Automatic sync of Foundation members between foundation's DB and LDAP



Hey,

I made a little script that syncs the Foundation members from the 
Foundation database (hosted on MySQL) to LDAP. LDAP is then binded to 
the export-mail script that automatically generates new @gnome.org 
aliases without the need of someone having to create them manually.

The current script is currently parsing the 'userid' field on the 
electorate table (which is a VIEW on the foundationmembers table with 
a special parameter added to it, the special paramater being the two 
years timeline before a membership is due to expire) which should be 
manually added by the membership committee member when adding the new 
member on the database through Mango. That said I have a few concerns 
I'd like to address with you:

1. How committee members will be able to access the relevant memberUid 
   from LDAP if they don't have access to LDAP at all? (access is 
   currently restricted to accounts team + sysadmins)

   About this point, should we give accounts team access to the older 
   committee members to properly check the relevant username of a new
   member? I did add more details on page-apply about this so it 
   should be clearer that the alias should match an existing Git 
   account username. (given both make use of LDAP)

2. What should be our policy in relation of old members still owning
   a @gnome.org alias? right now members are only added to the 
   'mailusers' LDAP group and never removed but we can easily turn 
   that on and remove an alias in case the membership expired. A 
   question arises though: most of the times members make use of their
   alias in many places around the web and breaking it might result
   in a loss of emails. What I'm wondering is how long should we leave
   the alias around? Also should we remove the alias at all when a 
   membership lapses? 

   Additionally deciding to remove existing aliases might trigger a
   massive run of old members to the emeritus ranks which (as you may
   know) are currently reserved to members with an *huge* amount
   of past contributions. I'd avoid processing dozen of emeritus 
   applications just for keeping the @gnome.org alias around also
   given the lack of man power the committee is facing nowadays.

   I'm for keeping the aliases always around, or eventually remove
   them on member's request.

   What do you think?

Thanks for your time!

-- 

Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Sysadmin Team Coordinator,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av

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