I would like to take opportunity on the EARN88 meeting to organize one or two BOFs (assuming I am able to attend EARN88, which is yet to be confirmed), on one of the following topics: - BOF-UDS: User Directory Services. We would discuss what kind of user directory services are required on EARN, analyze the reasons why the NETSERV UDS registration had little success, discuss the possible implementations of a new UDS system, etc. Please don't start a religious argument about OSI directories. I don't think users are interested in software that will be available in 5 years, and in the meanwhile I get about one request a day asking me about one Prof. Johnson from Zorglub University. The participation of a few end-users (who already have some EARN experience) would be very helpful. - BOF-MAIL: Requirements for a new RFC822/RFC821 gateway-oriented mailer (ie a replacement for the Crosswell mailer). I insist on the term "gateway-oriented": this mailer would have to be designed in such a way as to make it easy to write gateways to other networks. When I wrote the EARN-JANET gateway, I wasted 50% of my time finding no-mods ways around bugs in the code, and another 10% finding out the best places to insert the gateway code. RFC822 will be alive for at least another 5 years, and the present mailer doesn't make it very easy to write gateways. - BOF-LIST: Discussions about the future of LISTSERV. What are the (important) new functions that need to be added? How can it be made more user-friendly? That would be a kind of "brainstorming" session in fact. It would be important that end-users participate in this. - BOF-MGT: Nodes management discussion. Anything you'd like to discuss about nodes management. I don't think this would be going to lead us anywhere, since the BITNET board seems to be unable to identify an entity authorized to make decisions on their behalf, but if someone is interested, why not. I don't propose any BOF on NETSERV since it had been decided to freeze it. We probably won't have time for the 4 BOFs, although I suspect that most of you won't attend all the conferences (after all, we already know how to use EARN don't we? :-) ) and that you'll have some free time in the evening. I have created four dummy lists on FRECP11 to collect the names of people interested in the various BOFs. Please subscribe to them if you'd like to attend the corresponding BOF; if you know of other persons who would be interested, feel free to forward this note to them. For example, if you're interested in the UDS and MAILER BOFs, you should do: TELL LISTSERV AT FRECP11 SUB BOF-UDS TELL LISTSERV AT FRECP11 SUB BOF-MAIL Note: these are dummy lists created for this survey only; you can't send mail to them, and I'll destroy them after EARN88. Eric