So in the previous policy post I spoke about looking at the human side of the government and this part of the policy is more to do with the non human element. This will also be the last policy note about this point the next one will move on to some of the other points of interest mentioned in the overview.

So this idea was inspired by one of Thomas’ questions and has to do with continuity of administration. As TECH can attest I’m strongly in favour of open and accessible documentation and I think that it’s been mentioned that over time we’ve lost a dirth of knowledge and administrative expertise that hasn’t been passed on due to a variety of reasons.

In the past a project to create guides and documentation for the various administrative positions was started but didn’t get off the ground. I don’t know why but I would hazard it’s usually because it takes too much effort for one person in one go and then gets shelved forgotten and essentially lost.

We’ve also lost knowledge because in my opinion various works and utilities created and stored in many different departmental Google drives that have existed over time have been tied to personal accounts or setup with no redundancy in access in case the worst happens.

I would mandate a centralised stf Google Drive with account access shared by exec, ego and tech and then migrate all departmental materials currently available into sub folders with appropriate write access given to each qdir and fcomm for their specific folder.

With this in hand we can then start to build centralised guides for administrative positions over time. Store work on projects like for example a newer spec format or a gmt exam rewrite which would have happened much sooner with reliable storage of and and access to previous efforts.

– Matt/D