[foundation-board] Notes on the purposes of the coord group

[Jo Walsh]

OKF has enough accumulated surplus cash now to think about hiring a 
Projects Coordinator - someone to keep an overview of work on the OKF's 
funded projects, and take on ad-hoc project management.

So a subset of us on the Board will draft a job description and 
advertise it and see who turns up. Some of the responsibility would be 
towards the coord group, providing summaries of what is happening 
elsewhere. These are other things agreed at the meeting today

* Make clear where the responsibility of the board ends
* Introduce responsibility in the Coord Group for overview of funded as 
well as unfunded projects.
* Give the coord group a small fund to invest (5-10K) Fuck yeah!
* Make a closed list for coord for matters to do with uncertain money, 
contracts etc
* Not yet but at some point have the coord group select the Board
* Consider splitting 'Executive' and 'incubation' functions into two 
different lists if that is popular option

Need estimates of commitment, responsibilities for people re being in 
the coord group. Anyone welcome to join the mailing list, the formal 
membership of the coord group (for voting? i do not much like voting) is 
the leadership of every Open Knowledge Foundation project and working 
group.

Should start coord group blog - like Ian Ibbotson is doing for the open 
heritage data working group...

The small fund, i thought we could invest it like the loan groups in the 
Grameen Bank do, a project borrows the group loan offering to repay it 
within time N, and the pot recirculates.

This would necessarily (over)focus on projects that had viable means of 
self-sustenance on a decent scale in the shortish term. It would be hard 
to use it all on something that had a reasonable risk of failure - 
grant-writing, but this should be doable fairly cheap.

Then given investment success track record, the coord group would have a 
bigger pot of cash next year, there is a good surplus at the moment but 
to what extent is it sustainable, once open data is not flavour of the 
month? So it should be wisely spent in ways which return a tithe to the 
Foundation...


jo
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