[pydotorg-www] Final draft of redesign RFP

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 10:37:06PM -0700, Aahz wrote:
> I'll try taking a more detailed look later, but unless I'm missing
> something, a key issue is still not addressed: working with the existing
> site maintainers.

I read your feedback from November while revising the draft, and did
put in some changes with your comments in mind.

First, the draft now envisions the system being initially written by
the bidder and then maintenance duties would increasingly be taken
over by the site volunteers.  From 'Architecture and Maintenance':

     Post-launch, we envision that PSF volunteers will perform most
     future improvements and maintenance tasks; the winner(s) of the
     bid may provide assistance, but does not carry the primary burden
     of supporting the system.

Bidders may low-ball their costs as an implicit donation to Python,
but I was worried that they'd be reluctant to commit to an unknown
timespan (3 years?  10?) of doing maintenance at a low-ball price.  So
the RFP now says that they'll likely hand it off to the volunteers.

Second, the paragraph before the one quoted above says:

	The system must also be reasonably well-documented, with at
	minimum instructions for installing the system and an overview
	describing the general architecture.  Developers or content
	authors may wish to run the application locally for their own
	purposes, so the system must be installable for them.

Here I was thinking of the Python release managers, who need to edit
the site only every six months or so, and therefore they forget how it
works between releases.  So this text tries to make it clear that
making our own installations is an expected use case.

Third, the section 'Selection process' says 'Bidders should feel free
to ask questions of the current maintainers or discuss their proposal
before final submission by posting to pydotorg-www.'  I didn't want to
*require* asking questions or posting drafts to pydotorg-www, because
that seemed heavy-handed, and I don't see how to mandate that they
actually read or act upon the feedback.  (Especially if the feedback
ends up being contradictory!)

So I did try to say that the maintainers are important.  Do you want
to provide some text clarifying how bidders should work with the
existing maintainers?

--amk