Should email be attached to a Person?

[LegoStormtroopr]

Lots of people that popolo could describe won't have emails, for example a record of historical parliamentarians won't have emails for anyone pre-2000.

Since there is a contact_details area, is it worth discussing if email be removed in favour of the contact_details and people can use the note field to indicate its preferredness?

[jpmckinney]

There's no requirement to use the top-level email property for people who have none.

There had been earlier discussions of eliminating email since contact_details fulfills the same requirement (I think on a mailing list). email was added prior to contact_details, and was kept as it is a very common use case. Since there are many implementations of Popolo now, this would be a backwards-incompatible change.

[jpmckinney]

Will deprecate the top-level email and de-emphasize it in the docs. (ACTION)

[tmtmtmtm]

As a drive-by aside, I'm increasingly leaning towards migrating most email addresses in EveryPolitician to be on Memberships/Posts, rather than People, particularly when they're official parliamentary addresses. This would make it easier to clearly distinguish which email address you want to access, particularly in the case where someone holds multiple posts simultaneously (e.g. when they also have a ministerial address, or sit in both a regional and national legislature).

[jpmckinney]

That's how it should be done :) and how OpenCivicData does it.

Will add that best practice to the docs. (ACTION)