On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:57 PM, Michelle Olson<[email protected]> wrote:
> Jim Walker wrote:
>>
>> Thanks Michelle.
>>
>> In preparation for a meeting, I would like to see what we agree on.
>>
>> It appears there is general consensus from the OGB and members of the
>> opensolaris.org website team that Constitutional roles should not be
>> used to define website rights.
>> Is this true?
>
> No, there is no such consensus. The website community core contributors
> stand behind the roles as stated in the migration documentation.

What are we agreeing and disagreeing on? I have no problem
whatsoever with the roles as stated in the migration documentation.
I don't see any problem with moving to a new website based on those
roles.

The problem comes if you believe that the roles in the migration
documentation have anything to do with the constitution. It's
unfortunate that they use the same names, which just causes
confusion, especially as one could infer that the two roles match.

There's no problem with Projects and User Groups. The roles seem
reasonable and match to appropriate functionality.

The problem comes with Community Groups:

Core Contributor is a governance role, not a website role. You absolutely
have to manage website editing rights independently of community wide
voting rights. Do I really have to give someone a vote in the annual elections
just so they can delete a web page?

Now, the currently deployed auth app separates electoral roles from
website roles, whereas the transition documentation implies that they
aren't split. Which should I believe?

Contributor is a specific designation defined in the constitution, basically
a title we bestow upon those who have added value to our community.
(And something we ought to do more often.) Again, nothing to do with
website editing rights.

There's another problem with using the constitutional roles, which is that
of time. You want the website roles to evolve in real time as the members
of the community come and go. The constitution says that you can't do
that - CCs have a fixed term of 2 years, Contributors are for life.

Within a community you need the same hierarchy of roles as the other
collectives; basically Leader, Editor, Participant. Those roles - regardless
of what they're called - are needed in all collectives for the website to
be operational. They just don't map to the constitutional roles, and they
don't have to.

> What we agree on is that we need to move to the new infrastructure because
> the existing site is being decommissioned and we need to help the community
> make the move and learn the new applications.

Yes, we do, and I don't see any obstacles to doing so, apart from the
unnecessary conflation of constitutional and website roles. Declare them
separate and we're good to go.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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