response 25 of 96:

Jan 26 04:22 UTC 1998

Re #23:  "What then, is the problem?"  Well, the problem is this.  If we
allow people to pay for internet access on as many personal accounts as
they want, I don't think there's any way we can pretend we're not "selling
internet service".  Up to now, we call membership fees "donations", and
internet privileges "membership perks".  I don't see how we can extend
that to a situation where people can buy access for as many accounts as
they'd like. 

I don't think we should be in the business of selling internet service.
For one thing, I think we'd have to charge sales tax on those extra
accounts.  And for another, if our attitude shifts away from the
donations/perks model toward the sales model, people may start to treat us
the way customers treat a provider.  That's not what Grex has been like up
to now.

response 27 of 96:

Jan 26 06:58 UTC 1998

Nobody is proposing what Mark describes in #25. The policy is one internet
access per member, individual or institutional. I recommend keeping that
policy.

I'm a case in point, I guess. I maintain four accounts for non-profit
organizations (all MI corporations and 3 501(c)3)  in addition to my (one) 
personal account. Three of those organizations are institutional members
and the fourth one will be soon. They all use the internet - but only for
e-mail, web pages, and ftp from outside, which are all allowed non-members
anyway. None use party or a lot of other resources.

Am I a camel's nose?    8^}

(I just noticed that we already provide *everyone* with most of the
internet "perqs" that people might want - add lynx to the list above -
....the additional member internet "perqs" don't amount to much.)

response 29 of 96:

Jan 26 16:46 UTC 1998

This doesn't help with institutional users, but is there a way we could use
Unix group membership etc. to do the following:  Allow a user to establish
a "primary" account that would be internet-enabled and vote-enabled given the
$ and verification.  If that same user wanted internet access as another user,
then he'd send staff or whoever an e-mail from his primary account, to add
the secondary account to the group of the primary user.  That would allow the
secondary account to have internet access under the umbrella of the primary
account.  The downside would be a person who pays for his primary account,
then gets secondary accounts for his buddies to use without paying.  But if
we're supposed to operate in an atmosphere of trust...

response 31 of 96:

Jan 26 18:55 UTC 1998

What Kevin proposes in #29 sounds reasonable; my reservation would
be that it's yet another drain on staff time, which is in scarce
supply to begin with.

response 33 of 96:

Jan 26 23:35 UTC 1998

i just didn't see it the way aruba describes it.  that makes a lot of sense
to me, and given that we do not "sell" internet service, and do not want to,
it also makes sense to me to keep the limit we currently have.

perhaps we could have institutional memberships for formally organized groups,
and ask that informal groups register as essentially the personal account of
the contact person/primary user...?   hmmm... i see some potential problems
with that idea.  

i guess then what we are left to struggle with is the perception of what we
provide and what we are.  we could try to authenticate inst'l users, and any
who cannot provide some significant authentication can be asked to assign a
member of their group as "the person responsible and answerable for any use
or abuse of the account."  then we can treat that account, for all intents
and purposes as an inst'l account.  again, we'll have to rely on the good faith
of the contact person who creates the account, but since it's not a voting
account, i think that as long as we continue to maintain the idea that
individual users can only have one account with full access, we don't really
lose anything if occasional people want to deceive us and pay us for more.

response 37 of 96:

Jan 27 19:17 UTC 1998

That's what I thought too.

response 39 of 96:

Jan 28 01:36 UTC 1998

There are several reasons we restricted some internet access to members
only.
(0) anti-vandalism.  Vandals like to find anonymous machines to
        use as "jump gates" to hide their actual location, and they
        also like anonymous machines when attacking other machines.
(1) accountability/liability.  If a non-vandal decides to attack
        some other site or person, this allows us to name the person
        and pass the buck in terms of responsibility for the problem.
(2) to limit some kinds of use to a scarce resource.
(3) to be a perk for members.  This was not the *only* reason why
        we did this, but this *was* one of the reasons we originally
        setup this restriction.

