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On Mon, 8 May 2000, David L. Potter wrote: > The new IP 'membership' options include some form of ftp access to an > organizational website, one text dial-up account or two PPP dialup > accounts (seems to moving around... I though it was three). This is explained on the website. We've not altered what we first posted there. See the "How to sign up your non-profit group or organization" and "Our service packages for your small business" links on the new Services page at: http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/services.html > We now live with the reality of the 'zipless' website... five > minutes and a credit card will get you a web site with any number of > providers. People (some people at least) want it now! And for those that > do, the CCN IP registration process probably seems, complicated and time > consuming. Streamlining the registration/IP creation process and > centralizing it in the office makes a certain amount of sense but it > still needs considerable review. If some of the 'up-front' work previously > undertaken by the editors is transfered to the office some provision has to > be made to provide continuity through staff changes. While at the moment > the office/Andrew may be able to provide some of the facilitation that > editors handled in the past there is certainly no guarantee that subsequent > office staff will come to work with an understanding about any of this. The review process on creating new accounts for IPs has been ongoing since last fall (and before). I would suggest that future office staff would receive far better training than I received walking into the office job. The issue of spreading around skills so that more than one person knows them has been in discussion for some time now. Throughout the organization there are individual people who are the sole available resource for various tasks. This is an issue as should these people become unavailable, there would be a scramble to find someone else to administer these areas. > If we look at individual parts of the IP registration process, > several decisions have a long term impact, are difficult or inconvenient to > change, and need a decision to be made 'up-front', > > + an appropriate directory name/jump name, and > + the names of any mailing lists, You're right. The new groups signing up don't get a magic jump key. I was here for more than three years before I even knew what this was. For the benefit of those who still don't know, a jump key is a special kind of shortcut that works only within Lynx for people logged into the text interface. They press 'i' then a code phrase and get taken directly to the web site of the IP. This does not work for anyone else and I've never seen a statistic on how often this was getting used but cannot believe it is very high given the relative obscurity of the shortcut. However it is IPDB "functionality" not duplicated in the present scheme. Mailing lists are not dependent on the IPDB and can be set up for anything at all. > As I previously noted, ***we do not yet have these tools in hand*** so > there is still a need to retain important elements of the previous > registration process. I disagree that there are important elements of the previous registration process that are lacking from the new one and more to the point I need to work with what is available now, not all the great stuff that may be developed some day. The new signup process is much more streamlined and seems to be working quite well. More on this further down. > Recent Events > ====================== > > It has recently come to light that several weeks ago, a significnt change > was made to the IP registration/creation process. > "Recently come to light"? Meetings were held in advance with concerned parties, yourself included, and the new memberships were approved at the Board level after much discussion with both the IP Committee Chair and Technical Committee Chair present. > At the same time, the office stopped notifying editors about the > receipt of IP agreements. The office is perfectly willing to work with the various subject editors (who have an important role in the new process) as soon as the present website upgrade is sorted out. > These changes have several administrative and technical implications. For > one, the integrety of the IPDB has been weakened without a suitable > replacement identified... and further that this change was 'silent', > there was no announcement. > There are indeed technical implications. Last week I sought help from the Technical Committee mailing list on the issue of making quota information available to account holders and was informed that "from a pure technical perspective this is quite a low priority... I find it hard to attribute any significant level of priority to this at all." The technical implication I get from this is pretty clear. > An urgent requirement to implement a new registration process seems > to be the justification for making these changes without first obtaining > consensus from the IP and Technical committees. This is untrue. All interested parties were consulted in advance and nothing was done without prior Board approval. This process has been in the works for some time. The whole idea of progress is that you can talk about things forever but at some point you need to actually do something to implement the change and when you do there will always be someone not happy. The point of the exercise is not just to identify shortcomings in the new process but to work out solutions for them. > However, no request for specific improvements to the process/IPDB were made > prior to the changes and the 'silent' nature of the changes could be > viewed as an attempt to conceal these events for as long as possible... > Although I came away from the a meeting last Tuesday with the impression > there had been a 'flood' of IP's signed up, it appears as if only 4 new > accounts (with an income of $175) were created in the two weeks before these > changes came to light. The current standings (for the record): IP fees paid (January 2000 - mid April): $325 IP fees paid for extra services (VDN): $400 (4 VDNs @ $100) Number of IP Agreements received (new IPs): 10 The new account standings: Neighbourhood Account fees paid (mid-April - present): $600 NA extra services (VDN): $300 (2 VDNs @ $150 ($100 + $50 setup fee) Number of NA User Agreements received: 6 So, to recap, in three *weeks* the new Neighbourhood accounts have 2/3 the signups of the old IP format over a three and a half *month* period, have brought in more than double the money for fees and have rekindled interest in our hosting of Virtual Domains. The signup process is much streamlined, there have been no complaints from any of the new account holders to date and there are several more groups "in the pipeline". This is what is usually referred to as "successful". > I hope that the board will review these events and take this opportunity > to clarify the expectations with respect to discussions and consensus > between staff, volunteer committees and the board, and between individual > boardmembers with overlapping areas of interest/r