Bonnie Corwin wrote: > Hi Mark, > > I'm not sure I'm following. > > We were specifically asked to separate Constitutionally-defined role > names and Constitutional information from the collective information. > And that's what we will do. > > We will remove the Constitutionally-defined role names from the > Community Group collective. And Constitutional information will only > be stored in the Community Group Electorates. > > The basic architecture of Auth remains the same. It defines a core > set of roles that each application interprets as it needs to. With > this change, the Community Group role names are not associated with > information in the Constitution, so no application will map anything > to the Constitution using the Auth role names. In the case of XWiki, > it will map XWiki-specific privileges to the role names in Auth. So auth+XWiki will know my roles as: A constitutionally defined "Contributor" AND "Leader" for the ARC community? The former is my official status (unofficially I'm a member, which by that community's norm means CC but I doubt poll reflects that and there's been no formal vote or anything and I'm good with that). The later is the role that I have been filling in some capacity with the existing web site specific duties. Our group got along perfectly well with me performing some website admin duties long before I became eligible to carry a CC designation. Does that carry over?
I understand Auth's architecture. When asked by a client "Is this mark and what are his roles?", Auth is supposed to answer "It IS mark and his (constitutional)role is Affiliate(nee Contributor)". Interpretation on that role moniker is left to the client. And in this case, you've mapped them one-for-one with wiki content producing roles. "Leader" role maps to site admin and editor rights. "Affiliate" role maps to editor. And "Participant's" get read only. The problem is that would leave me out in the dark, now. My former role on the existing site now will now be gone, and my new rights profile will map directly to my officially voted upon role in the CG. Soon, if I want to continue to volunteer my time managing the site, I'll have to bother folks to get me a CC grant. And there goes the CC majority % +1. Seems like another case of a tool forcing the CC without really considering the Member half of the equation. The problem is not that Auth's scope is limited to just tracking the narrow set of constitutional roles, it's that XWiki is interpreting them as the only roles it has to work with to make decisions. That's the gap I'm talking about. It's too tenuous a line between a community's official roles designation and the roles for /this tool/. If there is ever a day that OpenRTI and its brethren make their way outside and outside folks get commit access to core consolidations, the 1-1 mapping you have probably works. For website content management? Mmm, maybe not so much. I should probably not worry about it. I'm not going to worry about forcing some formality in getting an official CC designation as that only matters to me as far as I can vote with it. After this website transition, it's only useful if I want to contribute my time as a XWiki site admin. The community will probably just accept this regression and I can relax knowing my responsibilities have been lessened by new limitations in the tools.
