[Theforum] why meo (was: evolt.org revamp comment period open)

[Marlene Bruce]

>Why are we offering it [meo]? Other than 'we already do'?

The premise for having meo: it's an education method to help our
members stretch their development wings.

This is a great idea.

Having meo leads to a need for warm bodies to receive, review, and
approve/deny membership requests. It also means we need to monitor
ongoing usage for appropriateness or abuse, which is a much bigger
task. I would suspect there's a fair amount of abuse out there,
starting right here with yours truly (at least in part). meo further
leads to bandwidth usage (we are waiting to find out how much).

I'm not sure what all gets used by meo members, but the validity of
our software licenses are in some cases questionable, and we run the
risk of being taken to task for illegal usage. Offering use of
questionably-licensed software to anyone who meets our criteria for
access compounds the problem.

My understanding is that we only have one person to manage meo
accounts (Dean, please correct me if I'm wrong), and that's not
enough to receive, review and approve/deny inquiries, as well as
police appropriateness of usage.

So the "keeping meo" issues seem to be:

* finding more warm bodies to manage the service
* acquiring legal software licenses (?)
* paying bandwidth costs

And the "ending meo" issues seem to be:

* email addresses going away
* linkrot

Here's my opinion:

I would like us to be able to offer a service like meo in addition to
something like Evolters. If I had to prioritize, I think Evolters
would be more important to the community as a whole. If we could find
a way to have both, that would be great. If not, we need to minimize
the hardships for people with members accounts and email addresses,
and visitors who follow links to members sites.

I think right now we need to stop accepting new accounts until we
figure out what's going to happen. Dean, can you (or have you) put
that on hold?

If we have to end meo, I believe we should be doing everything
possible to minimize any inconvenience to our members and audiences,
as long as it doesn't endanger our existence. If we can accept that
premise, then we should be able to find a mutually agreeable solution.

Marlene