Talk:Role

Roles & people

The biggest confusion in the field regarding roles is about the difference between a role and a person. Think of the word "role" within the context of theatre, the play is composed of actors (the people) and scenes making up the story. The scenes that make up the story define the roles involved and their communications amongst each other. The play is defined in terms of roles, not in terms of actual specific people which are chosen to perform the roles. The same play could be performed by different sets of people.

Project roles

The roles used in a generic organisation haven't been documented or refined yet, but a Category:Roles and Category:Nodal Organisations have been started.

Nodal roles

This is for the nodal definition of role, which is basically an instance of a nodal class filled by Human instead of code. Nodal roles are activated and deactived from within contexts in a similar wat to services or daemons using the processes in the nodeINIT, nodeMAIN and nodeEXIT associations.

Role notes

A role is an essential component of any organisation, is it a specific entry point for people to perform a range of tasks within the organisation. People who fill roles perform a range of procedures which are linked to from their role workspace and are expected to do so according to established convention for that role, the best practices. This is over and above their general commitment to the charter of the organisation they work for, motivated by the shared vision they have with the other members.

It is important to distinguish people from the roles they fill within an organisation. This is often overlooked, as many people identify with their (paid-for) roles so much they refer to themselves as "being that role", as in: Person 1: "Who are you?" Person 2: "I'm the janitor". In reality the person responding only fills the role of the janitor for a certain amount of time. Most people fill a number of roles, and to reduce them to the role they fill to "earn a living" reduces them to much less than they are, it also breeds discrimination and prejudice. From the perspective of the organisation and knowledge management, keeping roles and people separate is important to ensure that know-how remains within the organisation and new members can easily be trained up to fill a role, or multiple roles, or move between roles. Having a clear structure of roles ensures accountability and allows everyone to focus on their specific area. When people identify strongly with their roles this often a result of poor training and documentation and results in members leaving the organisation with a lot of role specific knowledge, which is lost to the organisation due to never being documented.

Within wiki organisation, role portals can be accessed through the ontology, they form one of the top level branches.

• Managing files and imap folders, home folder, login from multiple workstations, could be part of od-workstation pckg
• Groupware setup when setting up person in role - examples (Milan)
• Emailtowiki, Category watching, Config:Role
• Should allow conversion of posted form to wiki article
• Unique IDs? Done?
• Emailtowiki config, allow in article config:role