Parks for London supports landowners and managers of London’s green infrastructure to share and develop good practice, improve standards and maximise resources.
Earlier this year it approached the WCIT Charity for some technical assistance with upgrading Mailman – open-source mailing list management software which runs on a Linux cloud server. The version they had was due to lose its support, but the more recent versions did not have a straightforward upgrade path, as the Mailman package was no longer included in the newer distribution. They were also hoping to change the name of the service so they could use their parksforlondon.org.uk name and not a legacy name.
Chair of the Pro Bono Panel, Gary Bilkus, made an initial investigation and discovered that Parks for London actually had a bigger challenge, as the only technical resource who understood the system was no longer able to continue to offer voluntary support. That meant that even if they successfully upgraded what they had, they would have nobody to turn to if things went wrong in the future.
Their IT support organisation was asked if they were able to help with the upgrade of Mailman, but they had no Linux experience and declined to get involved.
Consequently, Parks for London was offered two ways forward. Either:
- Use a managed service which provided Mailman support rather than just a bare-bones machine; or
- Move to a different software solution and find a way of retaining or reposting their archive of messages.
In order to avoid complex relearning, option one was preferred, and a UK-based service provider who offered Mailman support was selected. The WCIT then worked with the provider to migrate the data over to a new managed service. This also involved name changes and version upgrades, and a significant amount of testing on temporary virtual machines behind the scenes.
When everything was ready, a snapshot of the data was taken from the existing server, then transferred to a new server and upgraded. The users had been pre-warned to expect a change, and were informed when the old service was decommissioned. The old service was set up to reject all future access and alerted visitors to the new service.
After some days of trouble-free operation, the old server was backed up and decommissioned. This turned out to be a much higher-end machine than was necessary for Parks for London’s needs, so the cost savings were more than likely to cover the managed service charges.
Ed Stannard, Executive Director of Parks for London concluded: “When we started exploring options for keeping a much loved, but antiquated communications platform for connecting park managers across London we didn’t know where to turn. As a small charity with limited resources and no in-house specialist technical or IT knowledge we didn’t even know what to search for when it came to consultants who could help. Luckily, we had heard about the pro bono support offered by the WCIT, who were able to assist us quickly, effectively, and professionally. We now have an updated platform that is easier to use and confirms to all up-to-date IT security standards AND which is being fully managed by an outsourced third party… for lower cost each month than when we used to host and run it off our own server – none of that would have been possible without the pro-bono support from the WCIT.”
