Web Steering Committee Minutes
May 24, 2001

Attending: Steve Butts, Jim Evans, Pete Gilbert, Ruth Lanouette, Michael Thorp, Nancy Truesdell, Steve Blodgett, Robert Lowe

The meeting began just after 3 p.m. The first item was final approval for the cover letter for the description of the proposed Webmaster position. The only change to Mr. Butts's Revision 1 was to have a single recipient, President Warch. The Steering Committee Chair will prepare and forward the request forthwith.

Next was a brief discussion of Lawrence's reaction to the upcoming creation of two new high level web domains, .biz and .info. We reasonably quickly resolved that LU should reserve three additional URLs: Lawrence.info, LawrenceUniversity.edu and LawrenceUniversity.info, and leave .biz the heck alone. Mr. Gilbert will arrange this when the domains open for URL assignment.

The recent discovery of a member of the Lawrence community's use of the campus net-work for parttime employment raised the issue of whether we should seek to change the current wording prohibiting the "commercial" use of computing and network resources. After a somewhat meandering but nonetheless fairly cogent discussion, the general feel-ing was that (1) the current text was sufficient to allow the University to take action if violations were to become egregious, and (2) the web as a social/economic institution has changed so profoundly since its inception that we could not even begin to draw a clear line between activities that are clearly "commercial" and those that are simply part of modern life, and we decided to take no action.

The final item was review of our RFP for consulting help for substantial revisions to the design of our site. Mr. Gilbert had added several items to the draft and it was deemed ready to go. He will run it by Bill Hodgkiss and thence into the wider world.

Our last meeting for the academc year is to be in two weeks, on June 7.

Stephen Butts, Secretary Pro tem

Created on ... May 25, 2001