BEEF meeting, 11/19.
We began with a discussion of guiding principles. Pei wanted to know what
the user base was intended to be--whether it's a service for faculty and
staff, or also students. (Tom) Both. (Pei) There should be a set of
policies for handling conflicts. We discussed various ways to handle
conflicts, and whether "equitability" is well-defined enough to include as a
principle. (No.) Did we agree last week that everyone should have some
auto-generated @Berkeley.EDU address? (Yes.) The conversation kept
returning to the uclink/socrates name space, and what significance it would
have.
I expressed my opinion on the uclink/socrates name space: It's polluted,
it's constrained to 8 characters (which, even if it changes in the future,
means the name space is messy now), it conflates mailing lists, aliases, and
real accounts, and people who have uclink/socrates accounts shouldn't be
given preference for @Berkeley.EDU addresses.
Jerry volunteered that coordinating with the uclink name space isn't the
same as using it. Also, it's not just the uclink name space, but it's also
socrates, and he'd like to see it be a campus namespace. My opinion was
that if you reserve a Berkeley.EDU name based on the fact that it exists on
uclink, you're essentially buying all the flaws of the uclink namespace.
And departments running their own mail servers will never reserve names
on their systems just because they're reserved centrally--that's one of
the reasons for running your own mail server.
Gordon wasn't sure what the advantage of having a new namespace is. It
might cause confusion if gordon@uclink is different than gordon@berkeley.edu.
Janet wants to start clean, without any legacy namespace. I concur.
If we use real names, how do we decide what the person's first name is?
This can be tricky. Faculty and staff can change their first names in
the LDAP database, so those are probably OK. Can students? We don't know.
Pei noted that UC Davis uses first and middle initials, last name
(tcholub@ucdavis.edu). She thinks we should stick with a formula
and not allow people to choose.
Ilona was asked about socrates' position on the matter; she feels that
socrates isn't primarily a mail server, so doesn't care that much about
the namespace and will follow uclink's lead.
Lucia and Ilona both felt that we couldn't decide many of these issues
until Jacqueline Craig joins the committee. We agreed to table the
discussion until she returns.
Gordon suggested that we still meet next week, so we can summarize our
discussions so far before Jacqueline joins us. We agreed to meet Wednesday,
11/28 at 1:00.
Jerry thinks we should talk about what problem we are trying to solve.
I'll add that as an agenda item.
-- Tom Holub (tom_holub@LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069) College of Letters & Science 249 Campbell Hall
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