apc.au blog

As Andrew indicated, I’ve been doing a few things on the technical front over the past couple of months. At last we’re at a point where we can focus on the big picture issues of what apc.au is trying to achieve, rather than being tied down to the draining world of running a hosting operation.

I have a day job (got to pay those bills ) so sadly, I don’t have lots of time to allocate to apc.au, thus whatever time I can put in, I want it to count. The big picture issues I want to address with apc.au include ICANN/IGF, ICT Rights, freedom of knowledge and so on. I also want to ensure that apc.au has the right foundation to support our other big issues that we take on, including Creative Commons, Social Justice, being an open company and many others (check out our Objectives and Strategic Plan for more details).

Sadly, all my time available for apc.au was being consumed by just trying to run our hosting operation. We didn’t have that many hosted clients, our single server did not have all the latest infrastructure required to run great blog & wiki systems and I was forever feeling trapped in a dead-end. I wasn’t able to step up to the big picture and apc.au was being held back as well.

So, towards the end of last year we decided to outsource our hosting to another provider. The goal was to let someone else take care of the infrastructure and we’d use the tools to support our great dreams. While we wanted to keep our hosting within Australia (like with our friends at RUCC where we had our server hosted), we just could not go past the amazing economies of hosting with DreamHost in the USA. For a group with a small income who wanted every dollar to count towards our big ideals, we had to do it. Trust me when I say that this decision was not made lightly nor without some sadness.

We did some trial work around September and moved most of our in-house sites and a couple of clients to the new server. Then, once everything had been running smoothly, we moved all our operations in late December & early January. Athough there are still a few items remaining to be completed, we’ve done the bulk of it and you can see the history at our decomissioning page.

The proof of any endeavour is in the results and I must say that so far, so good. All the hosting related operations are going well and taking almost no time on my part (except for finalising a few things ). It’s been comparatively easy to set up our Wiki and this blog site. Andrew and I are finding we have lots more time to focus on our big issues and the energy levels are starting to build once again.

There’s always lots to do, but at least now I’m spending way more time on the big picture than having to chip away at rocks that had been holding me back. Watch this space for more

Here at apc.au we want to make what we do easier, functional and useful. In the case of this blog we’ve set up a page on our wiki to help make a better blog out of our efforts.

So, if you’re reading this and you have a few ideas and a bit of time on your hands (something in increasingly short supply), click through to our wiki and see what you can do to help us make this a better blog!

Getting the apc.au wiki installed and running was a kind of revolution! Now with the blog going (thanks Grant), despite the late night DNS quirks (we really must get more sleep), I’m wrapped to be sitting in my temporary East Brunswick bedroom and writing up the first post!

Both the wiki and this blog will open out the work that we do to our clients, colleagues, mates, girlfriends, kids, pets… anyone who may want to know what where doing, where we are and more importantly, why(?)… not that we will demand more of your precious time, we in fact hope to encourage you to appreciate what time we have to do the amazing things we can to make this world a far far better place for all.