[OpenID] [OpenID board] Bylaws on the Wiki

[David Recordon]

I agree that I see no problem using a wiki for this, with change  
control, but just want to make sure the wiki actually reflects  
reality. :)

On Dec 17, 2008, at 3:20 PM, Chris Messina wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Martin Atkins <mart at degeneration.co.uk 
> > wrote:
> David Recordon wrote:
> >
> > While it is a wiki, you can't just change the bylaws as they're a  
> legal
> > document which the board needs to vote to change.  I know Bill had  
> been
> > working on some changes to them, not sure what happened to it all,  
> and
> > we should also vote to update them to reflect the new fee structure.
> >  The wiki page should however capture the current bylaws if we  
> plan to
> > refer people to it.
> >
>
> I'm wary of having multiple copies of this lying around, since at some
> point they're going to get out of sync.
>
> Things like the bylaws should be in exactly one place. If alternate
> formats are desired, they should be automatically generated from the
> source and guaranteed to always match the original exactly.
>
> However, if the complaint was just that folks don't want it as a PDF  
> we
> ought to be able to make the canonical version HTML and just throw  
> away
> the PDF to keep things simple. I assume this was a wordprocessor
> document at some point, so it should be trivial for whoever holds that
> copy to export it to HTML.
>
> This really isn't the sort of thing that belongs on a wiki.
>
> I disagree. PBWiki provides page-level authoring permissions, so I  
> can lock down this page to a few select individuals who should have  
> the rights to edit it (likely the secretary).
>
> My predominant interests in having the Bylaws on the wiki are:
>
> 1. to have a web-friendly URL that we can use to access the bylaws,  
> rather than a PDF
> 2. to be able to publicly track changes and link to the changeset.  
> i.e.:
>
> https://openid.pbwiki.com/sdiff.php?first=Bylaws.2008-12-17-20-38-48&second=Bylaws.2008-12-17-19-11-50
>
> In hard document formats, you don't get this kind of transparency,  
> and I think it's very important to be able to demonstrate what  
> changes were made by whom and when.
>
> I am inspired by the work going on at the Change Wiki, attempting to  
> keep a changelog of pages on change.gov:
>
> http://change.wikia.com/wiki/Change_Wiki
>
> I think we should endeavor to provide such transparency natively,  
> without forcing people to scrape and diff our content!
>
> So, I do agree that binding changes shouldn't be able to be made by  
> just anyway and that we should have a canonical location for the  
> bylaws, but I also think that transparency and editing history is  
> just as important.
>
> Chris
>
> -- 
> Chris Messina
> Citizen-Participant &
>  Open Technology Advocate-at-Large
> factoryjoe.com # diso-project.org
> citizenagency.com # vidoop.com
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