Board announces new name for the OCF.
March 31, 2016
Late Thursday night, the Board of Directors of the Open Computing Facility voted to rename the organization to the Open Facility for Computing (OFC).
"After seeing 'OCF' written as 'OFC' by people on Facebook, Twitter, and even by the Daily Cal's writers all in the same day, I decided it was worth bringing up at one of our meetings," said Chris Kuehl, the organization's former Site Manager. (Chris recently stepped down to focus on his studies.)
After a heated discussion (and short break to get boba), the members of the Board voted unanimously to adopt the new name and acronym.
"I try really hard to stay away from social media like Reddit and Facebook," said Nick Impicciche, the OFC's current General Manager. "Still, we're pretty strong believers in democracy, and it's clear what the people wanted."
After the decision was announced, OCF OFC
technicians worked into the night to get the website moved from
ocf.berkeley.edu to its new home at
ofc.berkeley.edu.
In the coming days, we'll be reaching out to student groups using our web hosting to ask them to replace their now-outdated "Hosted by OCF" web banners. We're also working with facilities to get some stickers printed to cover up the signs in the hallways of MLK.
The Open Facility for Computing is an all-volunteer, student-run organization. It was founded in 1989 to serve the interests of the UC Berkeley campus community.
Questions about this change? Please reach out to devnull@ofc.berkeley.edu.
About our organization
Founded back in 1989 by an agile team of Node.js developers disillusioned by a lack of free campus printing, the OFC (formerly OCF) has established itself as an important stop along the day of any busy undergrad.
Our staff work hard to provide valuable services to the campus community:
- Free printing, used by over 5,000 students per semester
- A spiffy computer lab in 171 MLK
- Free printing
- Web, application, and email hosting for over 80% of student groups and thousands of individual students
- Free printing
With the change in name, our volunteer staffers hope to spend less time correcting usage of our acronym, and more time trying to figure out why your paper didn't come out of the printer.
