Group: FSF:Tech Team Volunteers

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This page is linked from the FSF volunteer page.

The FSF tech team could really use some help from some skilled hackers!

The tech team team consist of 2 FSF staff and several volunteers. GNU has a lot more volunteers than FSF. The FSF tech team has a goal of being more volunteer-centric:

  • Increase volunteer engagement, empowerment, and leadership.
  • Making it easier for new volunteers to contribute and join.
  • Change the way we work or are structured.

What makes a good volunteer

  • You run GNU/Linux on your personal computer.
  • You are reasonably familiar with using the command line.
  • You know some basics of GNU/Linux server administration.
  • You can create a virtual machine on a computer you own with virt-manager or virsh and expose a port to the internet.
  • You are reasonably familiar with using git.
  • You can write technical documentation.
  • You are comfortable communicating on mumble, IRC, and email (we also have room in our Boston office).
  • You have at least a few hours to spend.

How to volunteer

  • Possibly just dive into different work listed below.
  • Join IRC: https://libera.chat, channel #fsfsys and say hi and that you are interested in helping out.
  • Catch up on IRC history. Get 1-2 days of chat history by saying "fsysbot catch me up" in #fsfsys. NOTE: This not a public log. We assume you know that anyone can join and request the last 24-48 hours of logs which are shared only to that person and that sharing does not imply permission to reshare the log. More info on logging is on Libera.Chat.
  • Join our mailing list https://lists.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/tech-volunteer-meeting
  • Apply to a tech team internship by following the FSF internship documentation.

It it also helpful to email sysadmin@fsf.org and tell us:

  • Things you are interested in working on (see project ideas below).
  • Overview of skills you have or a resume.
  • How much time you estimate you have.

The tech team or other volunteers will reply.

Examples of ways to contribute

There are many more possibilities, this is just some of the more obvious things.

Core FSF work that needs lots of collaboration with the tech team

  • Upgrading the operating system and software on one of our virtual machines. Document and fix various issues that come up.
  • Help creating the new FSF forge.

Work that can be done more independently

  • Write public documentation on FSF & GNU run services, software, machines, network, etc.
  • Help make an FSF-run web site available as a Tor hidden service.
    • Helping to convert an existing site to use relative links instead of absolute links is also helpful towards this goal.
  • Improve Email Self-Defense's edward GPG bot.
    • Upgrade to support newer ciphers.
    • Improve general usability and use cases (e.g. autocrypt).
  • Improve our web extensions JShelter and LibreJS.
  • Improve H-Node.
  • Improve the FSF History page.
    • The page is just HTML and CSS, but we would love help creating a custom static site generator to create the page from markdown.
    • Add translation support.
  • Improve our debbugs instance.
    • Upgrading to the latest Trisquel release.
    • Updating to the latest upstream version along with our changes if possible.
  • Send us a patch for the LibrePlanet conference website repository.
    • Removing validation errors and warnings.
    • Improving accessibility.
    • Adding translation support.
    • Adding optional dark or light mode support.
  • If you have significant security experience, there might be some specific work to help secure FSF run systems. In that case, please send a detailed resume to sysadmin@fsf.org and we can probably find you a project to work on.

Ideas and tasks for making the tech team more volunteer-centric

  • Migrate most FSF tech internal documentation & code to be public. Make much of the remainder open to trusted volunteers.
  • Create a FSF tech team public bug/issue tracker. We plan to use Savannah bug tracker first. Eventually, we could also use debbugs or another system we deploy.
  • Redirect most emails to sysadmin@fsf/gnu.org from staff request tracker to become public or open to trusted volunteers.
  • Make our monitoring systems be more public.
  • Do outreach: Talk about volunteer opportunities & our work in various places. Social media, blogs, podcast, etc.
  • Have more visible fun.
  • Respond faster to volunteers.
  • Idea: Rename the team.
  • Idea: Event for volunteers to hack on something together.

About the FSF tech team

We blog about our work at https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/

The GNU Project volunteer-lead work is outlined here: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-structure.en.html. There is no clear separation between FSF & GNU activities except that the FSF tech team has more FSF staff involvement. No one person can keep track of all the work being done. Sometimes responsibilities are traded back and forth between FSF and GNU depending on capacity of each.

Overview of Tech Team work:

  • Support the Free Software movement, the FSF, FSF staff, GNU and GNU developers in a wide variety of ways including technical support and advice.
  • Install and maintain fully free GNU/Linux systems on servers, desktops, laptops, and embedded devices.
  • (staff only) Share in the on-call rotation to deal with core system emergencies.
  • Coordinate and mentor interns and volunteer systems administrators.
  • Support GNU developers and FSF representatives in their use of FSF-run systems.
  • Blog and speak for the FSF.
  • Coordinate and do technical work needed for the LibrePlanet conference.
  • Report bugs, fix bugs and submit patches upstream for the software we use.
  • Occasionally help design, write, and release software when there is a specific need.

List of notable services we maintain or help maintain (including non-major systems we counted 63 services, platforms, and Web sites in 2022 https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/join-the-fsf-and-support-the-tech-team):

Programs we assist in developing

  • JShelter
  • LibreJS

Non-public services/software for GNU and/or FSF:

  • GNU Shell server: fencepost https://www.gnu.org/software/README.accounts.html
  • Asterisk
  • Email servers
  • ikiwiki
  • ftp
  • Bitcoin & Litecoin servers
  • Nextcloud
  • Backups
  • Prometheus & Nagios (migrating to prometheus only)
  • NFS
  • Request Tracker
  • OpenVPN
  • Ceph
  • Accounting software

Notable tools used internally:

  • Ansible
  • Bash
  • Trisquel
  • LibreCMC
  • Libvirt

Active tech team team members:

We (the tech team) are able to give roughly daily assistance to volunteers, but we have to be careful that the time helping a volunteer leads to more work being done than doing the work ourselves. In the past few years, two big projects we have announced plans for, the FSF forge and the FSF website remake have slipped as other work has taken priority. In 2022, we started to work on more general volunteer on-boarding and outreach. We want your help!

We publish some technical documentation on the Savannah wiki.

We store various things in the repositories at vcs.fsf.org. We have documentation on how to submit email patches which would work to submit changes.

FAQ

Nothing here yet. You can edit this page!

Ideas for things to add to this page:

  • Tips for handling when it feels like you have taken on too much or cannot keep up.
  • Tips for communicating with the tech team and the rest of the FSF.
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