[NCSG-EC] Follow up from Montreal discussion on our CRM

Thu Nov 21 18:11:06 EET 2019

Dear all,

As a follow up on our discussion on CIVI and Wapix during the EC meeting:

I have done a bit of asking around and research regarding web development
costs generally and it seems that Wapix prices are still in what can be
considered "market"

Now there are some costs which are not clear and some numbers that did not
match, as we discussed. I still have to clarify that with Josh. But:

. 95$/hr for web development for a US/Canada based company is rather
standard; someone who begins would charge less, with the downside of added
risk.

. while 300 to 500$/month for "support and maintenance" is more on the high
side, it remains that CIVI hosting is not just like any other type of
backend. It requires someone who knows what theyre doing (i.e. who knows
how to handle that CRM). Still, I find their 99$ price point on hosting a
bit high. I'll see what can be done with that.

. I could find some public price points for CIVI monthly packages, in the
low 100's, but they did not include any dev time nor technical support, nor
backups, not virtual server for testing, nor ddos protection, etc. etc.

. Finally, we are looking at at least a few if not several thousands of
dollars in "discovery" fees for onboarding a new company or individual. We
were to pick an individual consultant, it might be more of a few rather
than several, but think about it this way: onboarding is at least 20 hours
of work, and most likely more than that, so minimally 2000$ - more likely
towards or above 3k.

. And maybe most importantly, subject to verification as Steph required, we
have a 9000$/year allocation by ICANN. If we don't use that money on these
services, it's just not spent, we don't get to bank it or use it on travel
support... Given that we have a good relationship with Wapix already, I
feel it would be a better investment of these monies to continue with them.

That being said, our current system is I would say barely usable, and I
heard all of you express dissatisfaction with it. I also share this feeling.

Now the thing is, even if Wapix ended up being slightly above market price,
I would not be in favour of spending my time working on switching right
away, for the following reasons:

I understand that a lot of things Wapix does are things we can do "on our
own," but I don't think that seeing things this way is sustainable. We
cannot rely on the fact that we would always have someone ready *and* able
to take care of these things (and as a matter of fact, we have no one
now).

In that sense, the only longer-term sustainable solution is to have someone
do it for us. Let's say we pick an individual consultant who begins and
will do it for cheap. Great, we just saved a few 1000's over a year. Then,
one year later, said person, because theyre skilled, finds a higher paying
job in a company. Now we've lost our consultant, must look again, pay
discovery fees again, etc. Do note that we faced a similar situation with
Wapix, were our main POC left the company and left us in a limbo for
several weeks. However we were spared new discovery fees once we got
someone assign to us.

In addition, if we only pay the monthly fee and don't buy any development
time now, we are paying for a system we are not satisfied with, while we
have the opportunity to spend to try and make it better.

So subject to discussion with Josh for the points that need clarification,
I would suggest that we go with the cheaper option which includes less
monthly tickets and less development time included, but that we also buy
more time. How much, I don't know; at least one 10 hour block.

Given that Maryam is the prime user of the system right now, I would take
it upon myself to work with her to make sure that every dev hour is spent
on something that makes her life more easy (and incidentally, ours). We
used the previous dev time to fix the really outstanding issues, get
ourselves a minimally workable front end, and to cover up for emergency
issues that arose with the elections. Now I think we can try to capitalize
on that and make some further progress.

And as an additional note, Wapix SLA is rather open; we need one month's
notice to terminate. So if any of you is willing to put the time and effort
required to come up with a workable and financially advantageous
switch-over plan, eventually asking for an ABR when the time comes and if
we need it, or cutting some deal with NPOC and NCUC for more money as we've
done in the past, it will always be time to use up our dev time and do the
switch. You are free and welcome to start working on that right away, I
have absolutely no problem with that, on the contrary. But for now, I would
rather use the time I can dedicate to that task and the money we have
available, in order to improve the systems we have rather than coming up
with another plan.

And to end, some numbers: 400/month*12 is 4800. That leaves us up to 30
hours of dev time we could buy before topping our allocation. Do note that
I'm not in favor of topping it, I'm just giving these out so we know what
ballpark we're playing in.

The final decision belongs to the EC collectively so I'm looking to hear
from you all on that. I will schedule a call with Josh early next week to
discuss our questions (those we discussed in Montreal) and anything else,
and will share the details on list so you can all join.

CCed techteam list for information purposes.

Have a nice day,
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