Policy for the Death of a User

First, I am truly sorry to hear about your illness.

Secondly, I applaud you for raising this sensitive issue in the legal forum.

I agree that we need to have a policy in place to deal with the situation were a valued member of the Drupal community dies. I.e. somebody should be tasked with writing up a "help" page (similar to the Facebook page you link to) about how we deal with this. If we provide the means to report the death of a member (similar to Facebook), it is known that such reports do have a potential for abuse. If we do this, there must be good procedures for verifying the authenticity of any report. Facebook only accepts such reports from verified immediate family members. There no such notion of relation at Drupal.org.

As for modules, there is already in place a policy for dealing with abandoned projects that will eventually kick in (because a deceased maintainer will not be a responsive one).

It is also possible for a maintainer to put a module up for "for adoption" by their current owner/maintainer by setting its maintenance status to "Seeking new maintainer" and posting a message to the project ownership issue queue. I think following this procedure is the best option for securing continued maintenance when a maintainer know he/she will no longer be able to take care of a module, and will also allow the present owner to pick the successor(s) if he/she wishes to do so.

As for module owners that leaves us without going through an adoption process, the current abandoned module procedure allows for transfer of ownership of any module where the maintainer does not respond in any ways two weeks after being contacted.

Some other the aspects of dealing with the death of a user is dicussed here: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/social-networking-death.htm

AFAIK, there is no mechanism to leave a comment about other users on their homepage or elsewhere, so I do not think there exists a "troll" problem for Drupal.org and associated sub-sites. However, there may be a potential of abuse when an account that belonged to a deceased membere is taken over by somebody guessing the password. Another potential problem is that the "contact user"-form serves no purpose if the owner of the account is deceased.

As for the account itself and public content, the default rule here, as expressed in the recently added Terms of Service is that your account stays around unless an explicit request to cancel it is made. If a request to cancel an account is made (sec. F), any content created is retained, but authorship is attributed to the ‘Anonymous’ user.

I believe the defaults for content that already in place are mostly adequate for dealing with deceased members. Most people will want their valuable contributions to the community to still carry their byline after they've left, so as a general rule, we do not want to cancel the accounts of deceased members. Personally, I do not even want relatives of the deceased to have the option to remove any bylines, but I am willing to listen if somebody presents a good case for letting relatives do this.

To sum up:

• There should be a help page that also outlines the policy of how we deal with the death of a member.
• I believe module ownership succession his handled adequately by the current abandoned module process.
• Accounts of deceased members should be safeguarded against identity theft.
• The contact form should be disabled for accounts that belonged to deceased members.

I think that the technical details of what to do when someone passes, is simply detail. I'm sure we'll get that right. What I'm concerned that we might not get right are the non-technical aspects of death. I'll suggest that any policy should include

(a) memorial attributions (i.e, things like a page on d.o, a permanent marker on projects that user has contributed to, a blurb that someone thoughtfully writes for inclusion in obituaries), so that the Drupal community, the individuals family and local community know how important the developer was to the Drupal community;

(b) proper consideration to the family in their time of grieving, such as cards, flowers, charitable contributions, etc, so that the individuals family is supported and knows how import the developer was to the Drupal community.

These things could be handled by the DA.

This reminds me of a post made by an colleague of mine of mine on his experiences dealing with the social media presence of a deceased

Do we need a 'next of kin' contact field in a profile, so we can pass over the responsibility over the account details the correct person?

SSIA