[OpenID] [OpenID board] Bylaws on the Wiki

[Chris Messina]

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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