[foundation-board] an interesting potential coordinator

[paula le dieu]

I am putting a placeholder note here to assure Jo that I am following this
discussion as of this morning. I will marshall my thoughts today and
respond.
Paula

On 3 Sep 2010 01:55, "Jo Walsh" <metazool at gmail.com> wrote:

On 31/08/2010 14:34, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>
> I would also be keen to distinguish between core manag...
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
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