Cartel Mission Statement

Our mission is to facilitate communication between technical staff at a small set of peer technical institutions, to discuss ways to meet common needs, and to share ideas and solutions. Discussing both our commonalities and our differences provides us with insights for the directions our respective institutions will take in maintaining our status as pre-eminent technical institutions.

Guidelines for membership:

While we believe that keeping the number of members attending our sessions to a reasonable size is a desirable goal, the following features are the common values that we believe are essential in a member of our organization:

• Ability and willingness to do local development of software solutions for large scale problems, and a policy of releasing those systems to other organizations, via an open source license.
• Strong Centralized IT organizations, which provide centralized enterprise services to large portions of their institution's environment. Examples of such services include: file systems, email, calendaring, networking, tech support, printing, directory services, public computing spaces, etc.
  
  

Procedures, Resources, and Events:

All decisions made by the organization, including inviting new institutions to join the organization, will be made by a vote of the current member institutions. One vote shall be cast by each institution, and each institution may use whatever method they prefer to determine how to cast that vote.

The organization shall hold an annual conference at one of the member institutions. The conference will typically consist of a series of round-table discussions about various issues, but other formats can be explored. Each member institution should send 2-5 staff members to the conference, primarily developers, system administrators and network administrators. The hosting institution is welcome to bring a larger number of people to the event, but should remember that round-table discussions become unwieldy with large numbers of speakers. The hosting institution is also welcome to invite interesting members of the local community to attend.

The organization shall maintain a mailing list of interested staff members at the member institutions. This list will be used to coordinate the conference planning, and for discussion between conferences. In particular, discussion of issues and initiatives that occur between conferences will help to reduce the amount of redundant development performed at our institutions, and the amount of redundant discussion at the conference.

Where necessary, the organization shall serve as a way to coordinate feedback provided to vendors.