The Berkeley.EDU Expeditionary Force met Tuesday to discuss the LDAP
database, and the namespace we'll want to use. We had four new attendees:
Pei Chen (EECS), Jerry Berkman (uclink), Lucia Tsai (CalNet) and Gordon
Adams (Chemistry).
Pei Chen started off the discussion by noting that we should decide what
our target audience is. If it's primarily the students, it makes sense
to work closely with uclink, since most undergrads are using uclink for
e-mail. If it's the faculty, addresses will be used on a long-term basis.
(Tom) We want to serve all groups--Berkeley.EDU is useful on a lot of levels.
(Mike) The undergrad division wants to be able to send e-mail to incoming
students--students don't have uclink accounts at that point. Incoming
students also want to be able to publish an address before they get here.
They could point their Berkeley.EDU address at a yahoo or hotmail account
until they have uclink.
Lucia Tsai then gave us a run-down on the CalNet LDAP directory. Currently
there's only space for one e-mail address, but there's a redesign going on
which will likely add more. We should be able to request specific fields
as part of the redesign. LDAP keeps info for three months after students
leave.
(Jerry) What if a student takes a semester off? Does their information get
purged? uclink waits 6 months, and keeps the name reserved.
(Lucia) I'm not exactly sure what happens, will look into it.
The talk meandered to the kinds of names students will choose if given the
chance, and Jerry and Lucia independently suggested adding someone from AVCO
(like Jacqueline Craig) to the commitee, since they will have to deal with
such things. I will contact Jacqueline.
(Lucia) It's not clear whether CalNet will start using a friendly-name
system, or if they do, whether the friendly names will be published.
At this point, it seems we can ignore the issue, and let CalNet make
their own decisions.
The subject of CalMail, and related functionality came up. If everyone
has an @Berkeley.EDU address, those addresses could be used to send group
mail. Who has the authority to do this? What about the privacy issues?
(Gordon) We should let CalMail worry about CalMail issues.
(Tom) We should respect the do-not-publish flag in LDAP.
(Mike) There was some discussion of using student ID numbers as e-mail
addresses (010944432@Berkeley.EDU). This would probably be bad.
Wrapping up the CalNet discussion, we launched into a discussion of what the
namespace should be. We don't appear to be close to consensus on a few
issues, so I suggested we start by seeing if we could agree on some
principles to guide our decision-making process. We managed to mostly
agree on three:
* "Everyone" should/shall/will have something@Berkeley.EDU
Lucia, in particular, felt that the service should be opt-in. The
problem with that (my opinion) is when you opt-in to things on the campus,
you fail to reach some large populations, particularly faculty. Gordon
noted that an opt-in system may soon get to the point where 80% of the
students have it, but only 20% of the faculty. Mike didn't think
having only 20-30% buy-in was necessarily a bad thing. I think there's
no real reason someone would object to such a forwarding address, if
we're in compliance with things like the LDAP "do not publish" field
and other FERPA regulations. (Janet--does anyone know what that stands
for?) The service will be more useful the more people have addresses.
The consensus was somewhat begrudging, but we at least agreed to leave
it up on the board and go on to the next point.
* There should be a friendly alternative
Most people seemed to think this was a good idea. The main issue here is
whether people choose inappropriate or misleading names. That can happen
on uclink, and it's not a major problem--it's dealt with on a case-by-case
basis. We should bring in AVCO people.
* Namespace should be reserved only as long as we're providing service
uclink/socrates reserve name space after accounts are turned off and mail is
bounced. I personally dislike this. Jerry noted that if you ever
re-activate an account name, the new account holder will get mail for the
former owner. If we're going to reserve the name space (my opinion), we
should keep providing some service to the name, even if it's just a "this
person is no longer affiliated with the University" bounce message. With
this caveat, we appeared to have consensus.
We were out of time: Mike Sinatra suggested people e-mail other principles
we can use to guide our discussion.
Next meeting: Monday, 11/19, at 11:00 AM, in 261 Campbell Hall. We will
continue with our namespace discussion, probably focusing on whether or
not we use the uclink namespace, or how much we use it if we do.
-- Tom Holub (tom_holub@LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069) College of Letters & Science 249 Campbell Hall
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