[okfn-coord] Consultancy guidelines - please read this email before the Board meeting tonight

Tue Dec 15 14:20:24 UTC 2009

Hello all

Jordan has pulled together some really good work on the consultancy
guidelines which puts us in a good position to take this work to the
next stage. The full document is here
(http://okfn.org/board/wiki/Draft%20guidelines).

The document is intended to be circulated around the wider OKFN
community to ask them to inform how OKFN deals with any conflict of
interest issues when taking on consultancy work - although it also
works as an important restatement of our core values in this period of
growth as an organisation. It lays out 4 interim principles upon which
the Board will operate (reproduced at the end of this email for ease
of reference) while the community helps us shape a more detailed
policy for the future.

Before it is circulated more widely, we as a Board need to make sure
of two things:

1) That we are happy with the four interim principles as stated in the document
2) That we are happy with the wording of the rest of the document and
happy for it to be circulated more widely.

It would be ideal if we could approve the entire document in the Board
meeting, but let's at least aim to get 1) signed off in the meeting.

Hope this is clear, see you all tonight

Becky

Four interim principles:

1) Approval of the project must be by a majority of eligible
(non-conflicted) directors. Directors are ineligible to vote if they
have a direct financial interest (such as acting as a subcontractor to
OKFN on the project).
2) Directors contracted onto projects should use their non-profit /
discounted rate for their work, if they have one.
3) The outputs of the projects should be openly licensed whenever possible.
4) We should find ways to turn work for one specific company or person
into work for large groups of people. We’re not a consultancy that
sells the same advice for a fee to clients over and over again.
Instead, once one client pays us to do something, we’d like to make
the results openly available for anyone with a similar problem.