perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Jason Zurawski <>]

All;

Several people have written to ask about the format of such a letter.  I have 
developed a very short template (substitute your own letterhead):

  http://psps.perfsonar.net/20130506-Template.docx

Naturally use your own word for context, but this should be helpful to those 
that are having trouble getting started.  

Thank you again for your assistance on this matter;

-jason

On May 6, 2013, at 11:07 AM, Jason Zurawski 
<>
 wrote:

> All;
> 
> One of the great cruelties of open source software is that while it is free 
> to use, it is not free to develop and maintain.  From time to time it 
> becomes necessary to tap the 'tip jar' that sustains the perfSONAR-PS 
> project.  
> 
> In years past we have asked for help in developing, testing, and even 
> evangelizing the software to make things stronger and more reliable.  We 
> have a different request this go-round: we simply need statements from the 
> community (U.S. Based, as well as International) that perfSONAR is a useful 
> (perhaps even vital) part of your campus/lab/regional/backbone 
> infrastructure, and life would be more difficult if this software were to 
> fade away.  Perhaps additional comments if you have used the tool to fix a 
> hard problem, enable a complex activity, or if it is critical to day to day 
> operations.
> 
> This request does come with a caveat - while the words/praise of a 
> network/software engineer or researcher are important, the words/praise 
> from a Director/Executive/Chief matter a lot more to the parties that 
> control the purse strings.  Since the majority of subscribers to this list 
> may fall into the former category, we would ask that you please talk with 
> your supervisors (perhaps even draft them some text they could lend their 
> name to) about making a statement regarding the usefulness of perfSONAR.  
> Naturally, we need as many statements as we can, so if you can't get the 
> ear of your management, your own personal account would be most helpful to 
> this request.
> 
> This simple act will go a long way to ensuring that the project is able to 
> keep up with the demand of software updates, bug fixes, and feature 
> enhancements in a down economy; to do this it is vital that we can convince 
> our own management chain that there are passionate and active users out 
> there.  By our count we know of nearly ~600 deployed instances of the 
> software spanning numerous domains and countries.  These letters of support 
> can be addressed and sent to both Steve Wolff 
> ()
>  and Wendy Huntoon 
> (),
>  who will aggregate them into a cohesive report.  If possible these notes 
> should come in the next 1-2 weeks.  
> 
> Thanks again for all of your support for this project, and we do appreciate 
> all users and want to ensure that we can continue to delivery for the needs 
> of the networking community into the future;
> 
> -jason