|
draft-internet2-mace-mlist-virtual-org-survey-03.html |
Jill Gemmill University of Alabama - Birmingham |
|
Copyright © 2004 by Internet2 and/or the respective authors |
July 2004 |
|
|
Internet2 Survey: Virtual Organization Membership List Management and Basic Communications
Prepared by Internet2 MACE-MLIST
< DRAFT Version 3 >
Introduction
Mailing List (List Manager) software is a long-time "backbone" service supporting collaboration. Our definition of a “Virtual Organization” is a collaboration of people who happen to belong to many different institutions. The “Virtual Organization” usually needs a means for communicating with other participants, and may need logins or other access to equipment, software, or data shared by the group. This leads to a long list of logins and passwords to keep up with; middleware and federated administration are tools to improve this situation.
The I2 MACE-MLIST Working Group has decided to focus on middleware integration for mailing list software because mailing lists are commonly used to communicate with (or even define the membership of) a virtual organization.
This survey has been prepared in order to:
- learn what features are most important (or most annoying) to users from research and education
- ensure that at least one open source product meets our community’s needs
- publish these requirements for the benefit of other product vendors
Who Should Complete This Survey?
This survey should be filled out by anyone who is familiar with your virtual organization’s method for keeping up with who is and is not a member of your group. Your membership management activities are likely to include managing a mailing list for your group, but working with a mailing list is not a requirement. We are especially interested in Virtual Organizations having a large number of members. Please feel free to forward this survey to others you know who fit this description.
Survey results
The survey responses will be summarized and the results will be made available on the MACE-MLIST web site. We request that you identify yourself and your institution/organization, as this information will help us understand your responses better; you can be assured that your name will not be published on our web site. Also, we will represent the responses as a collection of personal opinions and not any type of organizational or official point of view.
1. Describe your virtual organization (select one)
a. A research partnership involving universities and/or national laboratories (and possibly some private industry)
b. An educational partnership involving multiple universities and/or K20 institutions (and possibly some private industry)
c. I’m not from a college/university, my organization is ________________________
2. Describe the size of your virtual organization
a. Twenty-five members or less
b. Twenty-six to 100 members
c. Hundreds of members
d. Thousands of members
e. Tens of thousands of members
3. What is the name of your virtual organization? <response not mandatory>
4. How does a person become a member of your group?
a. Designated by project’s principal investigators
b. Open to anyone referred by an existing member
c. Open to anyone interested
d. Other method (please describe)
5. Where do you keep your list of who is a member of your collaboration (your membership list) and who is responsible for maintaining correct information?
6. What information do you typically gather?
a. Name
b. Institution
c. Email address
d. Telephone number
e. Other (describe)
f. Other (describe)
g. Other (describe)….
7. Where does this information come from? How do you validate the information?
8. How do you keep your list up to date? (for example: participant changes email address or telephone number).
9. Is your membership list
a. Kept centrally as a single list
b. Distributed – each participating institution keeps track of its participating members
c. There is a central list, but we send copies to every participant or resource manager
i. If so, how many copies of your membership list are needed?
d. Some other arrangement – please describe:
10. Do you use mailing list software to communicate with your Virtual Organization’s members? (A mailing list will typically have a name that is used instead of copying each member’s email address into the TO line of your message).
a. Yes
b. No (skip to question 15)
11. Who provides your mailing list service?
a. Don’t Know
b. <name of provider>
12. Do you know which list management software do you use? <check all that apply>
Name Version
LSOFT ListServ
Mailman
MajorDomo
Sympa
Other: <NAME>
Other: <NAME>
Other: <NAME>
Other: <NAME>
Other: <NAME>
13. What are the list management’s most desirable features?
(Describe an occasion when this feature is used)
14. What are the list management’s least desirable features and attributes?
(Describe an occasion when this feature causes a problem because of being absent or difficult to use)
15. In general, you do you look to for providing collaboration tool support? (Collaboration tools include mailing lists, videoconferencing, software that allows people to share files and file folders or data)
a. Our virtual organization provides all the services we need
b. Some services are provided by a service group at one or another of our universities, and we provide the rest
c. We can’t get the collaboration tool support that we need
d. Other situation (describe)
16. What resources used by your virtual organization should have be protected so that access is consistent with your membership list:
a. accounts on computer systems
b. inclusion in mailing lists
c. accessing internal (non-public) documents, such as grant proposals and manuscripts in progress, lab notes, etc.
d. access to databases
e. access to videoconferencing services or other collaboration systems?
f. Please list other resources where use is primarily or exclusively for members of your Virtual Organization
g. If there is no relationship between membership and resource utilization, please check this box
17. Do you ever need “guest accounts”?
a. No
b. Yes
i. Is this for use by virtual organization members when they visit collaborators? (eg, for network access)
ii. Is this for use of your group’s resources by someone who is not a virtual organization member
18. Do you experience international encoding issues in your work? (Describe)
19. Do you have security concerns or needs, as a VO, that are not being met? (please describe—for example, having to cross multiple organizations’ firewalls).
a. If you require approval for these types of bulk messages, how is the approval process facilitated?
20. If list management and account generating software were able to read and use your membership list from a single, central location, would that be useful?
If yes, would there be associated concerns you would want addressed to make it useable?
21. Are you familiar with Web initial sign-on ? http://middleware.internet2.edu/webiso/
22. Are you familiar with the Shibboleth project? http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/
23. Are there capabilities we have not asked about that you wish you had access to?
24. What is your name? <not mandatory> <Will not be published on the web>
25. What is your title and primary institutional affiliation? <not mandatory>
26. What is your role in the Virtual Organization? <not mandatory>
27. What is your email address? <a pointer to results will be emailed to you if you provide this> <not mandatory>