Welcome Julian45 (and atj)!

I’m pleased to announce that Julian Anderson (julian45) and Adam James (atj) have joined our team as volunteer System Administrators. Julian has just now joined the team, where as Adam has been part of it for nearly 2 years and I failed to post the requisite blog post welcoming him. Mea culpa, Adam! Welcome to both of you!

We welcome volunteers to help us with our infrastructure, which continues to grow and become more complicated. The ListenBrainz project in particular has many moving parts in order to process the user’s data (stats, recommendations, fresh releases, etc.). On top of that, we’re working hard to make sure that our infrastructure is as automated as possible, so we welcome any help from people who know Ansible, like Julian and Adam.

You might be asking: “Why are volunteers officially becoming part of the team?” The main reason is our own Privacy Policy:

Also, members of the MetaBrainz team and other personnel contracted to provide services to MetaBrainz may have access to our infrastructure and could therefore view any information contained therein. However all personnel are contractually bound by non-disclosure clauses which prevent them from making any such information available to others.

In order to abide by our own policy of having only contracted personnel access our infrastructure, we’ve made Julian and Adam actual contractors to the Foundation, which binds them to the same privacy rules as our other team members. The only difference: the volunteers receive a token salary of 1USD/1GBP.

This seemingly empty gesture actually keeps our noses clean from a legal / privacy perspective – and that is quite important to us.

Welcome to the team, Julian and Adam!

P.S. Did you know that we have more than 50 servers running all of the Brainz projects?

P.P.S: Did you know that we’re behind on our yearly payments to Adam? We owe him nearly 2.oo GBP! 🙄🤪

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