Shared personnel information policy

From neicext
Jump to navigation Jump to search

This page describes how NeIC handles shared personnel information.

NeIC is a distributed organization whose activities almost exclusively consists of international collaborations between organizations of national significance. As such, it is of vital importance to have as high degree of openness and transparency as possible in order to achieve low overhead in information exchange. A prerequisite for this is to have correct, cohesive and comprehensive personnel information. This page describes how NeIC strives to achieve that.

Background

NeIC handles different types of shared personnel information:

  • Public information
  • Shared internal information
  • Shared managerial information

These different types of information should be handled by different means, depending on who needs access to them. This information dissemination/sharing problem is nontrivial to solve "perfectly" or "right" in a distributed setting, so while NeIC could choose to adopt a comprehensive solution for enterprise style organizations, this is likely to cause enterprise style overhead, cost and lock-in. Instead, NeIC strives to use the simplest tools possible that still solve the task at hand, while also assuming a very high degree of technical competence among its personnel.

The solution in present use is based on distributed and version controlled data in open text based formats, and is as open as information security and ethics permit.

One of the NeIC core values is continuous improvement, and personnel information is very important to NeIC, so any suggestions for how to improve upon the shared personnel information management policies outlined here are warmly welcome. Please direct your suggestions to your project leader or the NeIC executive team.

Overview

In general, public data is maintained centrally and in public. The public data can then be imported into more secure context (like the internal wiki) where it can be extended with non-public information which can then be presented in an integral and cohesive view. The shared non-public information does not leave the secure contexts by automated means.

Tech

Public data is entered in YAML format on the NeIC website repository at GitHub:

Documentation on how to enter information is available in the yml document itself.

Free text personal bios are added directly to the page that displays them in mediawiki format:

If data is entered in a wrong or disruptive way, the website will not update until the problem is fixed. Webserver status is displayed here:

This page will also show notifications about missing non-critical information.

Public data is displayed on the NeIC website:

The internal wikipages use the JSON RESTful API from the client's web browser to fetch the public information, using through mediawiki widgets:

Documentation for these widgets is available on the widget pages themselves. For consistency's sake, these widgets take additional internal information (if any) in the same way and in the same YAML format as is used for the public information.

Examples of how these widgets can be used can be found here:

Please notify NeIC XT if you find that these examples are outdated or not working.

The tables generated by these widgets can be copy-pasted as they are into spreadsheet programs like Excel, for those so inclined.

Shared personnel information management

Public information

The following information on personnel on NeIC service contracts is public:

  • Name
  • Short personal bio.
  • Basic contact information:
    • home institution
    • email address

Personnel are also encouraged to add a photo of themselves and a phone number, however this is not required

Shared internal information

This type of information is primarily kept on the NeIC internal wiki.

The following information should be available on the internal wiki:

  • Contact information to non-contracted personnel, like temporary replacement personnel.
  • Additional non-public contact information, like:
    • Additional phone numbers.
    • Skype id
    • Postal address
    • Home address (eg for finding suitable venues for working group meetings)

NeIC encourages all internal sharing of contact information that can help communication in the project, however notes that any such sharing must be on an opt-in basis, and respecting of individuals' wishes for privacy.

This widget can help with integration of additional internal personnel information:

Examples here:

Shared managerial information

Shared managerial information is stored on the internal wiki, on pages restricted to allow access only to relevant administration. In general relevant administration consists of project leader, project owner, NeIC administrative coordinator and NeIC director.

NeIC needs to follow up that contracted commitments are kept in practice, to ensure that commonplace personnel events like parental leaves, sick leaves or other leaves of absences are handled in a way such that activities can go on with as little disruption as possible.

NeIC stores only such information as is relevant for external/formal review, and for basing governance decisions on. For example, it is necessary to document leaves of absence, however the cause for leave is irrelevant for these purposes and is not stored.

The guideline for shared managerial information is to only store information that could in principle be legally made public. Information that cannot be stored usefully under these guidelines should be communicated by other means, storing only the relevant meta information by means outlined here.

The following shared personnel information should be available on management-only pages on the internal wiki:

  • Contracted commitment: % FTE
  • Currently active: yes or no.
  • Outstanding contracting issues: very brief notice.
  • Comment: very brief statement to contracting situation (if any).
  • Per partner: Historic deviations from commitment, and sum, in % FTE.
  • Per partner: Plan for correction of deviations.
  • Per partner: Known upcoming deviations.

This widget can help with integration of additional internal personnel information:

Examples here:

Links

Retrieved from "https://wiki.neic.no/w/ext/index.php?title=Shared_personnel_information_policy&oldid=9478"