Peter Tribble wrote:
The structures apply to the community governance; website operations
aren't directly tied to that.
That's stated as if it is fact, unfortunately it isn't, not for the
current implementation and not for the new one either. As I've already
said, we have merely migrated the existing data, not restructured the roles.
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.
They are, at least by the Constitution that wasn't ratified, because as
I said, that's what we based them on. If that Constitution is ratified
at some point then the problem will reoccur with Ps and UGs - the issue
is only apparently absent at the moment because the current Constitution
says very little about those two collective types.
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.
I think 'misused' misrepresents the situation. We will be migrating the
data to a new system. The structures we have defined in the new system
have been unchanged from when the current Constitution was ratified. If
you want to change the relationships, then the constitution needs to be
changed to break the relationship between voting rights and Community
roles. Until such a change is approved by the Community, we have no
mandate to change anything. And with all due respect, the OGB doesn't
have the power to unilaterally make that change either, it needs
ratifying by the Community as a whole.
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.
That seems not to be the case because you feel the Constitution and
Community roles are being 'misused' in some way.
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.
As Bonnie has already said, the Auth application is configured to
reflect the current Constitution, and we won't be changing the
implementation until the Constitution is changed. We have no mandate to
do otherwise. And in addition, we will not be making any further
changes to the Auth application before deployment (other than bug fixes).
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.
There are some changes, because the system currently on auth.oso
reflects the unratified Constitution. The final version will be, as has
already been explained, a combination of the CG structures from the
current Constitution and the P and UG structures from the unratified one.
--
Alan Burlison
--
_______________________________________________
website-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
