You invite some friends to a party at your home. While at the party, they sublet your home to strangers. You learn this after the strangers are throwing their own parties in your home and moving in, eating your food, dating your wife.

Although the plot is straight out of Madhouse (1990), I'm really talking about San José State University's network managers facing the reality of Skype adoption. In this metaphor:

• the student Skypers are the friends,

• the sublease is the Skype EULA,

• the strangers are the members of the Skype network,

• and side effects are:

  • a new thing to support without any planned budget,

  • unanticipated use of your networks,

  • unknown exposure to various risks on your master list.

This gets trickier when Skype's architecture (a blend of p2p and centralized services) isn't well understood beforehand.

Don Baker and Bob Neal are resisting proven defensive instincts. Before tossing out the scoundrels and locking the doors, they're inviting comment from campus stakeholders and building expertise by bringing an eBay/Skype person to a closed briefing on Tuesday. All the public attention doesn't make it easier to take a measured approach, so these SJSU University Computing and Telecom (UCAT) execs are showing great discipline.

If you want to learn more, and share your thoughts, Steve Sloan is hosting a discussion, open to the public, on Skype in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications (JMC). We'll be Skypecasting it too. I'll see you there.