Amending a charter
The fact that the Administrators workgroup is considering amending its charter to extend its work beyond that first envisioned, suggested to me that we should include in the Community Workgroup policy a recognition of this need and a suggested process for doing so. My suggestion is to put this in the "Supporting Community Workgroups" section, rather than the "Establishing..." section, which we are focused on now.
This is the advantage of hindsight and experience.
What about a new subsection along the lines of "substantive charter amendments" -- That is what to do when a substantive change in the project plan or objectives occurs.
Ultimately the intent of substantive amendments is to prioritise quality above mechanistic adherence to deadlines or other requirements. I think it would be good to develop a few procedural guidelines for this scenario.
Cheers Wayne
I've been thinking for awhile that we should portion our work on this policy into two phases: 1st phase determines policy and guidelines for initiating workgroups, 2nd phase determines policy, guidelines and support mechanisms for functioning Community Workgroups. I think the charter amendment process fits in the 2nd phase. I've been messing around with sections that could be included in this 2nd part, now titled "Community Workgroups at work". I added a section where we could list some guidelines for amending a charter. I'm reluctant to propose guidelines for this process now, given our upcoming experience with WE Administrators could well inform our thinking.
I feel a little bit like I'm pushing off what could be done now until later, but I like the idea that WE Workgroups has focused on developing what appears right now to be a good working process for initiating Community workgroups. There's not been much discussion from other WE members on the policy details, I can only hope that many have have checked it out and were happy with the process as written.
Policies should be living documents in the sense that they get amended, refined and improved as community experience grows.
So it's fitting to hold off on drafting sections where we have limited experience.
"Community Workgroups at work" is a good title -- the structure makes sense.
Thinking practically -- given that this is a policy document, I think that it is wise not to have uncompleted headings, so that we can differentiate work in progress from the actual policy. I propose adding an Appendix section to the policy where we can have a subsection on proposed subsections / drafts awaiting ratification -- this way we separate the draft sections from the actual policy.
I'll have a bash at drafting something for substantive changes for consideration of the current policy approval process.
Using an Appendix to include ideas for future improvement of a policy document works rather well. I was looking for something to distinguish the sections. This takes care of it.
Well it looks like we have a proposal for amending a charter. Now that you've got it going, I see the wisdom of doing it now. I think it will work out better to have something drafted that WE Administrators can try out. With the proposed steps provided, there's much less chance that the group will get bogged in the revision process.
I'll comment further in response to your "finalisation" thread.
