The Team
A small working group in Vancouver. Between them: the space and the community it came out of, the hardware and the operations, and the models the cluster actually serves.
Jacob Sayles
Technical Steward, the one who builds the cluster and keeps it running: the inference machines and the Proxmox host they answer to, Corliss (this app), and zai-ops, the Proxmox/Ansible IaC that stands the whole thing up from bare metal.
Stewardship is designed into the project rather than bolted onto it. Shared resources need someone at the helm, especially as systems get more complex. Making that a defined role rather than a volunteer accident is also what lets another community run one of these without inventing the operations from scratch.
Scott Hadfield
The man behind the models. Scott decides what actually runs on the nodes: which open weights are worth serving, at what quantisation and context, and which machine each one belongs on. That is the part of this system a member meets first and judges it by.
He also wrote the ATProto lexicons behind the membership record, and the first admin console for working it.
Boris Mann
A driving force in the Atmosphere community, DWeb YVR and Z-Space, the coworking space this cluster physically lives in.
Boris has pushed hardest on what gets built on top of the models: a shared, community-owned knowledge base rather than one more chat window.
And everyone else
The working group is wider than three people, and the hardware is wider still. Some of the machines serving models are on loan from members who own them. The point of the collective is that it is not a service somebody else runs for you.
Read on: what this is, and the system it runs on.