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



On Sun, 30 Mar 2014, Tobias Mueller wrote:

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)
I think I haven't understood it yet.

Where does Mango write the user information to? There is a "GNOME userid" field
when adding  a new user. Could we use this? If not, could we add another field
to the Mango web interface for the email alias?

The "GNOME userid" is the field you'd want to use for properly adding 
a @gnome.org alias into the system. The only issue with the above is 
the need for the "GNOME userid" to match an existing LDAP account, 
thus the need for at least one or two committee members to find out 
whether an account has been created already or not. (and if not, 
create it by following the account naming policies)

For istance, Bastian did not have an LDAP account (thus the need to 
create it on LDAP and then adding the userid in place).

Sebastian has an LDAP account already so it was just a matter of 
adding the GNOME Userid in place on his foundation membership entry.

I did add a little note about this on the apply form. [1]
 
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.

Right. That wouldn't be a nice move.
Do we have statistics on the usage of an alias?
I'm not entirely sure whether we want to create such a statistic, but
if we happen to have that information already, we may as well use it determine
what aliases are old and what we can get rid of.
Also interesting would be the number of bounces, I guess.

We currently don't keep any statistic about mail aliases usage and 
there are plenty of places where someone could have made use of the 
alias itself. We should probably add some more text on your "Your 
membership is due to expire in X days" script letting the member know 
that within 3 (or 6?) months from the expiration the alias will be 
disabled. How does that sound?
 
   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? 


Interesting question. I think, yes, we should. An alias is a "benefit"
of the membership. If one is not a member anymore, one is not entitled to
these benefits. On the other hand, such an alias is pretty much for free
for us to provide. And it's not a problem unless a new member want to have
that alias.
So maybe we can do it like this: Once the membership lapses, we send an email
saying that we reserve the right to reclaim the email alias in case a member
wants to have it. We can also mention that we try to claim it with a three month
notice. In any case, we'd appreciate if the alias can be removed.
Is that a too complicated procedure?

As a first step towards this we can modify the following form letters 
pointing out the benefits we provide are going to expire after a 
certain amount of time:

1. Welcome email
2. "Your membership is due to expire" mail (the alias will be alive 
   for 3 (or 6?) months)
3. "Your member has expired" mail (the alias will be alive for 3 (or 
   6?) months from the arrival of this email)

If someone then applies for emeritus membership and we grant it we'll 
just keep the alias handy. We'll probably need a way to parse existing 
emeritus members from within the python script for the alias to stay 
up and don't get caught by the two-years-expiration filter the script 
will follow.

[1] https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-web-www/commit/?id=1be65a1f0587348f3037c1f1d3ea99d788917cf6

-- 

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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