WHAT IS LUCY?

Lucy is an electronic ombudsman, ready to receive questions of all
kinds from the community at large. Any member of the MIT community may
ask a question on-line, ranging from "I'm new to the area. Where is a
good, moderately priced restaurant suitable for an evening out?" to "I
recently stole a small amount of cash from a fellow staff member. No
one suspects but I'm feeling horribly guilty. What should I do?

Communications will be anonymous, unless the sender chooses otherwise.
A subset of lucy questions and answers will be available on-line to
the community for browsing (with the sender's permission only and with
all potential identifiers removed). Starting in late January, anyone
wanting to communicate with lucy will be able to submit a question by
running an application that will be available as a pre-login option on
any Athena workstation. (An Athena account is NOT required.) Even if
the user logs in before sending the question, the username will be
removed from the message before it is sent to lucy, so that it will be
sent anonymously unless a name or other identifier is explicitly
added.  Questions which include the sender's name may be answered
personally, while questions with no identifying information will need
to be read in browsing mode.

		   WHAT MOTIVATED LUCY DEVELOPMENT?

Disclaimer:  This section isn't a prepared statement of the Athena
Harassment Action Task Force.  It's Bruce Lewis' answer to the
question that everybody asks after seeing the above description of
what lucy is: "Why?"  The following paragraphs are influenced by my
personal opinions and shouldn't be taken as a statement of Project
Athena or any other organization.

The idea for lucy, inspired by the highly successful "Uncle Ezra" at
Cornell, arose as a means of helping address MIT's harassment problem.
The most prevalent form of harassment at MIT is sexual harassment of
women by men.

Say A feels harassed by B.  The quickest way A can deal with the
situation is to confront B directly, and then bring it to someone else
if B won't listen.  However, A may feel too intimidated to take such a
course of action and need someplace else to turn.  There are already a
number of peer groups, hotlines, and other people available, which is
good.  But suppose A doesn't want to be revealed to anybody, not even
as a voice over the phone, but still wants advice.  Then lucy is
always there.

Another thing that makes lucy a helpful addition to the resources
already available is the browser.  If A is willing to have the
question/answer published (with any identifying details removed),
then the whole MIT community can learn something about the problem.
Community awareness is a big need that the browser can help meet.

Hopefully people will be as creative in their questions to lucy as
Cornell students have been with Uncle Ezra.  Questions don't need to
all be about harassment.  If they are interesting and varied, a lot of
people will read the browser, possibly gaining an education in the
process.