[hackerspaces] request for help: hackerspaces.org tech

[Paul Bohm]

Hey Hackers!

Hackerspaces.org has a problem and I really hope one of you can help turn
Hackerspaces.org into a properly working, useful resource again.

The Hackerspaces Wiki is stuck on an old semantic mediawiki version - and
it's broken on many levels. E.g. it's really hard - almost impossible - to
list all the spaces. Pagination is broken, the map doesn't work anymore,
etc. etc. It's basically just on life support.

Also it is running on a single physical server. upgrades are not likely to
work without problems when migrating from such an old version to the
current version, but leaving it in this broken state is like coma. Just
trying to migrate the database of a server that hasn't been fully updated
in years is scary, and might cause data model migration breakage and
horrible downtime.

Having helped build a service that now serves hundreds of millions of users
reliably (Dropbox), my standards are higher. So to make things easier to
maintain again, I'd really like to have fabric or puppet scripts to deploy
a new setup for hackerspaces.org from scratch - e.g. to ec2 -, so that we
can test migration (the classical dev, staging, production setup).

Sector67, which doesn't properly show up in the index and feels like they
are missing out on potential new members because of that, has now emailed
me twice in the course of months. They have even offered a cash bounty to
have this fixed. I'd really like to do this myself (for free), but I just
can't seem to find the time.

Is there anyone out there who has the necessary Ops experience to deploy an
ec2 instance per fabric script, and other stuff like copying over the
database to a staging machine where we can test if it migrates properly.
etc?

I'd add my own cash to Sector67's bounty, and I'd be glad to cover the
hosting costs, but more than that you'd get mad geek cred for having built
the deploy scripts for Hackerspaces.org (!). We've all helped build this
community to over 700 active hackerspaces in just a few years. Now let's
find a way to make this wiki a useful and usable resource again!

If you're interested send me direct mail and I'll coordinate!

Thanks y'all! Hack on!

-enki
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