[foundation-board] an interesting potential coordinator

Tue Aug 31 11:54:11 UTC 2010

Hi Jo

No worries about the lag, hope you had a nice bank holiday.

On 30 August 2010 23:31, Jo Walsh <metazool at gmail.com> wrote:
> dear Becky, all, sorry for the lag here,
> On 27/08/2010 19:32, Becky Hogge wrote:
>>
>> perhaps something to revisit?
>
> Right, i'm contradicting what was agreed at the board meeting, having had a
> few weeks to think it over - sometimes i think very slowly.

Yes, that is an issue, as it's a minuted Board decision. But we
definitely need room for slow thinking, as it's often the best kind.
>
>> To me, the project coordinator fulfills all the roles of an
>> executive director minus the strategic role, which is delegated
>
> This is kind of my problem - the governing structure that this implies.
> Board as head, people as legs, etc. Are we serious in our desire to make a
> "decentralised, networked organisation" in which case is hiring someone to
> be in the centre, a good place to start?

What I'm concerned about, and what our decision to recruit a project
coordinator mitigated, is that the executive ("head") part is
currently not working well. Effectively, Rufus has been taking an
executive role, but without proper accountability, because he's also
fulfilling a non-executive role (as a non-executive Director/Board
member and now as Chair of the Board). The most troubling symptom of
this, from a Board-member perspective, is the lack of reporting
particularly around budget and financials. The Board can't act as a
collective head if it is not properly informed.

Our commitment to make a decentralised/networked organisation was, I
thought, expressed in the idea that the Coordination committee would
emerge as a strategic force in the organisation. The project
coordinator would act as reporter to the Board, who would then be the
sense checker in terms of our financial and legal obligations. I have
no idea if this strategic/operational dichotomy will work, and I too
have been slow-thinking it in the weeks that have followed and have
come up with my own set of concerns about how this system might play
out in practice.

One example of where we're failing without this structure is
Jonathan's email yesterday asking to speak to a "representative" of
the Board. Currently, no such representative entity exists - this is a
classic role for an executive director. Under the system proposed
above, the project coordinator could address whatever concerns
Jonathan had about the operational aspect of his problem, and the
coordination committee could address the strategic aspects.

<snip>

> I still don't see that coordination and project management are the same
> role, it wasn't clear to me at the F2F meeting that this was certainly the
> case.

You're right to separate out these two questions. Recruiting someone
to take a project coordinator and an ad hoc project manager role was a
pragmatic decision based on where we thought money might come from to
fund such a position. The theory was that funded project management
work would supplement the coordinator's engagement with the
organisation. That in turn works on the assumption that a person's
engagement with an organisation increases exponentially with the
percentage of their time they spend involved with it. Thus any funds
from the core pot that we invested in the project coordinator role
would have this additional value.

> It seems to me that hiring a few people for less time over time represents
> less risk to us and more spreading of responsibility...

Perhaps, but spreading responsibility, at least over reporting to the
Board on core financial and legal matters, is something I actively
want to avoid, for reasons stated above.

It would be great to get a perspective on this from others who were at
the f2f meeting.

All the best

Becky