At Saturday Dec 5th 2009 we received the confirmation for a booth at the FOSDEM 2010 6-7 Feb 2010, Brussels Belgium. (FOSDEM Event Organisation)
and at Tuesday 15th, 2009 we also received the confirmation for a booth at the CEBIT 2010. CAcert get this sponsored booth from the Linux New Media (Cebit Open Source) (CEBIT Event Organisation)
I’m visiting Delhi and Varanasi beginning of Februari 2010. Is there anyone interested meeting me over there?
If properly planned sufficiently ahead of time, I might be able to manage to get multiple assurers there to get you up to assurer level in one time. But this requires planning and some interest.
Contact me if you’re interested: aphexer at somewhat obfuscated cacert dot org
In the last few weeks, our one Support Engineer (Werner, working mostly alone) has processed 65 support requests, 40 in the last week. Each case generates 5 mails. At the moment, the SE works with an absence of system, on a clunky silly mailing list, so there is no workflow assistance available to him. He has to remember each of those cases over the days-cycle time, and relate them to all the other emails.
Errors are inevitable. I’ve so far seen and counted 3 errors or blunders. Which means we’re talking around a 5% error rate. That’s to be expected when building a new system, working with fresh people, with minimal historical help, and working through a flood of a backlog with crappy technical support and poor information. Also known as, drowning.
(Obviously, in time, we want to reduce that to around 1-2%. When I did my 5-10 cases a month back, I generated at least one error. I’m not good enough for Support, I’m up in the 10-20% range.)
You can help us by pointing out the errors, directly, and suggesting what it is you would rather have seen. Positive suggestions are always appreciated.
The Triage team — Wolfgang, Martin, Michael, Joost — have to this point worked through outstanding emails back to July this year. See the attached for a picture of today’s Inbox. *Yes, it’s more or less empty!* They got there last night, and have reached the target I set them, to get back to July.
That means a human has processed every one of approximately one thousand support emails received over the last 5 months. There’s probably dozens of errors in their processing, but that misses the point.
In the next month or so, some or all of the Triage people above will get through their ABCs and become SEs or Support Engineers. At that point Werner will have help. At that point, we’ll be able to improve our systems. And, we’ll need more Triage people!
You can help us by signing up to Triage. Let me know if you fit the profile: Assurer, great with mail / MUA, etc, time to handle lots of little, quick tasks, good with English reading (other languages an advantage), and you grok the community (CCA, DRP and you want to know more about Security Policy but were always afraid to ask…). IRC.
We need people outside the European evening slot…
iang,
interim, temporary, impatient Support t/l,
looking for any excuse to get sacked!
CAcert Assurer Training Event Göteborg
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Much has happened during the past year. A list of up till now mostly “orally transmitted” rules have been cast in policies. New procedures (e.g. the Assurer Challenge) and obligations (e.g. in the CAcert Community Agreement) have been decided. The Assurer Training Events try to bring all this informations to “the people”:
– To what, does the CCA protect every CAcert-Community-Member and as such also you?
– Can you recount the 5 statements of the “Purpose of Assurance”?
– Can you at least recount 10 security marks of the Swedish passport?
Answers to these and following questions are given at the Assurer Training Events (ATE’s).
Participation in the events is free, Contributions are however appreciated.
Continue reading
Recently a dispute was filed about some confusion with our “Trusted Third Party” procedure. As part of this arbitration the board was asked for some explanatory words on the discontinuation of the TTP. In order to comply with this request and also shed some light on the issue, I have taken on the task of explaining this.
First off there is a misconception, that the board decided to discontinue the TTP. That is a misconception, because the board does not have the authority to do so. However the TTP was discontinued by the policy-group. The reason for this was simply that there was no policy to describe how the TTP procedure worked. As such the practice was outside the policies and needed to be stopped until a policy has been written defining TTP. The policy group has since made several attempts at writing such a policy, but has not yet come to a conclusion.
So I would invite everyone interested in this area, to please join the policy group, which is open to all community members, and help us write this policy and remedy the situation.
After the policy group had made the decision to discontinue several practices that fell outside the Assurance Policy by moving it to policy status the board felt it necessary, in its role as executive organ of CAcert, to enforce that decision. It did so with a motion ordering the ceasing of all assurances not under the Assurance Policy. This motion caused the systems team to terminate these practices.
However at the time it was missed that there was still a page up on the cacert.org website explaining the availability of the TTP process. This page has since been removed.
So to sum up, the board neither had the power nor did it in fact terminate the TTP, it simply enforced a decision by the policy group. However the communication of these facts was sorely lacking.
So to clear things up, and to comply with the Arbitrator order in Dispute a20091118.1 it should be clearly stated that:
The TTP programme is effectively Frozen until a subsidiary policy under the Assurance Policy is written and moved to DRAFT. Until such a time the TTP programme is against the Assurance Policy rules.
Note: although I am currently serving on the CAcert Inc. Board of Directors, I do not have authority to speak for the board. Therefore this article is written solely on my own behalf.