[GTALUG-Announce] On the recent GTALUG Outage

[Scott Sullivan]

Folks,

As many of you have noticed, GTALUG's mailings and website were down 
since Dec 17th. This was the result of the operations/executive failing 
to act in a timely manner after Chris's passing. A payment was missed, 
and our server was shutdown by the hosting provider.

Over the holidays an attempt was made to recover the account, but we 
came under the mistaken impression that the server had been deleted.
And so we focused our efforts on recovering DNS and establishing a new 
server from our regular backups.

We have great thanks to express to Hugh Redelmeier. A steadfast 
volunteer and contributor of our community. Uncoordinated with the 
board, he reached out our provider and offered to pay the bill. 
Successful by-passing our misunderstandings, hotfixing the situation, 
and bringing us back on-line. He will be compensated for an out of 
pocket costs.

Speaking personally, these are hard times. I as I've returned to help 
bridge the gap from Chris's passing, I've found to many functions and 
knowledge and pool in to few people and was not being effectively taught 
to new contributors.

We failed to get enough visibility into our areas of risk.
We failed to effectively communicate with our community via our other 
social media channels about our situation.

I'm personally working with the current board to full on-board our 
lastest board members. Establish handbooks for the various functions and 
roles.


In the past, the board was just the voting head of a rotating group of 
some 10-15 individuals that contributed and attended the executive 
meetings. If you want help spread the load, or be involved in how the 
group functions. Please see and consider joining the operations mailing 
list.

https://gtalug.org/mailing-list/#operations

Meeting Minutes of the Executive meetings can be found here:
https://board.gtalug.org/

Executive / Board Meetings have always, and continue to be open to 
attendance from our community.

-- 
Scott Sullivan
Wearing the Hats of, A Director & Secretary