Re: UK Academic Community Code of Conduct

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

George,

I share most of your remarks. The idea of establishing an "Academic Community
Code of Conduct" clearly proceed from a good intention, but convey a
distateful "isolation" paradigm. Some of its requirements, like "use for
academic, research and administrative purposes only", or "let each individual
know on any occasion when her or his details are made known to a third party"
are almost impossible to enforce. On the other hand, the equivalent of
"copyright" can be applied to the information, restricting its use for
commercial usage; France Telecom has already successfully sued many "list
providers" that were dumping data from the Minitel directory and using it for
commercial purposes.

I understand that the UK Academic Community has a long tradition of
"community networking", and that they can in fact impose whatever rules they
feel appropriate on their network services; I hope they dont believe that
other countries can enforce the same restrictions.

In fact, there is a contradiction between this "isolation practice" and the
current naming scheme. The use of "long names" was dictated by the desire of
guaranteeing country wide uniqueness for organisation names; but then, what
is the rationale for this uniqueness if you want to isolate a use community?
One should rather aim at "community unique" names, e.g. something like
"foo.ac.uk" (or "my preferred very long foo", "Academic Community", "GB" if
you like it better so). And one could establish access control rules at the
community level.

The more I see it, the more I believe that the directory pilots are just
that: pilots aimed at gaining experience in a field we ignore. We should not
pretend to standardize access control or naming practices, but rather
experiment...

Christian Huitema