On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 10:56 PM, Alan Burlison<[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Indeed. > 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. That's good. > 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. The structures apply to the community governance; website operations aren't directly tied to that. > 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. And, by and large, the user group and project areas work well because they aren't entangled by the constitution. > 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. There's only an issue if contributor grants are misused for website access control. > 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. The reason it's being cross-posted is because there is a question as to how the new website will be using constitutional roles. There are no constitutional issues here. I, for one, am still unsure as to how the new website will work. So I'll ask: 1. Will the new system store Core Contributor grants? 2. Will the new system use Core Contributor grants for access control? 3. Will the new system store Contributor grants? 4. Will the new system use Contributor grants for access control? The correct answers (in my view, and clearly in many other peoples view) would be Yes, No, Yes, No. It appears from the transition document that the answers are going to be Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes. Hence the problem. My own testing of the current implementation available to us is that 1 and 2 are clearly Yes and No (the electorate is listed separately, and a Leader role is present), and I'm not sure about 3 and 4, although it looks as though it may be No and No (there is a community contributor role, but it can be assigned from the auth app so can't really be a Contributor grant). In that sense, what I've seen from the auth app made available to us for testing and evaluation is that it's working fine - the question is whether what's going to be rolled out is different. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ website-discuss mailing list [email protected]
