[Discussion] Motion Expressing the Will of the Body on CiviCRM

John Wilford

John Wilford

Well-known member
I have already contacted quite a few people on this body for feedback and I think the motion is ready for debate. I AM SPECIFICALLY NOT ASKING FOR CO-SPONSORS. This thread is for discussion and debate, there will be a later thread where I will request co-sponsors.
Whereas, CiviCRM has the capability to allow SLEC access;
Whereas, Texas has 254 counties, 69 of which are affiliated, 4 officers, and 26 staffers that compose a large pool of people we are already planning to give various levels of access to CiviCRM;
Whereas, district representatives have been duly elected by their districts and have been charged by LPTexas Bylaw iV.a.6.V to “actively work to further the growth of the Party. This includes, but is not limited to, communicating current organizational status within their districts to the Party, communicating Party information to their districts, assisting with candidate recruitment efforts, developing county affiliates, oversight of Party administration, and assisting to ensure proper function of official Party events.”;
Whereas, a binding policy passed by SLEC would take a lot of effort to craft and would be wholly inflexible to changing times, changing circumstances, and unforeseen events;
Whereas, SLEC would rather see a common-sense approach taken by executives to day-to-day management, if possible, for the reasons listed prior;
Therefore, be it resolved that in lieu of a binding policy the SLEC officially wishes and respectfully requests that district representatives of the SLEC be granted access to the data covering individuals within their districts with similar permissions to those planned for county leadership.
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The three biggest questions I’ve gotten are:
  1. Can we make SD permission sets? Whitney will be talking to Andy Burnes to figure this out soon.
  2. Should SLEC members have access to all counties data or just unaffiliated counties? I personally think all but even if it was modified to unaffiliated counties I think it’s a step in the right direction. However, it would seem like having to constantly update which counties are affiliated would make the answer to question 1 more difficult.
  3. Wouldn’t it be better to give them access to the data without giving them access to Civi itself? Do we really want that many people in Civi? For this I’m just going to paste the last answer I gave but I’m sure others will have different thoughts.
I’m open to listening to the idea but I guess where my disconnects are
1 If the data is just being handed over through a volunteer then it just sounds like the same end result with extra steps and extra volunteer hours.
2 why are SLEC members so much less trustworthy than county chairs or inversely why are the county chairs more trustworthy?
3 let’s assume 25% of SLEC members are county chairs which I think is fair. There are 55 district reps. 75% of 55 is 42. What is the significant risk difference in 99 people and 141 people?
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I’m sure there will be more questions but that’s why we have this thread 🙂
 
#2 is yes, all counties in their SD. Because there’s no way to efficiently keep #1 accurate. Also, without a lot of manpower, with redistricting, we’d have to give them access to all counties that even partially are in their districts.

For me, this also comes down to “can we give them read-only access”. We may not want so many people being able to change data in such a system. However, if we don’t allow them to change data, we have to make sure we have dedicated people that have that ability and can do so quickly. This idea, that came from national a while ago, that we just tell our members to register again and we’ll combine on the back end isn’t something I favor. I’m still wondering why our members don’t have “accounts”.
Ideally, I’d like to see each member be able to log in and update their own data, ditching data that is no longer good and including current data. I realize this is a little bit of a rabbit trail from the main point, but it is central to whether or not County Chairs or SD reps need the ability to edit data.
 
It is my understanding that political districts’ data, such as SD’s, are not available, only counties or statewide.
 
Data from an individual record is also historical in nature. We are not to delete records, except to merge duplicate. Duplicates happen alot, so merging ‘on the backend’ will be a common activity for the person authorized to do so.

Most editing is, for example, changing their address, or noting relationships with counties, committees, and recording activities. It is a Customer Relations Management system (CRM), not a member list. Very few people should have full editing permissions, and definitely not the individual her/ himself. Conversely, a form of editing will happen everytime we record activities, such as making a phone call, or recording attendance. You will be assigned a role (permissions) appropriate to your position when you are approved as a user. We won’t define roles as much as we will adapt to the CRM’s roles. This will all become clearer over the coming months.

And it is much better to work from online lists than to download lists to be used ‘in the wild.’ No one who hasn’t signed an NDA should be given a downloaded list, if it is possible to avoid it. Plus it is much harder to record the results of interactions with people on the list if it is handed out.
 
