[infrastructure] Volunteer System Administrators Needed for Democrats Abroad

[Luis Arias]

Hi,

Although this is off topic and I understand that the volunteers on
this list are busy working on Open Source for America's agenda, I
thought maybe my message could be of interest to some of you or you
might think of someone who could help Democrats Abroad find some
system administration volunteers particularly ones in the americas
timezone.  Our services run on Drupal and CiviCRM.  You can learn more
about Democrats Abroad at http://www.democratsabroad.org.

As part of the small IT group in DA, I must say that we are certainly
interested in OSFA and I think particularly in regards to electronic
voting.  I will be joining the mailing list for that group shortly.

Thanks,
Luis

Here is our announcement:

Democrats Abroad is the official Democratic Party organization for the
millions of Americans living outside the United States. We help
overseas Americans participate in the U.S. political process and
encourage them to vote for Democratic candidates back home. Democrats
Abroad has committees throughout Europe, the Americas, the Middle
East, Africa and Asia. A small support office is maintained in
Washington, D.C. Democrats Abroad is recognized as a "state" Party by
the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and is represented on the DNC
by eight voting members, as well as by delegates to the Democratic
National Convention.
As a decentralized, worldwide organization, our IT infrastructure is a
key part of our ability to communicate with our members, enable each
of our country committees to organize their own local activities, and
most importantly to support our global online tools for voter
registration.

We are recruiting a team of 3 or 4 volunteer System Administrators to
share various responsibilities on a rotating (or time zone-shifted)
basis. This can include volunteers who live in the US and are
therefore not members of DA but who share our desire to help Americans
around the world remain involved in US politics.  There are millions
of absentee votes at stake, and those votes affect races at every
level -- local, state, and federal.

Although our system infrastructure is relatively stable, there are
occasionally planned periods when extra support is required (such as
when performing a software upgrade or installing new hardware). Also,
and as with any IT system, there are unanticipated events which
require a more immediate response (diagnosing network routing
problems, resolving hardware failures, applying security patches,
etc.). On an ongoing basis, system logs need regular review, and
proactive monitoring can be done to identify potential issues before
they cause operational problems.

If you have experience configuring and maintaining production servers,
mail servers, testing environments; if you understand the issues
relevant to database capacity and performance tuning; if you are
confident in your ability to coordinate with hosting providers, mail
service providers, and other vendors, smoothly implement DNS changes
and manage multiple domains; if you can do any or all of the above,
Democrats Abroad wants to hear from you now!

Strong Linux admin skills are required, and familiarity with security
issues is a big plus.  You should have experience supporting Apache
web servers, and be comfortable with DNS and related domain management
concerns, as well as have a good understanding of mail server issues
(reverse authentication, spam list avoidance, etc.)

Although we do have system backup procedures in place, there is room
for improvement. Volunteers’ time permitting, we might further
proceduralize the backup and archiving jobs, as well as create a more
formal Business Continuity Plan. Our volunteer sysadmins could help
with this as well.

The volunteer System Administrators will, together with our other IT
Team volunteers and our paid development resources, coordinate the
technical aspects of rolling out many additional features of our
Democrats Abroad web application and membership management system
which have not yet been utilized.

Interested? Please send an e-mail with your most recent resume and
contact details to:
IT-Project at democratsabroad.org  US citizens only, please. We look
forward to hearing from you!

-- 
Luis Arias
+33 6 14 20 87 93
skype : kaaloo