@gegallagher asked in a PM:
Great set of questions!
Ensuring that only members of UChicago community get access is fairly easy. We just need to enable sign up with email ID’s ending in a uchicago.edu (or similar such as chicagobooth.edu or uchospitals.edu) domain. We can allow others to join such as local community members from Hyde Park on a case by case approval basis (which is expected to be a really low number and can be easily handled by a grad student admin).
If we wanted to restrict access to only UChicago graduate students, there is no precise way to do this, even using the university’s CNetID based authentication — see caveats listed for eduPersonAffiliation at Using LDAP Affiliations for Authorization – Knowledge Base – UChicago IT Services (requires CNet login to access). TLDR being the university maintains multiple affiliations such as student, staff, academic, alum, etc. for members of the campus community but there is no such affiliation as a grad student.
I want to make a clarification about this platform being invite only, it is not. Anybody with a uchicago email ID can go to the homepage and sign up.
I am happy to check with UChicago IT Services when we reach the decision to do a university-wide deployment whether more precise authorization for grad students alone is possible. But my opinion is that this community should not be tied to or restricted by the way university chooses to do its authorization and instead should be open and welcoming to members of the university and the local neighborhood who want to participate.
The way I envision this can be done is (as I mentioned in my first paragraph above) by initially only allowing uchicago email IDs to sign up and in the future approving non-UChicago email IDs manually (that only if we reach a consensus to allow). All the advertising channels for entering this community will be grad-only (be it @grad-council, UChicagoGRAD, various DSACs or even individual departments) which will ensure we have a primarily grad/professional student body here. Even if some some curious undergrads end up joining it doesn’t hurt anyone; we are not supposed to be discussing anything against undergrads here in the first place, see # Always be Civil in FAQ.
EDIT: These also cover the following questions in the OP: