response 25 of 79:

Oct 16 03:07 UTC 1996

I would not characterize this discussion as a tempest in a teapot.  There
are strongly held but clearly different opinions as to whether this system
should reward those who send in money by granting them enchanced
membership access and services.  How this goes will most certainly shape
Grex's future.

And you can indeed slow Grex's growth without shutting off newuser.
We do it all the time without even intending to by simply not
pumping up service.  Which is why I'm fairly pleased we don't
have money to burn. 

This discussion really belongs in Co-op.  I've mailed tsty
asking for a link.

response 27 of 79:

Oct 17 16:12 UTC 1996

Membership cf? I'd like all discussions about Grex policy and manaement to
appear here in coop - so thanks for linking over this item. Are there any
others going on in "membership" that all members (and interested persons) 
should know about? You say, I should add membership to my .cflist? Why,
when coop is the right place? 

I'm not sure I fully understand the proposal. Is it that now any user can
have a web page, but if we require some (small) level of membership to
have a web page, it would increase membership? I would like to suggest a
different perspective. 

If we view web pages on Grex to be a means for informing the world about
the interests and activities of Grex members, this would be a public
service - not a "perq" of membership. We have often discussed that Grex
has to keep personal information about members because of state law. We
don't make that information public, but we have no reason why the
*members* should not make whatever information about themselves they want,
public. Web pages could be the vehicle for doing that. 

Therefore I propose that the opportunity to have a web page be offered
only to members, as a means to provide to the world more information about
those persons that are members, and "run" this organiztion, but on a
voluntary basis. 

response 29 of 79:

Oct 17 16:53 UTC 1996

   I sincerely doubt that restricting email to members would boost
membership much,  and would block out access to a very real segment
of Grex users who have no other access to email, and can't easily
pay for it--like a bunch of kids in Ann Arbor who use Grex for various 
things.

   I disagree with Mary that we'll have members-only phone lines
in two years: I'll certainly lobby as hard as I can to thwart any
such attempt to get that by the membership.

   I do however very much agree with Mary that there are all sorts
of ways to raise funds that are humane and low-key, and that we
haven't tried them yet.

   I also really hope that we do not come up with different 
membership rates, nor that we raise the current amount for
a membership.  We're paying bills right now, and we're as
"flat" an organization as we can be, I think.

   Anything we do to restrict access to things is going to
cost staff time, even doing it once or twice a year.  Given
how thinly staff time is spread out over things now, I
would rather not see anything more to do accounting wise.

response 31 of 79:

Oct 17 17:25 UTC 1996

Whether grex restricting email increases memberships is besides the
pointanyway.  Sooner or later the email load is going to kill grex.

And restricting party to two hours in a 24hour period for n on-members,
is reasonable because grex provides access for conferencing.  There
are too many people on Party who will never conference.  Party is
really popular with our India users, and they arenice people, but they
arent by and large going to conference, so limit Party use to two
hours a day (reasonable I think) unless they want to be members.

response 33 of 79:

Oct 17 20:40 UTC 1996

   Richard, you seem to forget than in an open system like Grex, you 
*can't* say "party is limited to two hours per person/day" and have
it work.  Those who wanted to would just take out another account
and continue on that way.  Considering that party is not account
oriented like email is, people could move from account to account
and never hit the two-hour rule.  I won't bother going into discussion
about the programming effort it would take to do that, and maintenance
of it all.

   Ken's comments worry me, because he is right: we do have a problem,
and one that isn't easy to solve.

response 35 of 79:

Oct 17 21:52 UTC 1996

email> People outside of the Ann Arbor area presumably have telnet access by
virtue of some email account or other.  That's certainly true in Michigan,
although certainly people are hopping in on friend's accounts.  So charging
for open-access email would only hurt the direct-dial-ins.  That wouldn't
increase the member pool considerably (IMHO), but it *would* alienate a lot
of potential future members (i.e., all them high schoolers).  So I'd be
against charging for email.
  
WEB> Web page access seems like a less common perk of having the sort of
access that gives one telnet access. Web pages are in demand and use
resources, and (IMHO) create a splinter faction.  Charging for Web pages seems
like a reasonable idea.  Grex was created, in my view, as a community
get-together sort of thing, and too many Grexers seem to (currently) find Web
access difficult or undesirable.
  
Party channels> This seems like an odd thing to charge for.  So I pay $6 and
get my very own party channel, and then when I'm not around, anybody can use
it?  *That* doesn't seem fair.  If you're going to charge for party channels,
or offer them as a perk of membership, then modify party channels so they can
only be accessed (when empty) by the owner.  It's possible, currently, that
I could be locked out of my own channel -- it's happened, due to crashes. 
I could see somebody on a vendetta against an ex-friend locking themselves
in ex-friend's $6 party channel out of spite.  Then baff has to come in and
settle it?  Nope, nope, nope.
  
