Computing & Information Services
Computing Policy Committee Meeting Minutes
October 3, 2006
11:00 am – 12:00 pm, ETC 309
Committee members in attendance: David Schiff, Luc Monnin, Akihiko Miyoshi, Sonia Sabnis, Marianne Colgrove, Victoria Hanawalt, Karen King, Jon Rivenburg, Ed McFarlane, Christine Mack, Marty Ringle, Molly Thurston Parker.
David Schiff called the meeting to order at 11:00 am.
1. Review of User Agreement (UA) and Procedures for Handling Violations:
At the last CPC meeting (February 24, 2006), Ed McFarlane proposed amending the wording in the document “Procedures for Handling Violations of the User Agreement”, Student Infractions, Level 3, first sentence. The sentence reads: If a student does not agree to have a letter sent to the Dean of Students describing a serious problem, or if a student repeats a serious problem after being warned and/or sanctioned, or if there is a major violation of the law or the user agreement that jeopardizes the Reed community, then CIS will: (a) impose necessary sanctions with respect to the use of college computer facilities and equipment; (b) immediately notify the Dean of Students; (c) file an honor case or refer the case to the Community Rights Sub-committee or other body as appropriate; (d) If a threat of bodily harm is involved, Community Safety will be immediately notified.
Ed suggested changing the phrase “then CIS will” to “then CIS may.” David Schiff suggested using a stronger word than ‘may’ (something in between ‘may’ and ‘will’). Vickie Hanawalt suggested using the phrase “will normally” rather than “may”. The committee approved the change to “then CIS will normally…”.
Vickie suggested making clause (d) a separate sentence. The committee approved the change.
Marty Ringle suggested removing the clause “that jeopardizes the Reed community” from the phrase “or if there is a major violation of the law or the user agreement that jeopardizes the Reed community.” The committee approved the change.
Marty asked if the committee members had any questions about the user agreement or recommendations for modifications. David asked what the phrase “Excessive non-academic use of network bandwidth or CPU cycles” means (listed in the “Prohibited Uses” section of the UA). Marty explained the term “non-academic uses” refer to uses such as gaming that can consume a large percentage of the network bandwidth.
Marianne Colgrove noted that, in the Prohibited Uses section of the UA, in the item “Commercial activities, such as development of software for sale, work undertaken to support any company, or contract work unrelated to Reed's academic mission”, the term “academic” could be excluded. David said you could make the case that anything a faculty member does is related to Reed’s academic mission, but non-faculty cases may be different. Marty noted that private business is prohibited by the user agreement, in order to prevent licensing conflicts (we hold many educational software licenses that restrict usage to not-for-profit activities that fall within the mission of the college). David recommended clarifying the text of the Computer User Agreement to explicitly mention educational restrictions on licenses.
Action item: Marty will draft an amendment to part (3) of the statement under “Prohibited Uses”, In general, any uses of Reed's computer facilities which (1) infringe on another individual's right to privacy, (2) adversely affect members of the user community, (3) are not allowed under the terms of our software licenses, or (4) are illegal, are prohibited, to clarify why our licenses are restricted.
Karen King noted the ‘Access to User Materials’ section of the UA is not very detailed. Aki Miyoshi recommended comparing our text to other schools’ policies on user material access. Luc Monnin noted that Johns Hopkins has a quiz relating to policies and prohibitions, which uses must pass to use the network.
David suggested we schedule a full meeting to discuss changes to the UA after committee members have time to look at other schools’ policies. Marty noted that he will distribute a link to the EDUCAUSE website, which contains a library of institutions’ user policies (The relevant url is: http://www.educause.edu/Browse/645?PARENT_ID=110). Aki asked what the most common violations usually are at Reed. Marianne said that the most common are illegal music and movie sharing. Marty noted that Reed has relatively few violations or infringement claims, compared to other higher education institutions, and, to his knowledge, we’ve never had a repeat offender.
Karen recommended that we look more at the administrative side of the UA. Marty suggested that the committee might consider having different versions of the UA for staff, faculty, and students. He pointed out that while the UA doesn’t cite HIPPA, FERPA, or other legislation, there are various laws governing data confidentiality that apply to employees of the college. David noted that the advantage to not naming specific legislation is that the legislation may change while the language in the UA covers all illegal activity.
Action item: At the next CPC meeting, the committee will revisit the User Agreement, Procedures for Handling Violations, and other computing policies and discuss any changes proposed by committee members.
2. SPAM expiration:
SPAM is stored on our network and consumes a great deal of server space (65-70% of all incoming messages are SPAM) and network bandwidth (for daily backups). Most other colleges have policies to automatically erase stored SPAM after a certain period (commonly 30 days). CIS proposes an auto-expiration protocol that allows users to change the 30 day expiration default or to opt-out of auto-expiration entirely. Ed asked if we will have a limit by which time all SPAM has to be deleted. Marty said that CIS wasn't proposing an ultimate time limit for everyone –– people who opt out could preserve SPAM as long as they want. Jon Rivenburg noted that the way in which a user’s client-side SPAM filter is set up also makes a difference, so it’s important that the community know about the differences between the way SPAM is handled on the mail server and the way they handle on their own machine.
CIS is also proposing an opt-in auto-expiration protocol for Trash. All users would have the option to automatically expire their Trash messages after a certain time interval (to be selected by the user).
As there were no other questions or comments, Marty asked the committee to approve the SPAM opt-out and Trash opt-in auto-expiration policies. The committee unanimously approved both policies. CIS staff will implement the policies before the end of the fall semester. Vickie suggested that background information be made available to users when the policies are implemented so that they will understand the issues surrounding SPAM (such as server space consumption).
Action item: Molly will schedule the next CPC meeting for November.