Per the current site charter, Admins are empowered to initiate a Charter Review once per year in order to ensure the Site Charter's cohesion and accuracy with respect to current policies. This process has not been initiated in a number of years and by the empowerment of the Admin Team, I have been designated to lead this review project. In the course of this review, and with respect to currently shifting attitudes and policies, it is worth asking the question if we would be best served by a full and forthright "Rewrite" of the charter from the ground up, rather than to use the review process.
Although the charter allows for review, it does not allow the Admin team to wholesale rewrite the Charter. While individual sections of the Charter could be individually reviewed and litigated by the staff team, the current process for policy approval would mean that a de facto rewrite using this process would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 months. To this end, the primary items are up for consideration:
#1 - Continue with the "Review" process as defined by the current charter.
This process will review individual articles of the Charter one by one, ensure they are accurate based on policy passed and consistent with intent, until we get through the whole charter.
#2 - Initiate a Charter "Rewrite".
This process would forego individual article review and would involve the creation of a new document. This document and its individual parts would still be subject to evaluation and consideration, but would not require direct and deliberate comparison to the intent of the original Charter.
#3 - A yet unlisted option.
Please expand in the space provided in this thread.
This discussion will remain open for 5 days and may be extended by consensus. If #2 prevails by clear majority, a voting thread will be necessary to permit me to formally begin a Rewrite.