry that already occupy our time.

On the latter suggestion of TECH setting up part of it and then outsourcing the role to a dozen other people across departments and fleets - how does this make sense? It takes 1 responsible person and shatters the job across TECH, the QDirs, and the rest of the Admin. I think this would be hugely inefficient. The Librarian is one of the more stable positions in the STF government, and given the new structure, one of the easiest ones to now train people for replacement on. If you want to pick an exemplar of beuarocracy gone wrong, that just isn’t it.

What would be a better answer is the elimination of for-one-person-by-one-person jobs. Many of the positions you list were created by the same person and designed so that they would have specific requirements met only by one person. A more thoughtful approach would be to see where these roles could be modernized, not eliminated, to make them more accessible. In your suggestion above, you are making changes that would need to be reflected in legislature among TECH, multiple QDir roles, and the EA positions themselves. This would be a massive undertaking.

Why do you view this as more efficient than looking at the EAs and their current usage and seeing what needs to be cut?

Additionally, I have a question about your time frame. You signal that the “first phase” (what does that mean?) will happen over the first four months - that is half of your term. What are you planning on accomplishing in this first phase, and why would it take so long? What do you plan on doing with the rest of the term? My first-hand experience is that people rarely plan their terms well, and setting a four-month clock on this makes me question the efficiency of the process.

-Thomas