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About Our Organization

Open Computing Facilitators.

The OCF is an all-volunteer, student-run, student-initiated service group dedicated to free computing for all University of California at Berkeley students, faculty, and staff. The mission of the OCF is to provide an environment where no member of Berkeley's campus community is denied the computer resources he or she seeks, and to appeal to all members of the Berkeley campus community with unsatisfied computing needs and to provide a place for those interested in computing to fully explore that interest. We do our best not to be elitist.

We are always securing more resources to fully meet the needs of everyone in the campus community, and we do have enough to meet a large number of them. Our primary resources are our UNIX workstations and UNIX servers -- mostly Sun Sparc -- that are administered by student volunteers, and located in Heller Lounge (2nd level) of the MLK Student Union, as well as 72 Barrows Hall.

To help people explore the field of computing and educate them about the resources available, the OCF also provides a variety of educational services. We co-sponsor a series of Help Sessions which are short classes taught throughout the semester on a wide range of computing topics, from beginner to advanced levels, and focusing on resources available to the Berkeley campus community. We also offer e-mail and in-person consulting with our volunteer staff members, as well as on-line sources of information about computing on the Berkeley campus and how to use the available resources.

The Computer Science Undergraduate Association is OCF's sister organization. We have put on career fairs in the past, with and without them.

Policies for this cluster and decisions for the OCF organization are made by the OCF Board of Directors, a group of students elected each semester by the OCF membership. The Board meetings, held at least once every two weeks when classes are in session, are open to the public and provide a chance for any user to express their concerns or opinions about the OCF.

If you need to contact the OCF computer system administrators, send e-mail to site-manager@OCF.Berkeley.EDU. If you need to contact the OCF organization, you can write to general-manager@OCF.Berkeley.EDU. We also have a post address:

Open Computing Facility
400 Eshleman Hall
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720

Official Documents of the OCF

Other Information about the OCF

The OCF also runs the www.ocf.berkeley.edu http server and the ftp.ocf.berkeley.edu anonymous ftp server.