Talk:U.s.oo.o/User Community Roles

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Volunteer membership

The Member's request must be supported by two or more Volunteers, who have validated the Members application and are willing to endorse this membership.

Why?

The application must be endorsed by a UCV Vote(3). The quorum for the vote is one third of the UCV, and a two-thirds majority must be obtained of votes cast.

For what purpose?

Who are we trying to keep out? -- 12:59, 9 September 2007 User:DrewJensen

Drew I've moved my answer to the 8daw topic since most of the participants in this debate don't seem to want to use the Wiki for this. However, my reasoning in short is that we are expecting the volunteers to agree to certain responsibilities and such an expectation is worthless in my opinion unless we have some confidence in their provenance and commitment / staying power. We want Volunteers to be active. As I suggested on the topic, maybe the easiest way to do this is to have a forum called requests for Volunteer status where the applicant just posts his/her application which will include a yes/no poll, and that anyone is free to comment as well as vote. That would do the same thing, but it could also then become a publicly humiliating trial.
In terms of the quorum: what do we do if someone applies for Volunteer status and we have 2 yes votes and 1 no vote? I am not sure how to specify this, but I do feel we need a minimum threshold of votes. I am not wedded to 2/3 majority, but I do tend to precautionary principle. Not quite to the gentleman's club level of one black-ball and you're out, but would you feel confident in a appointing a member as a volunteer, if the vote was 52 for and 49 against? Clearly where we have a simple case of three applicants applying for a forum administrator role for example then a simple majority is sufficient.
Also in the case of "trusted" rolls such as administrator, I would very much like to limit the vote to Volunteers. -- TerryE 05:09, 10 September 2007 (CEST)

User:Pitonyak October 8, 2007.

I am adding content here because it says that I should post here first (see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User:TerryE/User_Community_Rolls#Limitations_on_Site_Access). While searching for Moderators on a forum, some people were recommended based on participation. Then, everyone chimed in with their opinions on the people. This was not a vote of "choose three of the ten people", but rather, we can use all the people that we can get. In this type of decision making, if even a small percentage of the people were against a specific person having a role such as moderator, that is a big red flag that maybe something is wrong.

proposed change to Process of becoming a volunteer

User requests membership change to Volunteer:

User request is posted to a board maintained for this purpose.

  • Any UCV member may designate approval.
  • Any UCV member may designate protest.
  1. Upon two approvals, and no protest the membership is granted.
  2. After 2 weeks,if no member has approved and no member has protested, the membership is automatically approved.

If a member makes a protest. Then a vote of the UCV membership would be needed. But only in this single case. 1/3 quorum as proposed.

I could live with this idea of a minimum. Good idea, but suggest some tweaks -- I don't like the timeout = "pass".
After 2 weeks:
  1. if a minimum of two approvals have been made, and no protest then Volunteer status is granted.
  2. if less than two approvals have been made then the Volunteer status is declined.
  3. if a minimum of two approvals have been made, and any protest registered then a vote of the UCV membership is needed under the standard UCV voting procedure.
Where the candidate is declined, reapplication can be made after <3> months.
TerryE 05:11, 10 September 2007 (CEST)
This wording was floated on the forum with now major objection so I have now updated the wording in the main article to reflect this. However one issue that we need to think about is the issues of disclosure. Applicants might be willing to share personal details such as email with a closed community such as the UCV, but be a little vary about posting to the open internet because of mail SPAMing and identity theft issues. -- TerryE 08:21, 11 September 2007 (CEST)

--maxqnz 22:36, 8 October 2007 (CEST)

Just a question about the "vote if one protest" suggestion. I agree in principle, but wonder if it might be possible to require the protest to be "for cause" rather than "peremptory", to use jury selection language. If it was known that any protest had to provide reasons, it might help reduce the number of frivolous or personality-based challenges to the process.

Content Manager

Drew 22:54, 9 September 2007 (CEST)When I first read content manager what came to my mind was the situation with the person looking at publishing an OO.o magazine. I suppose he would be a content manager. Site Administrators would support him, similar to support for the service administrators. He would in turn follow some procedure for placing his content on the site. That may be emailing it to a site admin. on the first go round, or maybe placing in the CM system, at some point some automation, using a existing tool or perhaps a customized mag_admin screen just for this purpose.

I could also see this person being the moderator of a dedicated forum. Looking at the templates based mods available, for instance the one used to generate the home page at OOoForum. It is easy to see a way to support a magazine, having the lower 'blog' like list of recent posts limited to the dedicated forum.

Ombudsman

TerryE 03:39, 10 September 2007 (CEST)This is the one role that we should consider being elected by the Members rather than the Volunteers as this is a dual role which both polices the UCV and guards interests of the general membership.

Drew 17:22, 10 September 2007 (CEST) I much like the idea that the ombudsman position is voted on by the site membership as a whole. I would not limit this in any way, what I would propose is that one week prior to the vote for this position a PM be generated to every member account with any posting activity in the last 12 months. An announcement be presented on the Site and forum main pages for the week leading up to the vote, and announcing its beginning and end. Further that the PM sent 1 week prior to the commencement of the vote, solicit any volunteers that want to stand for the office. The final decision being
  • one person 75% or greater of cast votes - member become the sole ombudsman
  • two persons combined have 75% or greater of the cast votes - they both become ombudsman
  • any other vote split requires a new vote

--maxqnz 22:35, 8 October 2007 (CEST)

I do have a query about Drew's suggestion that the notification be sent to every member account with ANY posting activity in the last 12 months. Given the large number of hit-and-run posters in any forum, would not a threshold a little higher than 1 post be helpful in ensuring that those participating in the slection were at least somewhat active? I'm thinking of a very low threshold, say 5 posts in 12 months, or maybe 2 in 6 months. Still basically inclusive, but filtering out potentially hundreds of registered usernames that are effectively inactive. A look through the memberlist at the other forum suggests that using a post threshold a little higher than 1 in 12 months might help to both ensure the participation of those likely to be interested in the process, and reduce the potential number of votes to something more manageable for whoever it is that ends up counting them.

Drew 05:32, 12 October 2007 (CEST) Well, I understand the rational that you just want people that have been active, but if someone comes by once a week, with a question in mind, searches the forum gets their answer and leaves are they active? Does active then mean on a contributor?

I'm not 100% sure, I will try to check, but I believe that the forum logs will track your last logon. So if someone simply logged onto the forum say 6 times is that active? Going back to an example I used at the private forum, it is like a member at a lodge. The member comes to the lodge periodically, never volunteers for any job. When the time comes to vote on sustaining the lodge leaders is he not allowed to vote then? I have never seen a, or heard of, a service organization where that is the case. I believe they way it is viewed, and to my way of thinking accurately, is that simply being willing to vote is a form of activity.

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