ProjectType

Projects are classified into three types, as specified by the ProjectType field in the ProjectForm.

• GovtOversight - Oversight of the operation of specific governmental bodies, preferably by a consistent set of citizens who will grow to understand the issues to come before the body. A governmental body that can be tracked would be GrossmontHealthcareBoard, the board that has oversight over the operation of Grossmont Hospital.
• IssueOversight - Oversight of political issues or specific development projects that may require interaction with several governmental bodies. A good example is BlackwaterPotrero, the huge 824-acre training camp proposed by BlackwaterWorldwide.
• InfrastructureProject - These projects relate to the COPs organization and the logistics behind handling all the various projects. An example of such a project is the project you are currently reading, the ProjectAnatomy project, which deals with the specific sections of project pages on the website, and the COPsProgram, which is the ultimate parent of all projects.

The ProjectType field may be superfluous as the type of project could be determined strictly by the ProjectParent field, and additional Project topics would be created called GovtOversight and IssueOversight that would be parents to any projects in those categories. To determine the classification of any given project, however, it is necessary to follow all parent links until the ultimate parent is found. Although this design is possible, it makes such determination and qualified searches much more difficult given the flat-search method used by TWiki. An enhancement to TWiki would be linked topic facility, which is currently not available. Therefore, we will strive to keep the tree of projects as flat as possible, and rely on the Parent-Child relationship only as a means to assist the user to find related projects.