Thank you! (was: Re: Reducing the load on Sysadmin)

[Martin Steigerwald]

Dear Ben, dear admins for KDE infrastructure,

Ben Cooksley - 09.11.19, 00:49:49 CET:
> One of the things that was prepared as a result of the Sysadmin BoF at
> Akademy was a list of systems and services which we look after and
> provide to the community.
> 
> Whilst individually all of the services seem fairly reasonable and
> maintainable, the cumulative number of them has created a situation
> where they limit our ability to reasonably maintain our services as a
> collective whole.

I followed the discussion followed by this and your other mails about 
that topic. And I am completely missing a very important thing in there:

*Thank you*!

*Thank you big time* to you and the other admins for all the work you do 
to keep KDE infrastructure running smoothly.

Your work often is a lot less visible than the next shiny feature inside 
of Plasma or an application. It often happens in the background and may 
not be always thanked for at all, just cause no one notices to what 
extent it is your work that keeps all the services we take for granted 
running so smoothly as I do. I know how it can feel as I did quite some 
of similar work myself for some time.

On top of that you and other admins responded to some requests of mine 
often quite quickly and even when it was just about re-open and fill a 
mailing list archive for kdepim / kdepim-users on own KDE's own 
infrastructure or some spam here and there. You did that on top of all 
the other work you have.

So again, so that it really sinks in:

*Thank you*


In addition to that I ask everyone who responds to the more detailed 
mails to consider whether your answer will mostly mean even more work 
for the admins or whether it would actually help to reduce some of the 
workload. Please think a moment or two how you can make is easier for 
the admins to ease reduce their workload instead of adding even more 
work on top of it.

I considered to offer some of my time to KDE admin work some times ago, 
but so far did not do that step out of the fear that I would easily be 
swamped by work then while leading an already very busy life and 
struggling to achieve some of my most important goals. And knowing how 
challenging it can be for me to say "no"… I rather did not offer help, 
even tough I would consider myself qualified enough for this kind of 
work, beyond a little collecting of some mails into an archive so far or 
so.

I see your mail as a call for help, a call to have your workload eased a 
bit, Ben. I thought you would only be writing this in case you struggle 
with the current workload. And I can easily imagine that you do.

All I ask everyone for is some respect for that, some respect for the 
often unseen work you admins do.

So again:

*Thank you!*

I appreciate your work. Big time.

Best,
-- 
Martin