I don't see a big problem with institutional access, provided it isn't
abused.  We certainly need to get a good idea of who is responsible for
the use of the organization - for an incorporated business, this is not
hard.  They're registered with some state, and this is something we can
verify - we should also be able to get an address for the principle
office of the organization, & other contact info.

For an unincorporated business, the business itself can't be held
liable; rather, the individual people concerned are completely liable.
So, for an unincorporated business, we need the name(s) of all of the
people who will have access  Since there's no difference between this &
somebody just "buying" 2 accounts (so if we allow unincorporated
businesses, we should also allow people to just plain buy 2 accounts
with no need to make up a business name).

There are certainly ways this could be abused, so we should be careful
about this.  For instance, we certainly don't want to sell accounts to
"bulk mailers".  We don't want institutions to think of grex as a good
place to set up high traffic web sites.  We also want to be up front
about voting rights, so that they are not "surprised" later.  We also
don't want an institution to think of grex as a respository to store or
exchange private data, say, proprietary trade information.

response 41 of 96:

Jan 28 03:49 UTC 1998

I am strongly against allowing multiple internet-enabled accounts to users.
As long as we are limiting it to one account/vote/internet access per person,
I can justify to myself giving Internet access as a perq. (BTW, it was my
understanding when we voted on this that is *was not* a perq.  It was to limit
the use for resource resons.  I'm against giving it even as a perq.  Even to
the point of not allowing it.)  However, if we start to allow people to buy
as many accounts as they want, then that's selling internet access.  We then
have an implied contract with out customers.  I, personally, don't want to
devote my spare time, what there is of it, to maintaining a system that sells
internet access.  I guess I just have big problems with the idea.  So, I'd
say we need to verify institutions somehow.  I'm not sure how, but to a
similar extent as the personal verification.

response 43 of 96:

Jan 28 04:41 UTC 1998

Me thinks someone should just go back and repost the original
items where this was discussed so our memories could be
refreshed.

Security isn't tied to $6 a month but rather to validation.

response 45 of 96:

Jan 28 16:47 UTC 1998

Wow.  Mail is a service that doesn't use much bandwidth?  Well, not on a
per-user basis, normally, I guess.

Also, I note that we do allow "outgoing lynx" to all users.

Anyway, I think the alternatives that have some plausible support are:

  - status quo:  verified members can have one account each.

  - verified members can have extra non-voting accounts with net access
    upon request, but these accounts are for personal use only, not to
    be passed on to other people to use.  There is no charge for such
    accounts.

The above text raises some other issues that probably ought to be treated in
another item.

response 47 of 96:

Jan 28 17:24 UTC 1998

Right. The terms of verification of an Institutional membership are still
not clear. Since that is what this is about, I will suggest some acceptable
verifying documents:

1. Proof of incorporation and name/address/phone of resident agent (a copy
of the annual report to the state would provide all of this).

2. Check imprinted with name and address of organization, plus
names/addresses/phones of officers.

3. Copy of minutes of organization meeting showing resolution to join
grex, with names/addresses/phones of board members attached.

response 49 of 96:

Jan 28 17:48 UTC 1998

How about if we simply restrict institutional memberships to organizations
which are sufficiently formalized to be able to meet our needs for validation.
Any other groups which desire accounts may create, identify and pay for them
under the guise of personal memberships for the contact person.  Other members
of such informal groups could simply create accounts of their own, and the
group could ask the paid member to use their own access resources to provide
for the group's needs.  The individual member would still have a vote (because
it is not an institutional membership).  

This does not seem on close examination to be particularly discriminatory to
informal organizations, especially when we created the inst'l m'ship as just
a way to recognize unusual needs.  Also, I think it is fair to ask that such
informal organizations not hamper Grex's need to maintain its own security
and internet integrity.  What is at issue is what we want to *give* to whom,
and as such, it is within our prudent purview to make those choices.