My boss has asked me to try to get some idea of the amount of effort required by a twiki administrator in keeping up with a web or webs.

I can think of a few recurring tasks that would be done by the TWikiAdminGroup or sysadmin support staff on a recurring basis:

1. Resetting passwords
2. Reverting clobbered articles
3. Tracking disk space usage
4. Training new users
5. Encouraging/coaching people to generate new content

I gave my boss an estimate of 1-2 hours per week for TheCareAndFeedingOfTwiki. Does this seem reasonable? Too much? Too little? I hope 4 and 5 will diminish with time as we reach a critical mass of twikiites (twikiers, twiki, tusers, um well what do you call twiki users??) and the culture evolves getting content created won't be like pulling teeth from a kumquat.

-- JohnRouillard - 18 Aug 2002

I think 4 and 5 will be by far the biggest component. Also there is (6) customising TWiki skins/functionality and (7) TWiki upgrades - latter are infrequent but I find them very time consuming (at least half a day) if you are to take on new pages from the TWiki web and apply customisations made to the base templates (e.g. for CSS, new icons, etc). If you just upgrade the scripts, TWiki upgrades are much quicker, but sometimes template changes are important.

As for disk space checking, I have the following crontab on Linux set up to email me every week - was every day when we were tight on disk space:

# Email disk usage every week
30 00 * * 5 (df -h /home /var /tmp | mail -s 'TWiki disk space' twikiadmin@orchestream.com)

-- RichardDonkin - 18 Aug 2002