About this website

The Grand Lodge of The Most Ancient And Honorable Society Of Free and Accepted Masons For The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations - The Constitution Online

This website is designed as a research tool to assist members of the craft in Rhode Island to understand the Constitution of the Grand Lodge and to allow them to be able to refer to it for information. It uses a design optimized for tablet, smartphone and desktop computing; although depending on the platform, some features may not be available.

The Constitution is divided into five Sections: The Constitution (Section 1), General Regulations (Section 2), Decisions (Section 3), Standing Orders (Section 4) and Appendices (Sections 6 - 8). There is a sixth document (Section 5): the Grand Masters Protocol, which is used in conjunction with the Constitution.

Each Section contains Articles, which themselves contain Sub-Articles. The naming convention is numeric, followed by the Title. For example, 1.1.1 Title of the Grand Lodge refers to Section 1 (Constitution) Article 1 (The Grand Lodge) Sub-Article 1 (The Title).

The Sections are available from the main menu. Clicking on each section will further display the Articles in that section. Clicking on the Article will display the content.

Many Articles in the Constitution and General Regulations refer to, or are impacted by, active Decisions and Standing Orders. Where this is the case, the decion or order will be referenced in the Article text and, unique to this onlien version, the actual text of the decision or order will be included in the Article display. To see how this works, see /index.php/constitution/11-constitution/103-1-1-02-seals-of-the-grand-lodge, which references Decision 91. The Article text is there, and at the bottom is a further section entitled Related Decisions, under which is the text of Decision 91. There may be more than one Decision or Standing Order referenced in any given Article.

The Decisions and Standing Orders are also listed in their entirety under their menu options.

The website used tagging for several purposes. Firstly to relate the article you are viewing to any other article containing the same tags. For example, this function groups all Articles' Sub-Articles under Constitution, Article 1 together as an aid to reading and navigation. Secondly, tagging is used as an index to provide a listing of all articles tagged with the same index. For example, all articles tagged with "Doyle" will display in a list when you select that index item from the Index menu.

Finally, the website allows free text search of all content via a Search box on the menu. You can specify the scope and the words to be searched for. The result will be a list of articles containing that word or phrase.