[ppml] Policy Proposal 2003-1: Human Point of Contact

[Owen DeLong]

I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying.  This isn't really
about ROLE vs. individual accounts.  It's about having at least one POC that
leads to a human being, not an autoresponder, and not a voice-jail.  It's
about being able to get things resolved.  I will probably draft an amendment
to the proposal to clarify this issue prior to the meeting and send it to 
PPML
that allows for ROLE accounts as long as the ROLE account provides a phone
number that is ANSWERED (at least during business hours local time to the
published address) by a human being, and an email address which is READ by
humans, and not /dev/null'ed by a broken autoresponder.

I admit that the originally I was thinking that a human name was required 
for
this, and the policy was written in that form.  However, based on feedback
I have received, I still think it's important to be able to reach an actual
human, but I understand the desire to spread that workload and use role
accounts.  I think there are ways to accomodate this while still preserving
the intent of the policy.  What I am primarily trying to fix here is the
situations where ROLE accounts are used and NO human is reachable under
any circumstances.

As to how people run their business, in any business, there are community
standards to which every business is expected to conform.  If you want to
operate a business (or otherwise participate in) the Internet, there are
community standards to which it is reasonable to expect you to conform.
In this case, I propose that it is a reasonable community standard to expect
people who run networks to be reachable in an effort to resolve problems
being created by their networks.

Owen


--On Tuesday, March 4, 2003 21:34 -0500 Richard A Steenbergen 
<ras at e-gerbil.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 11:36:19AM -0500, Member Services wrote:
>> Problems:
>>         I understand the issue of hate mail, threats, and the general
>>         difficulty of dealing with irate complainers.  However, in
>>         any business, there are risks.  Being the human lightning rod
>>         for these complaints at a large provider is not a lot of fun,
>>         but it is a job which must be done.  Nobody likes to clean
>>         the restroom.
>
> That sounds like a volunteer to me... You're available 24/7 right?
>
> Let's get real here, that policy isn't just bad it's absurd. Role accounts
> exist for a reason, and 99% of the time it is to improve communications.
> I'd suggest that trying to solve the 1% of the cases where people are
> hiding behind roles by breaking the other 99% is not the way to go.
>
> I'd also suggest that it is a fallacy to project what you consider
> "reasonable" in your business onto others. For example, who is the 1
> person that you would recommend to handle all of UUNet's issues?
>
> --
> Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
> GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)