Figure out User Removal from Initiative Semantics

[gbdubs]

When a user is removed from an initiative what set of portfolios should be removed from the initiative?

Option A: None
Option B: All of the portfolios owned directly by the user, regardless of whether the user added them
Option C: All of the portfolios that the user added to the initiative, regardless of current ownership status
Option D: Both B and C.

@hodie Thoughts?

[hodie]

Can we transfer ownership of portfolios? I mean, I like it, but I don't remember that :)

Independent of that Option A seems like the right thing here. We already have the step of "submission" to make sure that only portfolios that should be in the initiative are in there. Most likely, users would leave an initiative because they don't see the use of being in there anymore. That step should not change the initiative data for e.g., year to year comparisons if we run projects with the same country multiple years in a row (real use case).

[cjyetman]

Hmmm... this may complicate things, but... I think it would be advantageous if whenever a portfolio is "submitted" to an initiative, that portfolio is then saved/copied/transferred to some initiative level entity, because once it's part of an initiative (e.g. it has been included in peer files etc.), we should probably retain the ability to replicate whatever we've done. It would be a shame if a user could upload a portfolio (into a given initiative), then "submit" it to the initiative, and then delete it... then the initiative would believe that it has a submitted portfolio that it no longer has access to. In the worst/malicious case, a user could intentionally "submit" a portfolio to an initiative and then delete/remove it before we had a chance to download the initiative portfolios, preventing us from following through on the project correctly.

On the other hand, I believe a user should have full control over everything they upload, whether they want to keep it around or get rid of it. So maybe the "submit" process should be more like donating a copy of their portfolio to the initiative, and after that a copy of it would be owned by the initiative and the user's original copy of it would continue to be owned by the user, in which case the user could delete it (from their account), but the initiative would still have a copy of it that the user gave up any ownership or control of once they "submitted" it.

Does any of that make sense?

[hodie]

@cjyetman your point makes perfect sense from the system perspective, but it wouldn't jive with the NDA we're providing for COP participants or GDPR (at least not without complex ToC that we would need to write and they would need to be able to accept or reject). I also think that many organizations would not be happy with a system that doesn't allow them to delete uploads/submissions if needed.

I completely agree with the goal of having initiative-uploads as stable (or exclusively expansive) as possible, and I hope that the proposed approach (Option A) would take us mostly there. With that option, the only way that a submission would be deleted if the user explicitly deletes the uploaded portfolio or deletes their whole account.

In terms of the initiative believing that there was a portfolio: I don't know enough about upload "registry", but I assumed we'd do a query for downloading/accessing all portfolios and also have queries for "how many portfolios are there right now"?