@RebekahBerg, in order for us to submit a formal proposal, we will need to have an initial group started to draft the proposal in the first place, hence why we were discussing different ways of doing just that. I like EyeR's recommendation of using freenode or something similar. Our goal isn't merely to be a minor IT team to handle trivial and off topic requests, but to start a dedicated team to help progress not just this Website, but Asgardia as a whole. For starters, and this is merely a very rough draft of a possible timeline: starting a group on freenode that is headed up by one of our Mods/Admins that either has a serious interest or skill in this area (as EyeR suggested), Asgardian users who show interest in the group are invited to take part in the input of ideas and possible solutions (as Vadorequest has pointed out, many have already offered to help, with almost no response from higher up), of those that submit input the ones showing actual skill in the IT field are asked to join the initial team, the initial team then begins deliberation of ways to implement said input and solutions in way that best serves the greatest number of users (minor and singular requests that only benefit the few are best left for later), at which point that group can then draw up a formal proposal to be delivered to Asgardian Official along with the supporting documents and proofs of concept.

We are not asking for control over the Website, nor any other aspect of Asgardia. We are asking for permission to start an IT team whose job it would be to turn all of this input that we are already receiving from users into a working solution that can be implemented at Asgardian Officials' discretion. ACIT (Asgardian Civilian Information Technology) would design and develop a usable product, and if approved, Official has but to "plug it in". ACIT would work with the current IT team, not replace it. By collaborating with the current IT team, we can not only draw some of the weight from them, but be able to get a better grasp as to how Official envisions the use of this Website to begin with. To further simplify this to those who may be reading this post, ACIT would operate in a similar manner in regards to the current IT as to how our Civic Asgardia operates with Official. We would be here to help speed up the process and promote civilian involvement in Asgardia. As condescending as some of EyeR's posts may seem in regards to the current state of the Website, in many of the cases he (forgive me if my assumption that you are a male is wrong) has a point. The current state of the Website, and especially the Forums in particular, leaves much to be desired. Whether this has to do with lack of time, lack of interest, lack of qualified individuals, or any combination therein is irrelevant. There are many in this new nation that have a genuine interest in it prospering, myself included.

Again I ask, how is a team to submit a proposal asking to build a team? The proposal submission process alone requires that a team already be established, or at the very least under way. I ask that we be allowed to begin deliberation and organization of ACIT in order to reach a point that we can begin drafting a proposal.

Sincerely,

Paul Miller

P.S. If anyone from our Admin/Mod team, or anyone from the current community wishes to contact me, please feel free to at asg.pwm@gmail.com

And thank you @Frogman for your interest, if we get the approval to start grouping, I will post a link to the group/team/input page here.

I really want to participate and I have no problem describing my experience or demonstrating my knowledge. But I don´t gree that it´s necessary to use the citizen ID so that it might be possible to "mark" that each one knows how to do.

If you truly believe that you can accelerate the process we create an initiative. But as I see it this should be a requirement of Asgardia to exist digitally, not something that is created because some annoying citizens continue to ask.

@Sultanovich, All initiatives that are going to handle Asgardian related materials have to first be approved by Asgardia Official, hence the request for permission to start the group. As easy as it would be to just gather people who are interested in starting the initiative, without the backing of Official, we are either dead in the water at best, or shut down forcibly at worst. Could you please explain what you mean by "...necessary to use the citizen ID..."? The closest I can guess is where I had suggested confirming Asgardians citizenship in order to allow input to the project, which would be done simply to keep the project "In House".

Keeping the project "in house" is "best" done by keeping the project in house. As tools and utillities to facilitate such initative should be under development already according to the "changes in the pipeline" post, there should be no reason for any system outside of ours to know of the ID and further, no correlation between that ID and a user should exist outside of the citizen DB, which hopefully won't be scrapable forever.

This isn't a requirement of being annoying, that's just a bonus and you're lucky I'm not charging double, it's definitely and purely about digital existence and long term resilience/maintainence. It is the only logical way this can scale effectively to meet demands, not only now but in the future.

