Volunteer Roles

Introduction

There are several roles defined for the volunteers within GENUKI. An individual may act in several roles.

Trustee

The Trustees of GENUKI were originally appointed to manage the service under the Trust Deed. Further Trustees can be appointed under the Trust Deed. Trustees ultimately take legal and financial responsibility for the service including  the requirement that  GENUKI meets the UK Charity Commission requirements, and any other legal obligations. 

They also provide strategic  leadership and ensure that there is  practical support for maintainers. The Trustees are responsible for setting the standards to be adhered to by maintainers. These standards may only be amended after appropriate consultation with the maintainers.

The Trustees deal with any formal agreements entered into by GENUKI, they register and renew the GENUKI domain names and they ensure that the GENUKI trademark is maintained and defended. They have power to give copyright permissions on GENUKI content when it is clearly possible to do so without infringing others' copyright, and to pursue infringements of GENUKI's own copyright.

Executive Team Member

Members of the Executive Team are responsible for running the majority of the day to day activity of GENUKI. The tasks are set out here. All members of the Executive Team are also active Maintainers.

Maintainer

GENUKI maintainers are volunteers who give their time, effort and skills freely to support the objectives of GENUKI in developing the freely available "virtual reference library" of genealogical information. A maintainer is given responsibility for a section of GENUKI (usually, but not always, a county). This is under their control and it is their responsibility to maintain, develop and keep it updated, according to the GENUKI standards. A maintainer has an implied contract with the Trustees of GENUKI, and is given delegated authority to act as an agent of the Trustees, under the requirement that the maintainer will not knowingly post or publish anything that will bring GENUKI into disrepute.

Normally the Trustees will grant autonomy for a maintainer to develop and maintain their pages in any way that the maintainer sees fit, within the limits set by the GENUKI standards. However the Trustees reserve the right to make a collective decision to override a maintainer with regard to any aspect of GENUKI content that might bring the service into disrepute or cause legal action to be taken against the Trustees. Where the Trustees have supported a maintainer in the matter of content which is subject to legal dispute, they will seek, if possible, to provide the maintainer with protection from legal action.

Some maintainers also work within Teams to support each other on maintaining a wider area.

System User

Some senior maintainers and members of the Executive Team  have additional rights and resposibilities, e.g. to do with setting up and managing the Drupal-based infrastructure that maintainers use.

Who's Who

 The current Trustees are listed here and the membership of the Executive Team is shown here. If you are logged in as a maintainer you can see who deals with what section and specific pages by clicking on Shortcuts > All Nodes which will take you to this page.