ORC skills and details doc

[Simon Thorpe]

Hi everyone,

Remember the idea for an ORC Members' Skills and Details google doc?

I think this is a vital part of trying to facilitate action and participation in this group beyond London, be it extra-London meetings (helped by knowing people's localities through the doc) or digital collaboration (helped by knowing people's interests through the doc).

The problem is that if it's not up on the website it's not very prominent and a lot of people won't remember to fill it in. Emailing it to the list means it quickly gets lost and forgotten in dusty depths of inboxes. The problem with putting in on the website and making it public is if people have names and email addresses there, it might be accessible to spammers or who knows.

I think I have a solution though.

I've made the doc Private, and shared it only with our google group reading...@googlegroups.com. This should mean that I can make the link publicly accessible online, but thanks to Google's service integration (better the devil you know?) only people who are members of the mailing list can view or edit the doc. I think.

So please experiment with this and check it works and let me know if you have any concerns.

Here's the google doc again for people to fill out: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ahem14FWwYLWdEU3bFY5Ym1YRE0tMEZINjdLOXpjUmc#gid=0

I'll put it up as a project so people can find it easily in future.

Si

[Sam Halvorsen]

Do you need to have a gmail account to access this Si? I suppose they are free and easy to set up right? in which case just being lazy....

[Simon Thorpe]

Ah. I hoped not. The wording of the guide I read suggested that anyone who's a member of the google group should be able to access the doc, and no one else. Now I think about it I can't think of a way for google to recognise you as a member of the group unless you were logged into your google account...

So when you try to visit it's asking you to log in to your google account?

That's a shame, thought I had a good solution!

The alternative was having it accessible to anyone with a link, which is secure enough if we only circulate it by email, like we have done, but then no one uses it. We could do with some expertise on the risks of having it accessible through the website with people's email addresses in. Could spam bots read it and steal addresses? I don't know.

hrm...

[Kirsten Forkert]

I don't know if listing the email addresses with out the @ sign (like
for example reading-occupyATgooglegroups.com) will fool the spambots.
Or is that an urban myth?

Kirsten

[Simon Thorpe]

I think that sort of thing can work but you have to be more clever and complex about it.

e.g. until recently the ORC address on the website was listed as occupyresearchcollective [at] fastmail [dot] co [dot] uk

and we're now getting quite a lot of spam which I'm sure must have been able to read and harvest that email address. I've now added even more anti-spam detritus into the above in hope of stemming the tide (inspired by Occupy sites - yay!). Hopefully it'll help.

So we could maybe have two separate columns for email, the first bit, and the domain. What do you call the first bit?