The passing of time is something that web applications often miss. Many events that we model have a fixed progression from browse to purchase and ship, or edit to publish. However some of them have a state which is semi-permanent. I've been involved with a couple of these recently and both were around roles in software. One was for work and one was in discussion with friends. The details are not that vital, so I'll discuss the general case.
The basis issue is that we let people take a role on our software and then something structural changes. Usually outside the world of our software, but that means the person can not or should not fulfil that role anymore. An example is employment, a person might have a role on a site, as they are employed by a certain organisation. If their employment status changes, then two things need to happen.
They need to be able to change or have changed the role they play on the site. Their previously contributed content needs to be flagged that it was contributed by a past employee. It is really easy to miss this kind of detail when building out the first pass of a site, but it is worth planning for it, as it can become urgent if the person moves to a competitor.
Thinking through the language to describe the person's previously contributed content and allowing for a history of roles on their profile will help explain to other people on the site that Simon was the admin of this group, but he is no longer.
The profile is worth further discussion, if you are allowing people to create an affiliation, you need to allow for change and past affiliations. I've worked for the BBC and I'm now working at Nature, ideally I'd be able to list both of these appropriately on sites which cover the past 3-4 years. Maintaining a single bio or profile might not be enough. Conference websites are a good example of this, as your career progresses your bio will change, but the bio and the conference presentation come from a particular time period.
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time, social software, role, groups, moderation
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