SRCF: Membership Administration

SRCF Membership Administration activity should expand, and become more pro-active.

The Society does not know enough about who its members are, or what they want and need. The more engaged the Society is with its members (both individual and collective), the easier it will be to extract donations, detect unusual behaviour, and make resource allocation decisions.

There are costs associated with each user and society the SRCF serves: the security risk of granting access, and the resources tied up. These are small, but cumulative.

The Society should liaise with each group member it has. This doubtless entails having a lot of deputy membership secretaries. In principle, individual users could also be assigned (if they want one) some contact point (possibly an SRCF rep in their college, in the case of undergrads).

Many users nowadays are not SRCF members for the shell access, and the friendly human face the Society presents via email could well be complemented by face-to-face contact for non-technical users who'd have someone they could bump into in the department or college who could answer incidental questions about the SRCF, particularly where the member doesn't know the right question to ask and doesn't want to waste sysadmin time over it.

Ultimately there's no particular reason why trusted SRCF reps in colleges can't reissue passwords (which could then be done on paper rather than via email) or sort out things like SQL database requests. Currently the SRCF trusts the @cam email system for a lot of the job of identifying users, and behind the scenes @cam probably trusts a lot of college-based information, so this is not necessarily a step backwards in security terms!

But by far the most important change is to become pro-active with respect to societies. No-one is going to tell the SRCF when a society becomes defunct, at least not under the current arrangements, so the SRCF must find out for itself. The best way to do this is probably just periodic checkups, but doing it personally rather than the nasty automated emails employed by CUSU would add a pleasant human touch.

Another minor touch would be stricter checking of accidental attempts to register the same society twice within the SRCF.