administration of who is a team administrator is inconsistent and lacking documentation

I also find it odd that an administrator cannot promote other members to be administrators BUT can take away administrator privileges from fellow admins.

IIRC, the reason why we allow administrators to demote fellow admins is
so that the team doesn't depend on a single person (the owner) to demote
an admin that starts misbehaving badly.

I agree this is confusing as it's not explained anywhere and I'm not sure
this has ever been of any use to a team, so it may be better to either
allow or deny team admins to promote /and/ demote members.

If an admin can demote fellow admins, then so could a misbehaving admin. :-)

If you wanted to protect against admin misbehavior, you could require signoff from N admins to demote another admin, where N > sqrt(total number of admins).

Since the owner of a team can be another team (there are admins), I believe any admin should be permitted to promote a member to the role of admin.

After this is done, what's the difference between an admin and the owner?

On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 04:06 +0000, Michael Hudson wrote:
> After this is done, what's the difference between an admin and the
> owner?

The Owner can edit the team details like descriptions, icons, etc.., the
Admins can only change membership.
--

__C U R T I S C. H O V E Y_______
Guilty of stealing everything I am.

That's not correct. I can edit all details of a team of which I am only an admin. AFAICT, once admins can make others into admins, the only extra privilege will be the ability to change the owner.

However, the ownership role is still very useful for giving ultimate control of a team to somebody who is not a member.

So the question is, should admins be able to promote (and demote) admins, or should only owners be able to make admins.

The original report wasn't a request for admins to promote admins, but for clarity about who can in the UI.

For now, I don't think we have any evidence suggesting our decision that owners choose admins, and admins do all day-to-day was wrong.

If anything, I think we possibly want clearer separation - e.g. team renaming is possibly an owner-only thing; admin promotion/demotion owner-only etc.

I'm going to put this back towards being a statement of confusing UI rather than a possibly mistaken change in admin-management rules.

(Oh, and responding to some of the other analysis - owners can be teams, so requiring owners to make changes to admins does not imply depending on one person only to maintain the admins of the team). The asymmetry between promoting and demoting should be fixed. We could allow some configuration here but I think it isn't needed: rogue admins are rare; launchpad support can intervene to remove a rogue admin in extremis.

Fixed in stable r14625 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/14625>.