A question of control

The issue is seemingly minor, yet opens up a major question. We use Google Apps for our communication and collaboration needs. One of the features is Google Groups - this allows for mailing lists, web forums, and access control. Now, anybody in the school can create a group. I could turn this feature off, but don't really see any reason why. At the same time, I create (via some scripts and magic sauce), the entire range of class, house, and staff groups. In the long term, these will be automagically synchronised to the Single Authoritative Data Source, though for now it's a hodge-podge of scripting and manual intervention. In preparing for the deletion of last year's groups, I asked staff if there are any groups that need to be saved or archived. This showed me that a number of staff had created their own groups for various purposes - staff, class, etc. Here lies the question: how much control over this do I want? It is certainly less work for me if the staff create their own groups as needed - this is simple enough for them to do, disperses control, and empowers the staff in the ICT realm. On the other hand, if everything is automated, that should be less work for the teachers and would make life easier for less techy teachers. Such a system would need to be quickly responsive to changes in group memberships, which it hasn't always been.

And having both systems side-by-side could get messy - I'm happy for ad-hoc groups to be created as needed, but having two groups for the same purpose is messy, and will get confusing in the long term.

Giving this to the teachers cedes control. Which I shouldn't have any issues with, but strangely find creeping into my thoughts increasingly.

The other point this issue raises is the lack of a forum to discuss this sort of thing. I'm happy to make certain decisions, but some things (like this) should be open to discussion by the user base, but there is no real place for this discussion to occur. Not enough of the staff seem to be on twitter or facebook to be representative, the staff@ group I prefer to keep as announcement only, and staff meetings are already overloaded as it is. Perhaps I'll set up an opt-in staff-discuss@ group for this purpose.