So we have one post on the forums by Nikari Steve Miller that says our current IT team is based out of AIRC and that this website and forum aren't their only projects, (January 24th)

https://asgardia.space/en/forum/forum/civic-asgardia-public-sector-145/topic/civicasgardia-activity-report-2023/

then we have Jason Rainbow who says that we already have a dedicated IT team for the site and forum (January 10th)

https://asgardia.space/en/forum/forum/technology-104/topic/i-can-help-with-the-web-developments-692/

Which is it? Did we go from having a dedicated team to not in two weeks?

These are 2 of our Global Admins by the way.

Good digging. I'm waiting for an answer from an admin about this.

• S

It does. Thank you for the swift answer!

S

Jason Rainbow,

I hope my previous post hasn't come off as condescending. It was a bit of concern for me, though, to see two seemingly contradictory posts by two higher level Administrators a mere 2 weeks apart. I do understand that Asgardia as a whole and even more so our Civic Asgardia section, are brand new concepts. By dedicated I had meant in the business sense, a definition given by the Business Dictionary being "Assigned to or created for a particular purpose, such as a telephone line dedicated to data communication, or a power source dedicated to emergency lighting," not at all to assume that the current IT team isn't invested in the project. With that being said, as informational as your post was in answering a few other questions, it still left the main question unanswered. Do we have a dedicated IT team working on this project? Is a portion of AIRC's IT team currently focusing solely on this website and forum? Or are we currently a task that is grouped with several, if not hundreds of others, that they are trying to prioritize with concerns to time and resource constraints?

Even if we were the latter, it wouldn't be a problem to me, though it would highlight what I have posted about starting a citizen based IT team to help pull some of the weight.

As I have said in this topic, the goal of the citizen based IT team wouldn't be to take control over the website or forum, but to submit working solutions to AIRC's IT team and Asgardia Official to read over and implement at their discretion to help speed up the process and take at least a little of the burden off of an already busy team. It would operate similarly to how Civic Asgardia does now, only on the IT side, with AIRC IT still being in control over the website and forum, but the ACIT (Asgardian Civilian Information Technology) team working as a sub team to come up with the solutions to problems we are currently facing and to be the go between for the civilians and the AIRC IT team.

An example to help depict my point: User accessible private messaging platform incorporated into the current site. ACIT would begin deliberations on viable solutions, select the most viable to begin coding, test code for proper UI interaction and possible bugs, completed project code is then sent to AIRC IT who reviews it, if everything checks out AIRC IT can implement the already designed code instead of having to code it themselves. AIRC saves time that can be spent on other projects, and Asgardians get the PM platform they have been requesting sooner than scheduled.

As Nikari Steve Miller had stated, our Civic Asgardia is already trying to help them tune the site and forum, so my suggestion is to establish a subsection of Civic Asgardia that tunes it for them. Instead of AIRC receiving a prioritized list of feature requests and bugs, they receive a list of codes (feature requests that have been coded for implementation) and fixes to said bugs. Instead of receive, review, design/develop, test, implement, they go to receive, review, implement (or reject with brief description of "why", at which point ACIT adjusts to accommodate).

Currently, the only drawback to this is the consistency at which AIRC IT would have to be in contact with ACIT (or an ACIT lead within Civic Asgardia), which Nikari already pointed out has been a bit of a hold up for Civic Asgardia (in regards to "Improving feedback").

I apologize if at this point it seems I am rambling. I suppose I really only have two questions directed at our Mods/Admins: Does a dedicated (again using the Business Definition) IT team currently exist for the website and forum (meaning for the sole purpose of improvement and development)? If not, would we have permission to begin an input and deliberation subforum directed at IT familiar Asgardians and overseen by a current or future Mod/Admin, to start a process of solving current issues, deciding what open sources to utilize, and organizing an ACIT team (or is there another way we might help speed up the process of improvements to the site and forum)?

