imminence: Decision Record: Department Permissions
Introduction
In March 2024 a proposal was put to SteerCo to allow departments direct access to Imminence to maintain their own data sets. Although all data in Imminence is publicly available, we agreed with John-Paul Dickie (and previously with Alex Pardoe) that it would make sense to restrict data set updating to the owning department to avoid the risk of data sets being accidentally overwritten by non-owner departments.
Requirements
Each service would need to be owned by one or more departments. Only editors with Imminence access permission in Signon should be allowed to view and edit those services, with the usual caveat that selected GOV.UK staff should be allowed to access all services for troubleshooting and incident response.
We looked at the way this was handled in Whitehall and other publishing apps, where Signon provides the current user's organisational slug and access can be limited based on that. A "GDS Editor" special permission is also typical of these apps.
Resulting changes
- Add an "organisational_slugs" field to each service, to be filled in by us for existing services before departments are given access. This will be a simple string field, with comma separation for multiple owners.
- Add a "GDS Editor" permission. Anyone with this permission can see and edit all services/data sets/places. Anyone without this permission can only access services whose organisational_slugs field contains the same slug as reported for them by Signon.
- When new services are made they will automatically be assigned an organisational_slug identical to the current user's, unless the user has the GDS Editor permission, in which case they will be able to edit the slug directly.
We will not at the moment add in an organisational drop-down, so any GDS Editor making changes to the organisation slug will need to know the correct one, but it is assumed that people with this permission will know how to find that out.