USGENWEB-ALL-L Archives

Archiver > USGENWEB-ALL > 2008-10 > 1224922402


From: "Mike St. Clair/ST" <>
Subject: Re: [ABChat] Official Report of the Webmaster Study Group
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:13:22 -0600
References: <00a901c93648$c37093d0$6a01a8c0@Sherri><4902C887.2030009@saintclair.org>
In-Reply-To: <4902C887.2030009@saintclair.org>


Today I had several urgent issues arise at work that kept me from even
taking a lunch break. I also had a prior commitment at a local Family
History Conference that occupied my entire evening. Thus my posting of
the current national webmaster's comments and markup on the WSG draft
were delayed much beyond what I had expected. I was unable to come up
with a reasonable plan to post her markup in the text format required by
our mailing list so I posted the color coded markup at this URL:

http://wsg.genweb.us/CurrentWebmaster_Markup_of_WSG_Proposal.html

If any of you know of a way to do this in text, feel free to post a copy
directly to this list.

The next three paragraphs are lead-in comments from Linda that provide
some explanation, which are posted here by permission.

"Here are very specific changes. These things are misnamed but otherwise
a great separation of duties between a content manager and a webmaster..
What you have first perfectly defines a content manager. 95% or more of
it can be replaced by a CMS. The technical role webmaster role is your
second role. If content managers are replaced by a CMS you'd just add
developing and maintaining design, templates, and support for content
publishers. It is a perfect delineation of the duties between the
webmaster and the content manager people or system."

"What is the criteria to determine who is Content Manager and who is
Assistant. Is the Asst at the CM's beck and call like a slave or just
does the crappy stuff? The difference in role and responsibility is
completely undefined. Why not two Content Managers to share the work and
no Assistant?"

"All of my specific changes are in red. A lot of stuff is way too wordy
and clouds things, some makes no sense at all, no terms or dates defined
to allow things to drag out with no firm start or end date, no similar
accountability on all sides, no automated tools installed to do some of
the requirements, no standards, and the worst part -- no communication
channel."

Now follow comments from Mike St. Clair:

If I understand what she is saying correctly, the gist of it is that as
historically handled within USGENWEB, the functions performed by what we
have called our webmaster are actually the duties of a "Content Manager"
not a "Webmaster" and that the actual webmaster has been the National
Coordinator. It seems the changes she has made are her attempt to make
the WSG proposal map with this reality. While I sympathize somewhat
with what she is saying, I believe it would raise serious issues of
compliance with our bylaws and that fully discussing and addressing this
major of a change would be a much bigger effort than what was approved
by the Advisory Board. In fact, because it would likely require bylaw
changes, it would take longer than this current board year. I greatly
regret that we didn't get to hear Linda's input and interact with her
during our three week deliberations, but at this point I think it would
be best to stick closely to our present draft and leave the other issues
raised for future discussion when and if the Advisory Board felt to do
so. I remind you all that standing rules adopted by the AB can be
changed in the future by the AB as needed. I'm not suggesting they
should be changed willy nilly, but they aren't like bylaw changes that
require the planets to align properly and annual voting cycles. If we
find a brand new rule like this later requires a tweak or two, or even a
major rewrite, it is within our power to do so.

Mike St. Clair

Mike St. Clair/ST wrote:
> I'm close - later tonight. After an unusually busy day at work, I was
> tied up at a Family History Conference all evening. Sorry for the delay.
>
> Mike
>
> Sherri wrote:
>
>> Mike, when are you going to post this?
>>
>> Sherri

This thread: