ICT inside and out

One of the things I have been pondering today is user account names..

Schools are coming around to the idea of having user account names that are longer than previously experienced.

When you login to local resources you can have a user account like john.smith because it is unlikely that inside your organization you will have someone with the same name.

With the Not a VLE project I want to start going down the road of a globally structured naming schema, eh? you may be thinking.. This is important because one of the main things I want to use is everything.

I don't want to be restricted and I don't want users to have multiple accounts or need to remember usernames. There are many reasons for this but the most important is simplicity and natural progression.

So you may be used to:

john.smith

Get ready to get used to:

dem.john.smith

dem here is identifying the school/organization. In this case it's Demo Primary School.

Is this scalable for schools?

By my maths there can be 17576 schools in this case. In the UK there are that many schools.. But what if we want to use global services? Shibboleth will handle this in some cases and in the future this should be more frequent...

To summarize on Scalability, the answer is in debate. Also is it a good identifying the organization of a pupil in a username from a child protection/data protection/copyright point of view..

If my brain worked today I think I could propose a solution for this problem...