jdlessley wrote:The issue of the tip is not to prevent priesthood leaders from identifying those individuals that want their needs from being addressed with sensitivity and care. The tip is not addressing or readressing the permissability of DO NOT CONTACT lists. It is stating the procedures that are acceptable in MLS. Granted, one can surmise the connection to a some Church policy since MLS closely mirrors Church policy. Extending this tip beyond anything else other than MLS procedure is pure conjecture.
Conjecture just happens to be the way we fill in the holes in our understanding left by information gaps. Now, hopefully, the spirit steps in and clears things up, but at the same time, we are also expected to exercise our due diligence and seek out what information we can. (Which is part of what I have been doing here.)
jdlessley wrote:When guidance is provided from Church leaders the reason for doing so may not be stated or explained. It would be nice to know why but not necessary to carry out the procedure.
Assuming the procedure was communicated clearly and understood correctly, and I'm not the first person to have sought clarification here.
jdlessley wrote:The first part of this statement is a bold, reckless and highly speculative statement that cannot be supported by fact. I would not like to be the one to make that reckless assumption and then be on the receiving end of a lawsuit. The second part of the statement is also false. The wiki statesThis is an additional consideration for members not wanting contact and not the only concern.
I think you overextend my assertion. My statement is well qualified, and is thus not really all that bold or wreckless at all. Oddly enough, your supposed "additional consideration" is not really an additional consideration at all. It is the same privacy concern. Being worried about the publication of PII is a privacy protection issue. (Being annoyed by home teachers stopping by is not here being considered as a privacy issue, per se, though perhaps I can see some cause for confusion.)
jdlessley wrote:It is quite clear that the membership record should not be adjusted or coded in MLS using any method designed to show the record as DO NOT CONTACT. What is wrong is adjusting the membership record or coding in MLS to show the record as DO NOT CONTACT.
Right, but as I have mentioned there are other ways to do nearly equivalent things, and it is necessary to know more in order to determine whether those other things also qualify for the prohibition.
For example, based on the communication received it would seem logical that redistricting to hack a no contact list should be forbidden.
Perhaps this doesn't affect the "member record" per se, but that's all a matter of how systems engineers decided to organize data. It really has very little to do with what we might conjecture from the citation of Moroni provided as context for the policy.
If we take this context at face value it implies not only that we shouldn't tag member records as "do not contact", but that we should also not use any other method to indicate a strict avoidance of contact. This may not be within the purview, authority, scope, bounds, whatever, of the specific body within church headquarters which had this statement issued, but on the local level, it is nonetheless important because our call to apply correct principles is not restricted to MLS.
Hence, when we are given direction, and the principle seems unclear, then it behooves us to inquire more into the principle so that we might arrive at a sound understanding.
Now, I happen to agree that a strict "do not contact" list is a bad idea very generally. Nevertheless, I have never used a "strict" "do not contact" list. I never had the slightest insight into how a "do not contact" list was created and thought that the lists I had seen in the past which said "do not contact" were created due to the existence of some standard "do not contact" flag in the database. I discover that this was not the case, and if not, I wonder as to why such a term was ever used by my former units.
Anyhow, based on Moroni's comments as a context for the policy statement, it would seem to me that playing around with districts in order to hack a "do not contact" list is a bad idea. Nevertheless, I find in this thread, that such a procedure has received praise, and I don't understand why. (Though I would like to.)
On the other hand, creating alternative markings (which I came up with off the top of my head, but needn't be so alarming) would seem to be permissible as it does not create a "do not contact" list at all, but instead provides a method for individualized handling of special contact considerations, which would seem to be in line with the policy. Nevertheless, my hypothetical procedure is criticized.
I do not discount the possibility that I am missing something, but telling me that things are clear does not make them clear for me, and picking apart incidentals is also not helpful.