Talk:CNM Tech Board 2023-12-14

Help desk

We need to have a help desk, Kevin is right, it is available at Odoo at any rate. Long ago, we heavily used Redmine for that purpose. Later, we substituted Redmine with GitLab, but Gary doesn't know whether GitLab has its feature. Gary sees that one help desk, probably, delivered by Odoo, should serve volunteers and another, delivered by GitLab/Redmine/something-else, should serve technical needs of our staffers.

Projects, tech vs public docs

Redmine? Taiga? Anything else?

Elementor to retire

We need a plan

Finance

Kevin proposes forming a Finance Board or Financial Oversight Committee that would table, say, any new purchase or payment for discussion and expected returns from this investment, budgeting, identifying cost-saving opportunities (as you had mentioned in cutting the costs), and any other matter that involves purchase and payment.

Revenue plan

• It can be done fast if you have a plan. The simpler the plan, the faster the sales. From Gary's experience, short training sessions were sold the fastest. To offer them, we need to have (a) the stuff for sale -- built, stolen, or partner training, (b) marketing to bring customers aboard, so called ToFu, (c) website and events to educate customers, so called MoFu, and (d) payment option and sales folk to charge and serve .
• Until Kevin doesn't offer his shorter plan, Gary proposes to act on a longer one -- to build the core of the stuff first. For that,
  1. Three of us agree on the Educaship pitch as the best depiction of what we want to create,
  2. We try to bring a school tech lady on the board to get her feedback,
  3. We (with the tech lady or without) agree on the scope of its MVP to be created,
  4. Kevin (and, possibly, the tech lady) test what we have and assess the scope of the development,
  5. We evaluate the options and choose the path. We will either try to hire testers/developers or launch what we have in hopes that student contributions will boost our productivity,
  6. Based on the decision, we will plan and execute MVP,
  7. When we have MVP, we consider its monetization.
• When we have the core, we can add paid features or can package it with travels or whatever. Gary envisions that sales of African American families' trips to have cultural experiences of living in Africa are absolutely real. Religious affiliations can be attractive sales points.
• Now, I see that Kevin started building the course and Gary sees no big value or urgency in that. We have old courses in English, we have tested courses in Russian, we have new courses in Ukrainian. None of them brought partners or money so far. We can rebuild it on the fly when we have a partner. So, Gary would like Kevin to concentrate on partner search, specifically, on Educaship pitch -- check everything, simplify, delete, or whatever. We will use the text as website content. Without a good website, it is difficult to sell anything.

Recording

It looks like we are moving forward. The second recording that Kevin sent is almost perfect. I don't really understand the sleeping VM problem primarily because I have never experienced it. I am sure that it is resolvable.

Email fields

I failed to find the coder who initially rewrote my raw code, but Natalia is leading our effort to reconnect with its last developer. If that effort fails, we will look for new freelancers.

HumHub Meetings. Two days ago, my bank blocked the payment (thanks for VPN I guess) and I haven't reached out to its card loss department yet. The good news is that the Meetings module is still coming.

Wiki

I expected that Kevin would have led exploration of HumHub's wikis and other features while I am buying their Meetings module. In the meanwhile, I continued working on the Educaship pitch and collection of 150+ projects that our school students can take over.

WordPress

I am still committed to setting up some sites. With regards to the students, we may also initially use HumHub since it has minimally-required features.

Tech docs

Natalia didn't report any progress on wiki-based descriptions of what we have. For instance, which instances are sitting in our cluster? Standalone Proxmox? Contabo? After the students finish with events and websites, they will need to see something related to technology.

Cutting the costs

I will publish the list of the current expenses on the tech since we should cut some costs. For instance, we have three DigitalOcean droplets, but it looks like we use just two, etc.

Increasing the revenue

I consider earning options for myself. If I take normal employment, I will not be able to go to Kenya for a while.