Ownership Model

Ownership Model

The problem this solves

Every finding on Drift-Findings has the same root cause. CivicTechWR has five documentation surfaces and no rule about which one owns a given fact. So a volunteer writes the meeting time wherever they happen to be, and now it exists in four places that will diverge.

The failure mode is not neglect — the website and Discourse are both actively tended. It is that nobody can tell, for any given fact, which copy is the real one.

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The options we considered

Consolidate everything into Discourse

Lean into where people already are. Wiki-mode posts, low friction to edit, retire the MkDocs site.

Why not: it puts everything behind a login and loses Git history — public discoverability and a review trail are the two things a documentation site exists to provide. It would fix the drift by making the docs invisible.

Revive the MkDocs site

Fix the 404 index, the FAQ and the season guide; point Discourse and Slack at it.

Why not: nothing changes structurally. The site already died once from exactly this state. PR-based editing is why volunteers went to Discourse instead — reviving it without changing that dynamic just resets the clock.

Assign ownership per fact ← chosen

One surface owns each kind of fact. Everywhere else links rather than restates. Automate the facts that already demonstrably drift.

Why: it attacks the actual cause, requires no migration, and does not require declaring a winning platform. Each surface keeps doing what it is already good at.

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The ownership map

Fact type	Owner	Everyone else
Event times, dates, venue, RSVP	Luma	Fetch or link. Never restate.
Meeting notes, recaps, in-flight discussion	Discourse	Link.
Policies, guidelines, templates, process	GitHub (.github org repo + this wiki)	Link.
Banking, funding applications, signed agreements	Google Drive	Link. Nothing else belongs there.
Public narrative — what we did and why	Blog	Link.
Project code and project-specific docs	The project repo	Link.

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The three rules

1. One owner per fact. If you are about to type our meeting time, our Slack invite, or our season length into a document, stop — link to the owner instead. A fact stated in two places is a fact that will be wrong in one of them.

2. Prefer fetching over stating. The website already proves this works: _plugins/fetch_luma_event.rb pulls the next hacknight from Luma at build time, which is why the website is the only surface whose meeting time is never wrong. Extend the same pull to Discourse and to any document that needs an event time.

3. Mark what is archived. A superseded document that does not say it is superseded is worse than a deleted one, because people still act on it. Drive's 2019 meeting decks and the org-docs FAQ are both currently doing damage in this way.

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Consequences worth naming

Adopting this means:

• The org-docs MkDocs site loses its exclusive claim on process documentation. Process that changes often should move here, to the core wiki, where editing is cheap. Policies with legal or review weight stay in .github where CODEOWNERS applies.
• Discourse stops being a documentation destination and goes back to being a discussion destination. The CivicTechWR Wiki category should be pointed here rather than grown — see Drift-Findings finding 09.
• Drive shrinks deliberately to only what cannot legally or practically live in Git.
• Someone has to own the blog or it should be honestly retired. Three seasons of silence on our only public narrative surface is itself a message.

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Keeping this honest

An audit of documentation drift that itself goes stale would be a poor joke. Two safeguards:

• This wiki is published from version control, so every change to it is reviewable and dated. See Editing-This-Wiki.
• Remediation-Checklist carries a re-audit item. The drift-prone facts — Slack invites, event channels, season length — are exactly the ones that should eventually be checked by a link-checking job in this repo rather than by a person remembering.