Thank you for the timeliness of your last response,

Paul Miller

Jason Rainbow,

Thank you for your explanation and your understanding in this. Though it may only be a rough outline at this stage, we (being anyone interested in helping at this stage, I am horrible at Formal Drafting and Writing) will try to put together and submit a formal proposal for consideration by Official.

Thank you again,

Paul

If no-one else can come up with anything "better" - then consider this a rough draft you can easily pad out with any absent details and submit:

ACIT - Asgardia Civic IT

Fabricated from input scraped from: https://asgardia.space/en/forum/forum/technology-104/topic/could-starting-an-asgardian-citizen-based-it-team-be-a-possibility-2531

This proposal is to create a community wide pool of IT skills and input to accelerate and maintain current and future infrastructure. The goal is not to replace the current IT staff, but to compliment it and assist with much of the burden already faced which manifests noticibly. The intent and purpose is to facilitate the advancements of Asgardian software and hardware, whilst retaining our own archive of the same.

An example to help depict the concept: User accessible private messaging platform incorporated into the current site. ACIT would begin deliberations on viable solutions, select the most viable to begin coding if a suitible open source project doesn't already exist to leverage, test code for proper UI interaction and possible bugs, completed project code is then sent to AIRC IT who reviews it, deploys in testing rig and if everything checks out AIRC IT can implement the already designed code instead of having to code it themselves. AIRC saves the AIRC IT time that can be spent on other projects, and Asgardians get the PM platform they have been requesting sooner than scheduled.

For how this would actually work, deployment of industry standard tools - like git (maybe a GUI for it as well would be appreciated by some users) should pretty much suffice at least short term, but a suite of realtime collaborational tools(should be something already being worked on, not sure if I'd requested git with them) would assist greatly - that can hold all we have, and all we create - from there we can build everything else together. Initially, control over this project should be placed under that of existing admin/mod staff with interest in this field - they should already be comforatble in using git, so shouldn't need training. Anyone can submit, or fork allowing rapid progress, but someone trusted is in control of the merging of pull requests - allowing for sane code imports. As citizens skills and or behaviours suggest suitability, they can be delegated further. As it should be heavily tested before entering the "stable" branch then this should reduce workload to AIRC IT staff to simply pulling over the top of existing served at their convenience. If they reject the update, they only have to mention why and we will fix it.

In the absence of in-house solutions for more effective communications, then until we(citizens) or AIRC IT(whichever gets it done first) builds some I also propose to create an IRC channel on Freenode's IRC as they host for a lot of open source projects - retaining some measure of neutrality of venue, I select this as it will not consume additional Asgardian resources at this time, is openly available to all and I can ensure a bot remains parked and logging - links to which will be made available in the forum to allow everything that happens regarding "official" ACIT to retain full citizen transparency - an incredibly important concept. I'd rather this bot be on Asgardian servers than mine however. Lightweight solutions can be provided to achieve this evidencing of activity.

Good job @EyeR. Let's put it all in a google document and eventually send the whole proposal by email at adminteam@asgardia.space.

Let's make the doc first, peer-review it, and send it when we all agree? Sounds good?

Don't quite see why google need a copy, or to archive who inputs what/how/when. But yeah, sounds like a plan.

I'm also in with the forming of the doc after we get our current proposal with Vadorequest on its way. Also, great work with the initial draft EyeR.

EDIT: A doc has been made in Google Docs quickly by copy-pasting EyeR's draft. The following link only allows suggesting to prevent vandalism: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oRu-IbuqzKZ0yBNQ-bKTjLM3EnjBh2UgfLPVSI6LOZ0/edit?usp=sharing

I have given Vadorequest editing permissions assuming that he wants to contribute. pwmmal & EyeR, if you want editing permissions, just say so, and we'll figure it out. The proposal is open!

• S

Thank you to EyeR, Vadorequest, and Speakee for the work on the proposal so far.

Edit: I started a post in General Discussion to try and bring more attention to the current proposal:

https://asgardia.space/en/forum/forum/general-discussion-14/topic/volunteers-needed-for-it-proposal-2688/