With the recent redistricting, this is something we really need, a team of people to go in and clean up the data, make sure everyone has the right SD listed. I would love the chance to do that, I’ve done it before on a smaller scale, but I already have a plan of how to attack it and get it done as quick as possible. There’s only 22 counties that aren’t completely within one senate district. Only the people who live in those counties would we need to individually look up and find out what SD they are in. All the others we would just need to take it county by county and make sure everyone in that county has the right SD listed.
 
Let me clarify using myself as an example. In the CRM, the data is searchable if you have access to the whole state. But you generally don’t give that access to county officials. There is no provision, the last time I talked with national, for district users. So, to give access to me, as SD22 rep, you would either have to give me access to the whole state, or else only Tarrant County members in my district would appear. I will not be able to search McLennan County. There is no in between.

This means sending out newsletters and performing phone banking in SD22 is out unless I am given broad access to the whole state membership. I am sure your CRM transition team will let us know if that changes. If it does, I have to go back to Illinois’ system and do more training for them.

Does that make it clearer?
 
That makes clearer what you’re saying, but I’m thinking something has changed since you were involved with the Illinois project. I am on our transition team, working closely with Kyle and Andy Burns to manage the data migration and onboarding of users. We have a Region Leader permission set that would fit our District Reps pretty nicely if that’s the way we’re going. DRs should be able to access anyone in their district. We just need to set up the districts (“regions” in CiviCRM) and tweak the permission set.
 
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Thx. I apologize for dated info. We (Illinois) have regions, but users were never offered a regional role. Unfortunately, the Illinois IT director who took my place has resigned, so I’ll be working to train a new one. I will contact David for clarification on this exciting new capability. Illinois’ Committeepersons are elected by congressional district.
 
jwilford said:
why are SLEC members so much less trustworthy than county chairs or inversely why are the county chairs more trustworthy?
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I agree with the resolution. It lists the reasons why district reps should have access to the resources, that everyone else has. It wouldn’t make sense that some members of the party have access to resources but it’s representatives don’t have that same access. I emphasize that as part of our duty to oversight of party administration, we should have access to the data even if it’s in a read-only state which I’m really only advocating for at this time.
 
I find it hard to believe that CiviCRM, by design, is unable to break out permission views based on senate district. What data actually exists in the database?

If the issue is no senate data in civi, then get a team of volunteers with NDA’s to go and update that.

If the senate districts are listed, then it’s a simple permissions view.
 
Assuming that I can access the data specifically for those in my Senate District, what would be the arguments AGAINST me having it?

According to the LPTexas bylaws, “[t]he District Representatives shall actively work to further the growth of the Party. This includes, but is not limited to, communicating current organizational status within their districts to the Party, communicating Party information to their districts, assisting with candidate recruitment efforts, developing county affiliates, oversight of Party administration, and assisting to ensure proper function of official Party events.” At least three of listed duties would be greatly facilitated by access to that data, so someone is going to have to provide me with a compelling argument why the interests of LPTexas would be better served by me not having that access.
 
My understanding is that a lot of state affiliates organize their regional/district representation according to CD. In Texas, primary parties are required to organize by SD, so the thinking is that we’ll be ready for that when we’re required to become a primary party (personal POV: regardless of whether that actually makes much sense at our size…).

But yes, Lex, check with David and Andy re Illinois. This capability already exists in Civi. Sounds like in the case of Illinois someone involved decided it wasn’t necessary to implement it, at least not yet.
 
That person is me. After checking with David he confirmed our problems. Give me a call if you want to understand that decision.
 
So for everyone’s edification, I spoke with Lex, who has some experience and expertise in this. The long and short is that Civi CRM is built on stacked permissions. So larger groups are made of smaller groups. A person is a part of a county, a county is a part of an SD, and an SD is a part of a state. What does this mean for the motion? It means that everyone voting for or against this motion needs to know that because of IT limitations SDs will probably have access to the entirety of all counties touching the SD.
 
I would like edit access. With the redistricting and everything, having each SD rep be able to assign a person to a new SD sounds like the easiest way to handle this. Additionally, routine backups should be happening regardless of if we have read only or edit access. I do not understand the problem with giving us edit access.
 
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