Additional user roles (Director/Directee) to support best practices in Directed Editing

[bhousel]

Directed editing is a hot topic! Various organizations are currently performing directed editing on OpenStreetMap.

There are several enhancements that we can make to the OpenStreetMap website to guide organizations towards better directed editing practices. Please discuss! 😄

I am proposing to add two (mutually exclusive) user roles: "Director" and "Directee"

Director

Users with a Director role manage a directed editing team. (For example, managers / teachers). What would it mean to have this role:

• Clear visibility on the user profile and other parts of the website that this user is a Director, and what organization they are affiliated with
• Directors receive copies and can view all messages and notifications sent to their directees
• Directors may manage the accounts of their directees (create, delete, rename, manage profile, etc)
• Directors have the ability to convert a Directee account to a normal account

Directee

Users with a Directee role work on a directed editing team. (For example, paid mappers / students). What it would mean to have this role:

• Clear visibility on the user profile and other parts of the website that this user is a Directee and what organization they are affiliated with
• Directees may not receive private messages without the Director also seeing them
• Directees have limited ability to manage their own account (TBD)

For additional reference and background, here are some things that people have written about directed editing.

• Organized Editing Best Practice
• Draft Directed Editing Policy

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Background: I worked with TeachOSM recently on an event in which we trained geography teachers how to use OSM. Several of the teachers have already incorporated OSM into their curricula, and provided helpful feedback on ways that we can support them. This is one of a few related issues for discussion based on this feedback. Thanks!
cc @nualacowan @geomantic

[gravitystorm]

My first thoughts are that we might have the need to create "teams" (or "groups", but that concept has a different history in OSM so I'll stick to "team" for now for clarity). That ensures the Directors can only manage particular Directees (and not Directees from other organisations). This would also help show the organisation, and allow people to e.g. view all the Directee accounts for a particular organisation.

If so, perhaps the Director and Directee roles are actually attributes of the membership of the team, rather than site-wide "user roles" that we have now. For example, in pseudocode

t = Team.new(name: 'foobar school')
d = User.new(display_name: 'S. Teacher')
u = User.new(display_name: 'S. Student')
...
TeamMembership.new(team: t, user: d, role: 'director')
TeamMembership.new(team: t, user: u, role: 'directee')
...

However, this doesn't quite cover the limitations of a 'directee' account, such as having limited ability to manage their own account, so there might be a need for for a user role applied to their whole account too.

We should also consider:

• Whether there could be multiple directors for one team
• Whether a directee account can be a member of multiple teams (simultaneously, or over time)
• Whether a regular user account can be a member of a team but not a director (e.g. student has existing account that they would like to use for some directed coursework)
• Before messages can be intercepted and shown to Directors, we would need a lawful basis to do so, for example getting consent from both the Directee and also whichever user is sending the message.

[simonpoole]

The LWG has been thinking about how best to handle school classes and the like.

Our current thinking on the data protection issues is that we will be basing our argumentation that our data processing is based on "legitimate interests" this removes a hard age limit for children, however puts us in the driving seat to determine how to best protect them. One of the things we've discussed are accounts with limited/no access to the "social media" functions of OSM, that could be:

• no diary access
• no messaging (messages to the account get routed to the "Director")
• ....

@bhousel as a clarification: is mapbox proposing to pay for work on such a feature in the immediate future or is this an independent undertaking?

[grischard]

The DWG has received some very good feedback on its draft policy, and we're thinking about getting rid of the formal director/directee distinction. This doesn't mean this idea is a bad one at all!

Is the managing and messaging part already something organisations can handle with email?

[bhousel]

@bhousel as a clarification: is Mapbox proposing to pay for work on such a feature in the immediate future or is this an independent undertaking?

OSM US and Mapbox will be hosting a hackathon in May, and we'll be participating in http://rubyforgood.org/ in June, so I'm thinking now about useful things to ask people to work on.

[pnorman]

One of the things we've discussed are accounts with limited/no access to the "social media" functions of OSM, that could be:

It's important to note we've discussed this only for minors.

I'm against making a restricted class of accounts where not legally necessary.

[simonpoole]

Just to clarify, it should have been clear from the text: I was only referring to minors. WRT directed editing in general I don't really see why we would want to restrict access to the social media functions (I can see some value in some more support for groups in general).