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Should we have organization accounts?
I've seen many times something like "This is just my personal opinion, not of the team" when administrators such as Monica Cellio respond to posts. In my opinion, this is because of a lack of a way to distinguish the two through authorship alone.
Therefore, should shared/organization accounts be allowed? And should Codidact have one? This would give the ability to be explicit about whether one is acting on behalf of a larger group, such as Codidact or a more community specific moderation team.
On a technical level, organization accounts should probably be explicitly marked somehow as shared accounts, and be restricted from certain things like voting, earning[1] editing or moderation privileges, etc. to prevent abuse, but otherwise I don't see an issue with having them.
One could also do something like dev.to, where users can post on behalf of an organization they belong to.
That way, there is clear attribution to both parties, which also helps with transparency. However, this starts to complicate access rights and such, so it probably is something to be considered down the line rather than now.
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but perhaps being able to be granted, for instance for a Codidact official account ↩︎
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An alternative approach would be to have the concept of organizations but not separate accounts. A user who is a member of one or more organizations could have a way, when posting, to say "on behalf of this org", and it would show up something like your "for the dev team" example. Advantages:
- No separate account, so no need to restrict voting etc.
- Clear attribution (we know who posted it and not just that it was official).
- More likely to be used correctly: if you have to log in as a different user in order to post something, that's more frustrating and it invites accidents (forgot to switch back after).
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What is preventing staff from using a second account, potentially using an anonymous alias? If they want to only express their personal opinions, then simply register a second account, without the admin/staff/moderator etc status attached to it.
As long as the multiple accounts aren't interacting with each other or used as "sock puppets", there's no problem with that approach.
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