Conferences> Charge $1/screen for posting.  then Grex could pay all it's bill
off of kerouac's posts.  =}  <-- joke, joke, joke!
(btw, how many spams are there in a kerouac, scott?)

response 37 of 79:

Oct 18 01:45 UTC 1996

I think restricting acces to some things to no-members is a great idea...
except for one problem.... rumors are the only thing in the universe that
spread faster then light, so if word gets out that we're restricting access,
people are going to get pissed, even if we send out an official notice of WHY..
people may eventually accpet it, but many will not...

response 39 of 79:

Oct 18 03:56 UTC 1996

Janc's position statement:

  I think we need to get more members.  I do not believe that we should
  restrict any guest access in order to try to prod more guests into 
  becoming members.  Grex should continue to strive to give as much to
  as many for as little as we can.

  I see two major thrusts for raising memberships.  

  (1)  Do a better job of explaining to people what Grex really is.
       Grex is doing an unbelievable public service.  This is a great
       organization.  We need to do a better job of publicizing just
       how amazing and generous we are.  (As opposed to starting to
       be less generous.)  If we start doing a better job of telling our
       story, more people will want to support us, for the right reasons,
       not for perks.

  (2)  I think we can find creative new ways to give modest perks to
       members without taking anything away from our guests.  For 
       example:

       - The idea of finding an ISP that will give discounts to Grex 
         that I mentioned in another item.

       - Start a permanent "Grex store" where people can buy nicely designed
         Grex t-shirts and mugs and mouse-pads and such-like stuff.  Offer
         modest discounts to members.

       I think lots of similar things could be done to make members feel
       "appreciated" without undermining our goal of treating people
       equally.

  I think there are lots of other good fund-raising things that can be
  done that will strngthen, rather than weaken, Grex's culture.  The
  idea of a Grex Garage Sale once a year was a good one.  Lots of people
  had STUFF they wanted to donate.  We were really only missing a place to
  do it.  These kinds of things bring our users together, rather than
  dividing them up.

  I think we may have to come up with some restrictions on E-mail, not
  for fund-raising, but to discourage certain classes of users that
  our exploiting our charity.  For instance, people who want a
  snazzier-looking E-mail address to put on their business cards, or
  want a more stable address than their ISPs.  These people aren't
  evil, but I don't think our members donate money and our staff member
  donate time so such people can have a nice mail forwarder.  We would
  like to offer free E-mail service, but really only (1) as an adjunct
  to conferencing, and (2) to people who can't get E-mail otherwise 
  (especially local people), and maybe to people who are new to E-mail or
  only send one message a week, and aren't quite ready for commercial service.

  I don't have a plan for how that would work.  I'm not sure yet that a
  plan would be needed.  A few ideas that would almost work, if we 
  decided to restrict E-Mail would be:

  - Require users to sign and snail-mail in a printed-out form before
    their accounts get authorized for E-mail.  The form would say
    something like:

       I recognize that Grex is a non-profit charitable organization
       whose major mission is blah blah blah, and that its free
       E-mail services are meant for people who blah blah blah.

       I understand that Grex's Email is free, however a modest donation
       would be a great help to Grex and would better help Grex serve
       those who most need its services.

       I understand that Grex is working on a cool stamp collection,
       and would appreciate it if I stick a neat stamp on the
       envelope.

       I would like Grex to enable login _______ for Email.

       Signed: _____________

    Every request would be granted.  I'd be tempted to drop the small
    request for $$ in the second paragraph.  The main idea here is not
    to hit people for money, but to make sure they understand who they
    are dealing with when they accept a free account from Grex.  Well,
    I also think it would be a good way to get a really neat stamp
    collection.

  - Accept only mail that is addressed to:

      login@bpddpqppdbd.0IO10lOl.grex.cyberspace.org

    Anyone who would be willing to have *that* E-mail address would have
    to be *truely* needy.

  Well, OK, neither of these suggestions are 100% serious, but I like both
  of them better than restricting E-mail only to members.  The *last*
  thing we should think of doing is providing services only to people who
  can afford to pay for them.  If we decide that E-mail must be restricted,
  we need to be more creative and less mercenary than that.

response 41 of 79:

Oct 18 06:15 UTC 1996

I'm uncomfortable with Grex charging for anything more than we are already
charging for.  In fact, I'm a bit uncomfortable with Grex charging for the
outbound Internet servicese that we are currently charging for, except that
don't think we can afford to to put ourselves in the position of being the
free ISP for the Ann Arbor area.  MichNet tried that, and couldn't support
it.  Grex certainly can't afford to.

