WiserEarth Governance

Rights, Obligations, and Relationships of All WiserEarthlings

This group emerged out of the WiserEarth Partners meeting held on December 13.   Our intention is to open this group up to all that join and participate in WiserEarth. 

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Created: Dec 01, 2008
Updated: May 12, 2009
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Organisations versus Groups versus Resources

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Problem:

It is obvious in many circumstances what a group is, nearly all of us can identify a group correctly when we see a good example.  The same is true for organisations.  The same is true for people, and so forth.

 

However that does not mean that WiserEarth has all these attributed correctly.  Any errors could be for several reasons.  It could be that someone adds a new entity into WiserEarth in the wrong place, perhaps due to a misunderstanding of how to use WiserEarth. 

 

It could also be due to lack of key knowledge about the identity they are adding.  For example you might have a person's name that happens also to be the name of the company that person runs, thus creating some ambiguity.

 

It could also be that what was an individual has changed over time and now wishes to be represented as a company, or vice-versa the company has stopped operations and yet one key individual wishes to continue operating as a one-person operation.

 

All the above does not include questions around legal, charitable status or even profit vs non--profit status.

 

Most often I see the transition going between groups and organisations.  For example, some Yahoo Groups gain traction over time and then incorporate themselves into a company.

 

Solution:

I guess what I am calling for (if it does not already exist) is the ability to reclassify entities.  So what might have been seen as an individual might suddenly become a company.

 

~andyswarbs


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bowo 12 months ago

Thank you for spending time to post this suggestion Andy.

 

Yes, this is a problem we have but I'm not sure reclassifying entities will be a good solution. For example, how would you 'convert' the data on a personal profile to that of an organization? From group to organization? etc.

 

I do agree with your idea on providing a better explanation upfront to new users on the different type of entities, and when to use which. This should help cut down misplaced postings.

 

Fyi, here are some of the 'workarounds' that we have for this problem:

 

  • Our Terms of Use includes a clause that specifically request users not to use the user profile and not to chose a username that represents an organization, project, campaign, etc., and only to use it to represent themselves. This info is also presented in the user signup process. This way, user profile can be just that, to be used by real people and not by organizations or groups.
  • Organization representative can create a group for their organization. The organization page is for directory listing purpose and serve as an informative page on organization info, the latest reports on progress made, and to map connections it has to people, resources, events, etc. The group page is for communication and collaboration between organization staff, volunteers, supporters.
  • WiserEarth editors and admins can consolidate duplicate postings (by deleting one of them and moving usable data to the other one). Admins can consolidate user profiles. Ability to do so for groups is being discussed by the community here and here. 
How does this sound?
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andyswarbs
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bowo
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sicjedi