[foundation-board] an interesting potential coordinator

[Jo Walsh]

On 31/08/2010 14:34, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> I would also be keen to distinguish between core management functions
> for paid projects and strategic/operational/day-to-day stuff. So
> project coordinator would be responsible for projects where we have a
> specific budget, deliverable, deadline. For other projects, events and
> activities (e.g. Open Shakespeare, Is It Open?, ...?), I'd be seen to
> see devolution of responsibility to Working Groups and Project Leads
> (reporting to Coord Group) ASAP. Trick for all of us will be to do
> this transition well and strike the balance properly.

Jonny, I absolutely disagree here. I think the difference between funded 
and unfunded projects is synthetic and is not organisationally helpful. 
CKAN began as a volunteer project and was for a long time.
*All* OKF projects deserve funding.

Please, all of you, get over this "reporting". It is just writing 
documentation, working in public as much as possible. This is standard 
practise for JISC projects, this is not unreasonable to expect.
Collecting documentation together, having simple standards, that help 
new people coming to projects understand and engage.

I don't understand what you mean by devolution of responsibility. 
Project owners already have autonomy. All i am talking about here is 
minimal documentation. Even volunteer projects will benefit from proper 
public documentation about exactly who is working on a project, exactly 
what the goals are, what the common ground is with other projects.

Only a project leader / project manager can really produce this. A few 
HOURS of work per project for a very large one, if that, to get this 
done enough and produce an overview from. (using Yahoo! Pipes or whatever).

I know it is late at night but I feel like i am typing into a black hole 
here. Martin, Jordan, Paula, Rufus - do you agree with Ian and Becky 
that OKF needs an Executive Director to report to the Board and manage 
paid/partner projects? Or do you see my point here, that this move is 
not in the spirit of where OKF started, appears to be addressing the 
problem at the wrong level, and is likely to have a negative impact on 
the rest of the community?

I also feel like you're putting cart before horse. Let's hire an ED. 
Okay, let's figure out what they are going to do.
Look at this task list: http://wiki.okfn.org/coord/tasks

Apart from the sysadmin stuff, your ED could be responsible for most of 
this. Rufus and Jonny are *already* both dropping a lot of stuff on the 
floor trying to cover this task list. Let's look at it and think about 
collective organisational priorities and task dependencies, what the 
most benefit is in hiring someone to do, in time they free up for 
others, and at points where we are letting the community down (such as 
not responding to issues raised in the tracker, flaky infrastructure, 
poor project documentation not encouraging participation, etc)

Please excuse my last mail - travelling and thinking too much, had no 
right to start fucking at you all. This speaks of my frustration but 
also my sincerity about this, i am not deliberately being divisive.


jo
--