Request for feedback: Handling more complex memberships

A few members have described a limitation of the current Popolo Membership model [1], for which I would appreciate your feedback.

In both legislative and non-legislative contexts, it is common for a person to be a member of multiple organizations. The question is, how can we determine whether the person is acting on behalf of an organization while occupying a given position, or whether they are acting independently?

For example, members of this Open Government Community Group may join as unaffiliated members, or as members on behalf of their employer. We know that, for example, Bob is a member of this group and a member of XYZ Inc., but we cannot determine whether Bob is a member of this group on behalf of XYZ Inc, or on his own behalf.

In many legislative contexts, it can often be assumed that members are on legislative committees, etc. on behalf of their political party, but in some contexts (especially those where a member can belong to multiple parties at once) this assumption doesn't work.

It's been proposed to add a term to the Membership model to point to the organization that a member acts on behalf of. This seems to be a simple and reasonable solution.

If everyone's agreed, the next step is to choose an appropriate term. A challenge is that the term should not imply too much agency to the member with respect to the organization. For example, legislators may be members of political parties, but individual members rarely speak for the entire party. So, terms like `representing` or `agentOf` may not be the best candidates. I'm currently considering `onBehalfOf` or `asMemberOf`.

What do you think?

1. http://popoloproject.com/specs/membership.html
2. https://github.com/opennorth/popolo-spec/issues/33

Thanks for any comments!

James