Handling secure access for inactive deputies

We’ve been checking in with most of our deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. over the past month or so and, while many of you are able to continue donating your time to the Community Team, there are some deputies who are not able to do so anymore. This is entirely understandable of course, as we’re all volunteers here, but it leaves us with the question of how to handle inactive deputies.

Right now, deputies have access to our central Help Scout instance where all community support is handled and most deputies also have author or editor access to this P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/.. To that end, we have a few options for how we can handle this kind of access for individuals that are not actively involved for the moment:

  1. Leave everyone in their current state with full access to Help Scout and whatever user role they have on this P2.
  2. Remove inactive deputies from the “WordPress Community Team” inbox in Help Scout, and demote them on this P2. This will mean they are still a user on Help Scout, but they can’t access anything, which makes it easy to reactivate them in the future with very little friction – it should also preserve their interaction history in Help Scout.
  3. Completely delete inactive deputies from Help Scout, and demote them on this P2. This will mean reactivating them on Help Scout in the future would be like starting all over again and we will most likely lose their interaction history in Help Scout.

Option #2 seems like the best bet to me, for security and accountability purposes, but a case could be made for either of the other options. Please comment here with what you think would be the best way to manage things going forward – if you have any different ideas, please share those as well.

This discussion will remain open for 1 week – until Friday, 2 March at 12:00 UTC – then we will wrap it up and go forward with the best option.

#deputies