Hi all, sorry for the quiet from our corner concerning the civic cloud
collaborative... That's what happens when you work so much you don't
even look at your personal e-mail for a week at a time!!

The short story is that we are building a 1 Rack cloud using a ceph
cluster for storage and OpenStack. The hardware is a mix of servers
donated to the effort by Big Heavy World, CCTV Center for Media and
Democracy, LaboratoryB, and Vermont Media Exchange. Other groups
involved are Code for BTV, Found Line, Regional Education Technology
Network (RETN), and Vermont Community Access Media (VCAM).

The Civic Cloud Rack will be located inside the Burlington Telecom
(BT) Network, and will offer 1Gbit/s connectivity to the BT network
and 100Mbit/s connectivity to the Internet, all for non profit use and
prototyping innovative web applications or other services on a high
bandwidth network.

We will also be applying for a connection to the Internet2 network for
our mini cloud via BT's existing Internet2 connection.

Code for BTV and CCTV collaborated on and won a Prototype grant from
the Knight Foundation on January 22nd to cover networking equipment
for the rack and some of the labor time involved in putting it all
together and documenting and testing it in a iterative human centered
design model.The grant runs through Jun.30 this year and will at the
end also involve rounds of applications for the public / organizations
to use the cloud resources for application prototyping. The end result
of this first phase is an IaaS OpenStack cloud, to which organizations
/ individuals can apply for the usage of resources.

On the technical end of things, we are in the lab phase of the cloud build.

We are happy to have folks stop by and check it out ( ~ 9AM-5PM 294
N.Winooski Ave. Burlington ) and/or share your ideas for this
resource.

Due to the nature of the donated hardware, we don't have much
flexibility for this first deployment, but our hope is to be able to
respond to the community needs as we discover them in future
buildouts, as the rack will not be full when it is installed at BT.

We will also plan to have a few evening events in April to dive deeper
into ceph and OpenStack for interested individuals.

The Collaborative is still formulating the governance structure and
operational cost sharing for the project, but the goal is to provide
non-profit access to storage, compute resources, and network
bandwidth, and learn a lot about how it is used and managed as a
public access resource.
http://codeforbtv.org/collaborations/civic-cloud/

Feel free to contact Jessica or myself about technical volunteer
opportunities via our cctv.org addresses.

-Andy

On Feb 15, 2014, at 1:37 PM, "Rion D'Luz" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Thanks guys!
>
> Off to the lab w/me! Civic Cloud sounds pretty interesting, appreciate
> the link. Anybody else care to share what's driving them or what they're
> making (besides PaulFlint - our doyen de vague who keeps the spark
> alive)
>
> Rion
>
>
> On Sat, 2014-02-15 at 10:08 -0500, Joe Golden wrote:
>> I think he means http://www.laboratoryb.org/ ;-)
>>
>> Lots of soldering hackers there. I recommend it to all. Also good meetings there on crytocurrencies.
>>
>> Agreed with Rion that there should be more excitement on this list.
>>
>> In a small open source victory, please keep your eyes peeled for the City of Burlington to relaunch their site on Drupal. I did a migration from Ektron to Drupal for them and trained their guys in the marvel and wonder of Drupal. Expected launch within a month (but you know how that goes).
>>
>> Also see excitement surrounding the Civic Cloud at http://vtdigger.org/2014/01/22/burlingtons-civic-cloud-effort-lands-35000-grant/. Not sure if this was posted to the list. Lots of open source goodness here.
>>
>> Have fun in the snow Penguins ;-)
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 08:34:56AM -0500, Robert Ryan wrote:
>>> Yeah I'd suggest sending an e-mail to [log in to unmask]
>>> On Feb 15, 2014 8:31 AM, "Anthony Carrico" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hey Rion, I'd recommend dropping by one of the hackerspaces downtown,
>>>> they'd probably have the best equipment on hand.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Anthony Carrico
>
>