Real Community Conferencing System

RCCS Index

RCCS Introduction

Written 03Oct2000, comments added 18Jan2002

Introduction: (new)

My goal in building a new system was to save what was good about BIX, and replace/fix what was not. That is why you will find a lot of stuff on management here, because that's where BIX was broken.

In honor of the real community of people I met on BIX, I named the new version the Real Community Conferencing System (RCCS).

Because I saw the possible uses of RCCS as very wide, you will also find that it is designed to deal with multiple owners, each with multiple systems, multiple sysmgrs, mult EEs and moderators, etc. It also deals with sharing topics and conferences across physically and logically distributed community.

Most of what you will read here is the original design notes. I only added explanatory material where my cryptic notes were obviously obscure. If it's still obscure, ask. :-}

Goal:

Improve on the BIX-Cosy conferencing system. BIX is first and foremost a diverse community of people who share a common trait such as curiosity about computers, science or simply want to trade food recepies.

(Note: Geographic location, ownership and subjects are assumed diverse)

Design Philosophy:

The community concept is key. Without a real, live community, conferencing is a sterile and limiting environment. To develop a real community, we need the following charcteristics:

1. It is required that authority and responsibility be commesurate and distributed.
2. A community *will* have politics. To run smoothly, we must make it possible for the community to influence who runs it and how it works. Who and how may vary from section to section.
3. Content is important. S/N ratio must be kept high.
4. There must also be room for different personalities and experimentation.
5. From the technical POV, the system must be manageable, expandible, simple to use, and have an organized structure and database.
6. Reliability and recovery is also important. People expect the community resource to be available 24/7 at 99.99 reliability. Loss of data is unacceptable.
7. Some form of access control is essential to restrict & limit those who trash systems or attempt to damage the community.

Management: (new)

Management deals with system capabilities (hdw & sfw), subjects supported, class or type of users wanted or accepted, by whom and how the site is controlled. Management is not synonymous with ownership. Ownership is basically financial, management is basically functional. A system that is well managed should be profitable.

Politics:

Politics always exists - to ignore it means it will control things in a manner that reflects polititcal power instead of management objectives. Keeping a lid on political power requires a method of correcting problems without violence. This method is called voting. :-}

Votes are secret, only totals are kept. Pass/Fail numbers frozen at time of proposal to prevent stuffing box with new/temp members.

Voting is a privlege/responsibility at the Bixen membership level. Current and recent past Bixen are grandfathered in. Entry to this level is either by a term (TBD) of membership, or by being voted in by a majority of Bixen in that area. (Once in, does membership applies to all areas?) No

Security

Needs to deal with:

Spoofed messages via replication or comment
Confidential areas/conferences
Multi-level security?
Moderator/Ed security
Script kiddies
Spam/harvesting names
Secure Authentication should be default
Standard monitoring all members
Distributed system security
Basic java web browser access w/pgp
Replication control security
Community control security

Replication:

By area only
Controlling area (conference) coordinates all adds, ops
Fallover/recover sequence
All changes propagate from central (master site per conf)

With multiple sites sharing a single conference - How does user get to a specific site? Or is it auto closest site?

Addendum:

My lengthy tenure on BIX was an education in several ways, some planned, some unplanned. As a moderator I learned a lot about writing clearly and handling people gently. It was interesting.

As an EE, I learned about managing in an abrasive environment with little authority and no power. All EEs were equal, except for some EEs who were more equal. There was more pain than joy in being an EE.

The community that was BIX was very worthwhile. I came to know many wonderful people, and even met a few of them in real life. Van Horn and I still collaborate on some things.