Espen, et al,

I'm rolling this question together with an e-mail you'd sent last week.  There's a good deal of overlap between topics that I thought others might appreciate hearing.  The excerpts are from EspenA: 

this should be a "non-issue" for me if I use my Concours email (--actual e-mail deleted--)as my primary email. But I am doing that on newparadigm, and still can't get access to the wiki.

I cannot comment on the NP wiki setup as Apps Team does not own that resource.  I'm under the impression different credentials are used there.  It is worth noting that bsgalliance.com uses the BSG Platform User Service (our SAML 2.0-compatible identity provider) which is meaningful simply because it's the convergence point for single sign-on for all BSG apps and systems.  This is being rolled out incrementally as resources are available, therefore today we have many systems requiring their own credentials; however, there will be a future date when your bsgalliance.com account will get you in to everything in our ecosystem.

(I am not on bsgalliance.com - how do I change my primary email address?)

By primary e-mail address we mean the address you use 99% of the time on bsgalliance.com.  You can create as many accounts as you want here, but we do not recommend this practice as it effectively splits your identity within the system.  We have the notion of user personas, but that's for another time.  For now, we recommend you pick one e-mail as your primary and we'll configure your usage around that account.  For example, mine is actually my Hotmail account; however, I'm recognized by the system as a BSG employee and other corresponding benefits.

So, what do I do? I think relying on people to remove a .bsglock tag manually will slow things down, since they inevitably will forget and I am six time-zones away. Also, removing this tag may open up discussions to more people than we want, viz. the openly accessible thread above (which came to me through Bloglines).

I don't share your pessimism ("inevitably will forget") about this feature's learnability; however, experience has shown that people adapt to a publishing model (such as e.lab's and in contrast with a point-to-point model like e-mail) at different rates which can lead to frustration on the part of both "speaker" and "listener".  

Ultimately, whether a user narrows his audience by adding a tag or widens her audience by removing a tag, the step of audience determination must happen.  We're all comfortable now with determining an audience when sending e-mail, but we weren't always and certainly mistakes are still made today (e.g. type ahead filling in a different "Scott").

Lastly, for BSG upper management, the choice was made to err on the side of restrictive publishing (hence the default BSGLock for every BSG employee).  While this means removing the tag and this can be construed as slowing things down, there's both legitimate reasons for the choice and functional options (the Preference setting) for easing the burden.

I am not an employee, but a contractor with Concours, but I have been in that position (with the title of Euroepan Research Director) for nine years and, as a matter of course, pitch in on every research project where I can contribute. How about creating a category of users called "trusted partner" or something like that?

The Hub supports such scenarios / groupings.  Jeff Milne is your contact for helping get this policy configured correctly within bsgalliance.com. 

(incidentally, this interface is really ugly in Firefox 3.0b4) 

While this statement is certainly provocative, it's not tremendously informative: do you have a screen shot or a clarification of interface(s) you find "ugly"?  We actively test IE7 and FF2 so perhaps you're encountering rendering bugs we're unaware of.

Comments welcome.