On 18 Mar 2013, at 14:50, Fearghas McKay <fearghas@gmail.com> wrote:
The NCC already sure has a large number of people in the dB who are non-members ?
Some of whom will hold resources as well as being contacts ?
Is the use case so drastically different ?
Yes. Maybe. Depends. The costs of maintaining existing DB entries for these non-members are probably negligible. I think. Money may well change hands whenever these non-members get additional services from the NCC such as resource certification. Unless of course the membership decides to absorb the costs of doing that "for free". Even if no charges are levied, NCC staff may need to spend a lot of time verifying who those PI holders are before issuing certification tokens for their resources. Although I have no idea about the extent of those incremental costs, they must surely be more than holding some tuples in the database. It would be helpful to get some upper and lower bounds on what the likely costs would be. I doubt they will be negligible or bankrupt the NCC. The question is where they might sit between these two extremes. We just don't know. I'd like to get this info as input to the discussions so we can hopefully arrive at a consensus on something that won't spring last-minute surprises.