[tahoe-dev] Elinor Ostrom's theory of governance of common resources (was: Test Grid is full)

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 6:49 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
>
> There are tickets open to turn on expiration by default, and to
> default to leaving 1G free:
>
>  http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1205
>  http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
>
> It would be a useful experiment to ask everyone running a pubgrid server
> to enable expiration now, which is very easy.

I agree that this would be a useful experiment and might tell us
something about #1205 and #1208.

Dear everyone who runs pubgrid a.k.a. testgrid servers! Please do what
Greg Troxel suggested!

>   In my case, expiration
> and not filling my disk requires only the following in tahoe.cfg:
>
>  reserved_space = 50G
>  expire.enabled = True
>  expire.mode = age

But note that some of the 10 servers currently connected to the
testgrid are probably run by people who are not reading this list. :-)


> I think there's more to it than expiration, though - it seems people are
> storing large files on the pubgrid disproportionately to the storage
> they are contributing.  In my case, I only have about 105K stored...
> So the pubgrid is serving its purpose, pointing out the need for
> accounting (or zero-knowledge proof of reciprocity).


Heh heh heh. Yeah, exactly! Let's try adding Ostromism! Brian
mentioned Ostromism in his "Accounting, 2010 Edition" letter:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-December/005748.html

For example, a simple hack that everyone wants is to add "How much
storage is this server currently offering total and how much
available?":

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/648# collect server
capacities and put them on the welcome page, output of 'df' for SFTP,
etc.

I created a tag "ostrom". You can find all tickets tagged "ostrom"
with this query:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=!closed&keywords=~ostrom&order=priority

> I think it's important for the project that newcomers be able to store a
> few files.  So it might be good for someone with adequate standing, if
> they concur, to publish social norms that people should only store 3/4
> as many bytes of shares as they are contributing to storage and that
> people using the pubgrid should be on this list.

I agree.

Regards,

Zooko