Policies

Prior to a policy being adopted by the Positive Control Network, the following factors must be considered:

1. User Experience - How will the policy affect an individual user's experience on the Network?
2. Membership - How will the policy affect the membership as a whole?
3. Benefits - What are the benefits of the policy, what value does it add to the Network?
4. Implementation - How difficult would the policy be to implement?
5. Enforcement - Can the policy be enforced through automation? If not, how difficult would it be to manually enforce?

After careful consideration of the above factors, a decision is made by the President and POSCON Directors on whether a policy proposal should be adopted or discarded.

All Network policy changes must be reviewed by the Network Directors and approved by the President. All Legal policy changes must be reviewed by the Network Directors and approved by both the President and General Legal Counsel.

Major changes to policy content should only be released in Q2 or Q4 of any given year. Major changes policy content may be released during other times of the year so long as those changes can be classified as urgently needed by the President. Minor fixes to spelling, grammar, and indexing may occur at any time.

Policies that are adopted need to be constantly evaluated by both the staff and membership to ensure that they remain relevant. Policies can and should evolve over time based on feedback from the membership.

If something doesn't work well for you, we want to hear about it! Your input is critical to the success of POSCON so we encourage you to submit your policy suggestions. You can do this publicly or privately at your discretion.

• For public policy feedback, feel free to use our Feature Requests section of our Forum.
• For private policy feedback, feel free to email [email protected].

We call "must" and "must not" words of obligation. "Must" imposes an obligation on the readers to tell them something is mandatory. "Must not" are used to say something is prohibited.

While "shall" and "shall not" are not the most suitable terms for obligation, if you see the terms used in these policies, they have the same meaning as "must" and "must not".

"May" means purely optional and does not imply that the writer recommends that option to the reader. "Should" also means optional but implies that the writer recommends and advises the reader to use that option.

Summary:

• Must = mandatory
• Must not = prohibited
• May = optional
• Should = recommended

These are the only valid word choices to convey those meanings.