Peter Tribble wrote:
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.
The migration to new infrastructure is primarily that - a migration to new infrastructure, it is not a re-architecture of the existing Community structures.
Currently data about Community members is spread across several applications, e.g. the Portal, Poll and so forth. Complicating the migration process is that none of these systems has a completely accurate model of the way the Community functions at present. The individual applications often hold only partial information, or worse still, information that is in conflict. The aim of the forthcoming migration is to centralise the disparate sources of information, and hopefully address the inconsistencies. The migration is not intended to fully address all of the mismatches between the theory and practice of how the Community functions, although it should help move us towards that goal.
In the case of CGs we have kept closely to the structures defined in the current Constitution because we have no mandate to change those structures without such changes being agreed by the Community, in the form of a new or amended Constitution.
In the case of Projects, they are only loosely defined in the Constitution, and User Groups not at all. We've therefore largely followed the lead of the proposed new Constitution, which as we all know failed to be ratified. That seemed to be the most prudent course, as the new Constitution was drafted in light of the experience of the Community in setting up and running both Projects and User Groups.
As for the issue with CG Contributors, one possible constitutional fix seems fairly obvious - remove the 'for life' nature of Contributor status, either by creating a new role for active contributors, or perhaps re-purposing the Emeritus Contributor status for people who are no longer actively contributing. However as I have said, that will require constitutional changes.
Another example of something that that probably needs addressing is that UGs and Ps can't currently grant voting rights. Certainly, in the case of UGs that seems like it might disenfranchise people who contribute significantly to the Community - but again, addressing that is primarily a Constitutional issue.
It seems clear that the constitutional issues are all ones that the OGB should discuss and decide, in consultation with the wider community. They are explicitly not issues that the rollout of the new infrastructure will be addressing.
I suggest the correct forum for any such discussion is ogb-discuss, rather than website-dicuss, although I see this thread is currently being cross-posted to both.
-- Alan Burlison -- _______________________________________________ website-discuss mailing list [email protected]
