[foundation-board] URGENT: Problems with a specific individual and OKF projects

Tue Nov 16 21:02:28 UTC 2010

On 16/11/2010 09:23, James Casbon wrote:
>  Do you think, as her friend, you could ask her to
> tell you the fraud she thinks has taken place?  At least then we can
> actually deal with the claim.

After a bit of probing on question of alleged fraud, got down to this:

[[The specific allegation is that the LOD2 OKFn project deliverable is 
my proposal for which OKFn has gotten funding and then left me out]]

For "my proposal", read "a registry of open government data services and 
resources".

So, we could address this by publishing information about exactly what 
LOD2 deliverables OKF is working on (and who is working on them).
I know this is covered by http://lod2.eu/ but the description there is 
kind-of high-level. http://lod2.eu/WorkPackage/wp9.html describes a 
GovData.EU service, with OKF as one of the partners on the work package.

Also a note about when the LOD2 proposal went in, would help here.
This sort of thing doesn't need to be a special statement, just part of 
standard project documentation. I set up a stub page based on the 
OKFNProjectTemplate for this, some time ago, it never got used though.
http://wiki.okfn.org/p/LOD2

I hope this does not seem unreasonable?

Soeren Auer (the LOD2 project leader in Leipzig) has been very calm and 
reasonable about the email snarl-up that he has been caught up in.
Here is what he had to say in response to my last email:

[[I have to say, that I think OKFN with its numerous volunteers does a 
marvelous job. E.g. just yesterday I learned OSM aims to adopt the 
opendatacommons license, which directly showcases the success and impact 
of an OKFN project.
My intention with acquiring funding for OKFN through LOD2 actually was 
to foster this success and help establishing effective and sustainable 
processes.
It is quite depressing to see that this can actually also have the 
opposite effect. However, I hope we overcame this problem now and this 
is the start of a more constructive discussion and a process of 
incremental improvement of OKFN as seems to be already decided (or on 
the agenda) of the OKFN board and community.
]]