Minutes to the 2nd OCF General Meeting (28 February 1996)¶
ATTENDANCE¶
Erik Agee (agee) * George Gong (gong) Ahilan Anantha (ahilan) Geordan Rosario (geordan) Alan Coopersmith (alanc) * Jennifer Snider (jenni) * Andrew Swan (aswan) Kenneth Nishimoto (kennish) * Elaine Chao (chaos) GM Steve Martinot (marto) Dan Holliman (danh) Michael Constant (mconst) SM Jennifer Wray (deery) Phil Tran (philipt) Don Szeto (dszeto) Thomas Cheng (tomcheng) * David Tang (dtang) Wang Lam (wlam) *
(*) indicates Board of Directors members
AGENDA¶
o Welcome & Historical Notes o General Manager's Report o Site Manager's Report o Sparc Manager's Report o EJC Representative's Report o Old Business o New Business o General Discussion
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WELCOME & HISTORICAL NOTES¶
o The meeting was called to order at 7:10 pm, Pacific Standard Time.
o There were a lot of new faces at this general meeting. Self introductions were made. Traditionally, a round of self-introductions is done at every general meeting, even if everyone in attendance already knows everyone else.
o Ken (kennish) found something interesting while reading through the old BoD meeting minutes. Starting around March 1990, and for several years afterwards, a person named "Margaret" was mentioned, in some way or another, at every meeting. Alan (alanc), the only one in attendance who's ever seen Margaret explained: Margaret was the girlfriend of an ex-OCF officer. At one point, it was unofficially decided that some reference to Margaret would be made at every meeting so that her name would end up in all of the minutes.
GENERAL MANAGER'S REPORT¶
o The OCF mid-year report has been turned in to the ASUC.
o The IS&T proposal (requesting that the OCF be allowed to stay in its current space in the EMF for another year) has not yet been turned in. Elaine (chaos) needs to speak with Jenni (jenni) first.
o The GM squad is being revived. Anyone who's interested in helping with the OCF can join.
o The San Francisco School District said they were interested in the Sun servers we have in the warehouse, but now they are not. Excess and Salvage says that they'll dispose of them for us free of charge.
SITE MANAGER'S REPORT¶
o We plan to set up an X-term in the office for the Eshelman open house on Tuesday. If one of the Suns will not work, we'll lug an Apollo down there.
SPARC MANAGER'S REPORT¶
o One of our Sparc IPCs has been volunteered to TCS for Prof. Hilfinger's Java project.
EJC REPRESENTATIVE'S REPORT¶
o The Engineer's Joint Council is hosting the regional NAESC (National Association of Engineering Student Councils) on the weekend of March 1.
o Engineering Week is coming up. Last year's E-Week wasn't really much of an E-Week, so the EJC plans to work harder this year. Planning meetings are every Thursday at 5pm in one of the 120 Bechtel rooms. E-Week is an annual event in which various engineering groups hold engineering-related activities. Some of the attractions include contests to build houses out of playing cards and papier-mache "hens" to hold eggs dropped from the roof of Evans.
o Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the computer science honor society, was added to the EJC, since they are interested in participating in E-Week. UPE is a relatively new organization, having received their charter only last December.
OLD BUSINESS¶
o The transceivers that we need can be ordered, but the normal credit process is long and convoluted. That will be dealt with, however, so we should have no problem getting them.
o Both of the OCF network routers crashed this week, disrupting network access. We should set up more routers so that the likelyhood of network disruption is lower.
o The Eshelman open house is Tuesday, 5 March. We need people to staff the office for most of that day. Sign-ups for staff members is in ~staff/open-house-96. We also need people to staff the office during the regular week, or else we'll lose the office.
o There has been no response from the Tatung representative at Uniforum. (It was decided at the last BoD meeting that a Tatung Sparc 20 would be purchased as our new server.) We will contact the campus Tatung sales representative instead.
NEW BUSINESS¶
o Michael (mconst), a root staff member and the current site manager, had his account deactivated under suspicion of invasion of privacy-- specifically, reading other people's e-mail. He claimed his innocence and asked to see evidence to support the accusation.
Entries were found in the "do" logs, which keeps track of root commands that staff members execute from their accounts, of Michael copying and viewing user's mail spools. In most of the cases, Michael explains that it was part of his routine procedure, while deactivating user's accounts for quota violations. If the user's mail spool is very large, he would check it for pirated software.
He could not explain some of the entries, however, and claims that he does not remember entering those commands. Some of the entries in the log date back over a year. The issue of privacy and the sanctity of e-mail as discussed. According to the staff policies, under no circumstance is a staff member to read a user's mail. Michael says that he was informed otherwise, and that the site manager who trained him had taught him to check users' mail spools for pirated software when squishing them for quota violations.
The suggested course of action is to mail the owners of the files that Michael is accused of reading, and ask them if they had given him permission to access those files. If any one of them says no, the issue will be referred to the Office of Student Conduct. If they all say they've granted him permission, then the issue will be discussed at the next general meeting.
A motion was made to reactivate Michael's account, without any root privileges, so that he can investigate the charges and gather evidence before Monday, 4 March (the next BoD meeting). The motion passed with 16 for, 0 opposed, and 2 abstaining.
o The OCF now has a fairly large number of newer, less-experienced staff members, and only a handful of older, more-experienced staff members. Thus, we have developed a problem of not having enough staff around to take care of the really serious problems. For the most part, this is due to lack of communication between staff members.
Jenni described the old staff training procedure, which involved new staff members holding office hours with older staff members, who show them the ropes. When the new staff member is deemed ready by the site manager, he is granted full staff privileges. Then, when a staff member wants to be added to group wheel (root), he spends some time learning from another group wheel staff member before he is finally added to root. This system has been abandoned in recent years due to the lack of older staff members and the fact that the site managers have not had time to coordinate the training of new staff.
It was proposed that staff training sessions be held regularly by the site manager. This may not work so well, however, since, it is argued, people learn by looking over others' shoulders, not by formalized training.
The other solution is simply for the new staff to ask whenever they have any questions or problems. A lot of the old staff do have information that they've written down and placed in their home directories. It just needs to be organized and compiled so that they're more accessible.
o Jenni proposes the formation of the Disk Management Board. According to the by-laws, any lasting changes to the decision making structure of the OCF needs to be recorded. The DMB, however, doesn't officially exist, even though we've been electing DMB members every semester for quite a while now.
Thus, it is proposed that a Board-elected, 3-member committee will be created to make decisions on disk usage policy and issues. It will be called the Disk Management Board, and its members will serve for 1- semester terms. The proposal passed with 15 votes, no opposing, and 3 abstentions.
The DMB members, who were elected at a previous BoD meeting this semester, were recognized by a voice vote. They are: Alan Coopersmith, Jennifer Snider, and Rune Stromsness.
o With regards to voting at general meetings, the OCF constitution currently states that there is quorum by default and that each member is entitled to one vote. Jenni moves that the by-laws be amended to state that all motions are passed by a simple majority of the attendees. The motion passes with 13 for, 0 opposed, and 5 abstaining.
GENERAL DISCUSSION¶
Topic: Where do we go from here?
Tom (tomcheng) comments that the OCF lacks focus--that our goals are too vague. For our limited resources, we are spread really thin, and we should think about specific goals to work toward. Andew (aswan) points out that we do consider concrete issues when making decisions--for example, our plans to migrate to a new platform. Jenni further explains that if we become too focused on a few tasks, we are certain to alienate portions of our users, and that runs contrary to the idea of open computing. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The meeting was adjourned at 9:02 pm, PST.