Holacracy Community of Practice Archive, 2015-2019 Community Holacracy Web Site
Posted in Practicing Holacracy • By Fred Magovern • 02/29/2016

Validity of Removing A Role

I'm our Knowledge Base Custodian and we no longer have a need for an internal knowledge base, something which everyone agrees. I'm trying to think how to frame my tension to connect it to my purpose / accountabilities being inhibited. Does anyone have suggestions around that when it comes to removing a role that's no longer needed? I'm also our Social Technologist (running point on our holacracy rollout), so I'm trying to be a good role model (lol). Here is the role:


Purpose: To make our knowledge as crowdsourced and accessible as possible.

Accountabilities:

  • Onboarding new team members.

  • Staying informed of new knowledge base tools, testing those with promise, and deciding which ones to implement.

  • Managing team settings and permissions.

  • Responding to related requests from fellow team members.

  • Troubleshooting technical issues.

  • Helping the team continue to expand on their knowledge base skillz.

4 Replies
Margaux
03/01/2016

Dear Fred,

 

I think that might help:

3.2.2 Criteria for Valid Proposals

“[...] Finally, a Proposal is always valid regardless of the preceding criteria if it is made solely to help evolve the Circle’s Governance to more clearly reflect activity that is already happening, or to trigger a new election for any Elected Role.”

Here, I think your tension is just to reflect what's happening, i.e. not using that role because you don't have any knowledge base anymore. You still have to bring it to governance.

 

However, I would like to ask you a question: who decided to remove the knowledge base? What role? You say “everyone agrees”. “Everyone” doesn't exist in Holacracy. Who has the authority?

 

Moreover, in the description of the role you provided, there are terms like “team members”, I'd be curious to know what is a team member, is it clearly defined in the governance records?

Jean-Michel Gode
03/01/2016

Hi Fred,

Agree with Margaux.

Just bring your tension in a gov meeting "The Base Custodian role I enact is useless regarding that we don't have any need for an internal knowledge base"

Make a starting proposal "I propose to delete the Base Custodian role".

Then process it  using the IDM process. And you'll see what happen.

Hope that helps,

Fred Magovern
03/01/2016

Thanks for the replies!

@Margaux: I decided (as Knowledge Base Custodian) after seeking input from Rep Links at the most recent GCC tactical meeting. By "everyone" I meant all the GCC members. No one has the explicit authority to remove the knowledge base - probably won't raise a tension to clarify since it would be a short-lived clarification.

I'm using "team members" colloquially. We have not adopted the Constitution (yet) so we don't have any governance outside of GlassFrog.

Margaux
03/02/2016

@Fred, I'd be curious to know what led you to find the Knowledge Base useless? That tension must be grounded on something like a concrete situation where you experienced that it wasn't useful. That might be what you are looking for