Unlike a lot of people here, I am not unfcomfortable with the idea of a lot
of people from India using us for free e-mail.  If they need free e-mail and
we can give it to them, cool.  That's exactly the same reason I started using
Grex.  I was a high school student without any money, and I wanted to be able
to do mail.  Somebody told me about Grex, and I started using it.  After
several months of that I got sucked into other areas of Grex and started
learning a whole lot.  I'm not sure where I'd be right now without that, but
it's probably safe to say that if it were not for Grex first luring me here
with its free e-mail, I would not be doing computer stuff professionally right
now.

I see providing e-mail and other low level forms of net access to be an
important community service.  Sure, people in the Ann Arbor area, and most
of the rest of the US, now have plenty of sources of really cheap Net access
such that they probably dont' need something like Grex to provide that in the
way that I once did, but our community is a lot bigger now than it was then.
If people in India are in need of resources we can offer, I'd like to see us
doing what we can to help.

As an aside, as one of the people who puts a lot of time into keeping Grex
running (although not nearly as much as some people spend), I'll mention that
the bulk of my computer time is spent doing work for paying customers of the
company I work for.  I get paid for doing that.  For Grex, I, like the rest
of the staff, work for free.  This isn't just because I enjoy doing that kind
of technical work; if all I wanted to do were run a computer system I could
work on some system that I would be getting paid a lot of money to run. 
Instead, I choose to spend time doing things for Grex for free because I feel
that the things Grex is doing for free are a valuable community service.  If
Grex stopped doing a lot of the things I feel are important for free, I'd have
to do a lot of thinking about whether I would still want to work for free.

I agree with those who say that there is  a lot of untapped fundraising
potential out there.  Often, if I wander into party and start talking to
people about how Grex is funded, a lot of them have no idea.  A  lot of them
are poor college or high school students who can't really afford to send us
money anyway, but we also have a lot of users who I think would contribute
if they knew it was needed.  I just wish I could come up with better ways of
getting the word out.

response 43 of 79:

Oct 18 10:00 UTC 1996

Yep, I once asked an Indian user telnetting from college if he
could access the Web from his school.  His reply:  "Yes.  I asked
the staff about that, and they said to access the Web, telnet to
cyberspace.org and run lynx."  Eep!

aruba sent me this e-mail a while ago:

>However, the Indian consulate had this to say:
>
>----
>The difficulty you have described in your letter is due to the reason that
>Indian Rupee is not fully convertible currency.  However, Indians can draw
>foreign exchange in exchange of Indian Rupees on specific demand.  For
>this they will have to approach the Reserve bank of India or any Indian
>Bank dealing with Foreign Exchange.
>----

Our helpers should keep a copy of this on hand, in case anyone
from India asks about sending us money.

response 45 of 79:

Oct 18 14:01 UTC 1996

Regarding limiting offsite email to members: what scg said, but more.  I'm
confident that there are quite a lot of Grex users who have no other email
access & for whom paying an ISP (or Grex!) for email would not be worth while
because they rarely send much offsite email.  I know that was my original
position here - I knew no one's email address whatsoever, but then suddenly
needed to get customer support for something for which the alternatives were
a long wait in the queue on an expensive long-distance call or email.  After
some back & forth within a couple of days, it was many months before I ever
emailed off Grex again.  This is a *lot* less common now - a lot more people
have email addresses now! - but I'd sure say that cutting off email abuse
across the board seems a lot better to me than making email available only
to people who contribute financially.

response 47 of 79:

Oct 18 16:43 UTC 1996

   Aside from the question of wanting to do that, changing the software
in Apache (our web server) to allow graphics from members accounts only
would have to be done.  It wouldn't be hard, but it would be another thing
to always have to change, in future versions of apache as they came out.

   And that touches upon one of my reasons to be wary of offering "perks"
to people: it takes software to do that, and that software has to be 
maintained.  As an example of that, Marcus has to make changes to
sendmail every time we decide to upgrade to a newer version.  If we forgot
to make those changes, then we'd lose some feature/ability that we've taken
for granted here.  The consequences could range from annoying to a serious
security hole.

   Thank you Jan for #39 and Steve G for #4?; I agree with both of
those very much.

response 49 of 79:

Oct 18 19:06 UTC 1996

Is that policy explicitly stated in any founding documents, Rane?