Re: [atlarge-discuss] Membership records Re:[atlarge-discuss] Point of personal privilege -- I'm ...

[espresso@e-scape.net]

At 16:04 +0200 2002/08/05, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
>Even if we're not able to supply mailboxes or even e-mail forwarding
>(which could become bandwidth-consuming if widely used by hundreds of
>people) we could possibly have on the site a "personal account"
>section where you can supply and edit your updated personal data (with
>perhaps some exceptions for data subject to verification, ie a
>member's own name). In the end, we could integrate everything there,
>from forum access to voting booth (even if we have to consider that
>not everybody has web access - some can just use e-mail).

Exactly why it would be helpful to be able to provide people with free, non-ad-ridden e-mail accounts, even if the mailboxes themselves were small. 

Keep in mind that in plain text, a good fat novel occupies less than 500K, and that most people who use public access terminals will print out their messages or store them on a diskette rather than leave them sitting on the server. In an era of multi-gig server systems, it should be possible: a Terms of Use policy prohibiting the transfer of attachments means precious few people would be getting more than 500k of through-traffic, and automatic deletion of messages left on the server after a specified period would also help.

There are a couple of community networks here in Canada which offer a personal account with membership for $25/year and make money on it. Actually, you might want to take a look at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca in Nova Scotia, which runs a Linux-based system called CSuite which has already been localized into French and allows people to use their accounts from just about any device with a modem since you can use the Lynx text browser, PICO, etc. running on the server. (For a while, Bell Canada was trying to implement something called Alex, a rather limited version of France's Minitel, and when it failed a lot of the primitive terminals were donated to people who use them for this kind of access.)

Another fairly popular approach is the old BBS setup. There's a Canadian software called "FirstClass" which is available for multiple platforms (there's even a DOS client, though it's not supported any longer) in English, French and (I believe) Spanish. My first exposure to the Internet was through BBS systems and FirstClass was a real pleasure to use. The local Macintosh user group still runs its member BBS with it. But there are certainly others worth looking at, too.

One issue about doing everything on the Web is the number of people who have little or no access to the Web. Another concern would be security, I think. Frankly, although e-mail can obviously be intercepted, it's less likely to be a problem than somebody trying to scoop personal information off a Web server. There should certainly be a way to get the membership registrations into a passworded and encrypted database into which the updates could be incorporated. This is already getting out of my depth since I know very little about server side databases but we could do a little research if we don't have people with more expertise amongst us.


Anyway, as you may have gathered, I'm quite eager that we start taking some concrete steps towards outreach at the same time as we thrash out what we can realistically set out as the charter for this new organization.

Any and all thoughts on this are most welcome.

Regards,

Judyth



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Judyth Mermelstein     "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito..."
Montreal, QC           <espresso@e-scape.net>
ICANN At Large Member No. 374546 since July 2000
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"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once 
they have exhausted all other alternatives." (Abba Eban)
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