Re: desktopsummit registration forces gnome users to have a kde identity

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Olav Vitters wrote:
> What is the problem exactly?

The problem was setting up registration for the Drupal instance which
will be the conference website.

In December, we agreed to use Drupal and COD (a Drupal conference
organisation module) for the website.

KDE have a well-established Drupal server & sysadmins who knew the
system inside out, and we agreed that it'd be an instance on their servers.

Their Drupal uses identity.kde.org, which is an LDAP server, to handle
accounts for the website.

At the time, there were two choices: require everyone to create a Drupal
account just to register for the conference, or use the authentication
system which KDE already had in place.

After some discussion, for the sake of expediency (this is an existing,
well tested authentification system, and many of the conference
attendees have accounts on it already) the KDE identity LDAP server was
used for authentification.

Some concerns were raised, and one potential solution suggested by one
of the KDE admins (Jeff Mitchell) was to use OpenID or something
similar, to allow people to authenticate with whatever service they
already had an account for.

This didn't get implemented, as far as I can tell, purely for lack of
manpower.

> If the identify.kde.org could have:
>  * another 'frontend' with a desktopsummit.org layout (a theme)
>  * call it identity.desktopsummit.org (serveralias + theme only)
>  * guarantee that my details are only used for Desktop Summit (e.g.
>    hidden field which stores this only for identity.desktopsummit.org so
>    details can be deleted afterwards)

I don't see the benefit of doing something like this outweighing the
costs. This may not be visible from the outside, but getting the website
online was already much slower than we'd hoped, purely because we did
not have people committing to getting it done - Kenny Duffus basically
took on the configuration of the conference site on his own.

>  * some kind of privacy policy explanation + guarantee (from KDE towards
>    Desktop Summit -- I mean this in a legal sense, no problems trusting
>    KDE... but you could theoretically have legal issues. Usually you
>    cannot just share privacy related information with another
>    organisation)

A privacy policy sounds like a good idea.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org