8/10/05

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> Definitely sensible. But, you want to be careful how
> much you put in writing. Not necessarily because of
> the legal issues... but more because of how much
> information you might be dealing with. Some policies
> can end up taking up pages and pages and pages of book
> space. I'm sure that if you take all the "unwritten
> rules" and "unwritten policies" and write them down...
> I'm sure that we would end up with so much information
> that it would be insane.
In this I agree with you completely. I don't believe that all of the things that are unwritten policy should be written down and taken as hard rules. What I'm actually trying to get at is that many of these things are currently (and perhaps correctly) in our rules as uses of discretionary authority. Our officers are given fairly broad powers, and can certainly exercise them when they feel that they should. However, I feel that when they do so, they should make sure that they are in fact doing that rather than blindly following something that they think is a rule, or that they present as a rule.

If one presents the complete reasoning behind a decision (barring of course some issues of privacy) then everyone can work productively towards fixing the actual problem, or can discuss whether some details are in fact the problems that they appear to be. If one only reveals one aspect of the reasoning (such as a domain missing a bunch of reports), then it takes much longer for everything to be resolved.

Charlie Collins
us2002023850

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Henry Towsner
Last modified: Sat Aug 13 14:50:24 PDT 2005