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

[Jonathan Gray]

This looks excellent - I would add that in addition to outputs being
openly licensed (perhaps whenever outputs are public?), we should only
take on work that pertains to open knowledge - i.e. material that is
open as in opendefinition.org. It might seem obvious, but I would
argue that there should be an explicit policy that we only take on
work if there is an open knowledge/data/content (or even
software/services) 'angle', otherwise it shouldn't really be our core
work.

Jonathan

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Becky Hogge <becky.hogge at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> okfn-coord at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-coord
>



-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org