Restricted Minutes
University Board Meeting - March 2008
...
Agenda Item
Item: Weblogs by students and members of staff.
Sponsor: Professor Dumbledaw Head of Hackademic Standards
Proposal: To issue a set of standards for weblog and other internet publishing

It has come the the notice of the board that a number of students and staff are publishing things called weblogs (known colloquially as blog's). These are free text unsupervised articles that are gaining in popularity in the internet especially with the younger element of our society. Our working party on internet use within the university uncovered a number of these weblogs which we discovered are open documents in as much that anyone who has a computer with internet access can read them without restriction.
Most weblogs are inconsequential, just being a private diary of thoughts, or photographs of the young people having a good time.
However we have uncovered a few weblogs that are potentially damaging to the standing of the university. One in particular, we have discovered, is written by a member of staff and has a large following. Whilst humerous in nature, it does not cast a very positive light on the university and in particular the leadership of this institution and is nefarious in deed. Due to the access to the level of information this individual (who goes by the internet pseudonym of platothefish) appears to have, he or she is not a junior member of staff. It is not thought that this individual has access to the highest levels of data like our board minutes for example, so we assume that he or she is an academic and not of senior management grading.
In the light of the government developing new rules for such activities with civil servants we would like to propose that the board draw up a set of regulations for our own students and staff to abide by.

It was carried that a draft set of publishing standards would be presented to the next board meeting in April by Prof. Dumbledaw.



For the news about restrictions by the government on it's own civil serpents see here.

Me thinks that the board have forgotten something... stay tuned. However it must be nice to know that your restricted minutes are safe from 'such nefarious deeds'.