[foundation-board] an interesting potential coordinator

Sat Sep 4 11:05:26 UTC 2010

I feel a awkward jumping into this conversation having been so obviously
absent from the last year of discussion about many of the subjects covered.
I apologise if I state the obvious or revisit areas that have already been
discussed and rejected and obviously this is all just my opinion...here
goes...

 The most contentious issues seem to be around specific roles and
responsibilities particularly as they relate to reporting obligations and
access to clear point/s of accountable, timely advise and issue resolution.
There are lots of other concerns but I have already written way too much so
will contain it to the above.

Reporting Obligations: As a Board member I share a concern about the need
for the accountability of funded projects and for financial management more
generally. It is critical that we have exemplary financial reporting and
management both because it is required practice but also because we owe a
duty of transparency to the all participants in the network and to the
public. Also as has been noted already, this last year has seen us taking on
projects that puts us in the spotlight with respect to financial
transparency and accountability particularly when it involves public money.

I note that we have already put in place accounting software and developed a
relationship with professional accounting support. In a separate thread
there is a discussion ongoing about a treasury role at the Foundation Board
level. All of which will help assuage the concerns held by the Board and our
issues of personal accountability but may not be enough to deliver the
transparency I think we need to provide to the network.

I wonder if what we need is a short term burst of paid activity (I think
Jordan might have suggested something similar and Jo also covered individual
project reporting) from a paid specialist to establish two way reporting
protocols across the network. This would cover all reporting - financial,
project progress etc and would cover all projects not just funded projects.
The goal would be to establish appropriate reporting protocols that enable
all projects to regularly communicate progress, risks, issues, resource use
and requirements etc as well as establish clear protocols for how that
information is collated and made available to the board, the network and the
public. For funded projects it is required, for non funded projects we seek
to find the balance between ease of providing reports and value of access to
an overall view of the network as an incentive to participate. This work
would be a fixed term contract with clear deliverables and delayed bonus
built in for successful adoption.

A great deal is already done in this area but I am struck that we (the
Board) seem to be very concerned about the lack of visibility we have and it
is making us anxious about our responsibilities in the face of being called
to account. This is possibly driving us to an assumption that we need to
create a centralised organisational structure as it is a model that is
easiest for a Board to implement and provides a clear, named individual to
hold to account. I believe there is a fundamental difference between having
a person/s who takes on the responsibility for making sense of, and
presenting information, such as an accountant making sense of collated
budget reports from funded projects; and having someone who we hold
accountable for the decisions and priorities inherent in the information
(ie. ultimately accountable for the financial standing of the org).

There is clearly a need for the former but I share Jo's concerns that the
latter moves us fundamentally away from very idea of the network. To embody
that kind of responsibility almost always engenders a need within that
individual to control and direct all related activity (just as we are
seeking to do to make us more secure in the face of our responsibilities).
This brings into question the independence of activities across the network
and I fear will come to inhibit the enthusiasm brought to new and
established projects alike particularly if non-funded. In short I believe we
need to find the expertise to support the act of reporting rather than the
expertise to ensure we like what we read within the reports.

Issue resolution and timely advise/clarification:

I admit that I don't know much about the specific case mentioned in the
thread. I am assuming that it relates to funded projects. As such the
following may be entirely missing the mark.

We have put in place a governing board with a chairperson for the OKF. As
such we have an ultimate resolution and clarification mechanism already in
place for issues that cannot be resolved any other way. However, the
development of funded projects has introduced the need for clarification of
issues that the network has previously not had experience managing, with a
timeliness that does not work well with the network and with accountability
complexities that make it unclear who ultimately bears the brunt should it
all go wrong. In this case I wonder if we should be considering
instantiating small project boards to provide advise and oversight for
funded projects as well as ensuring that the decision making limits of the
project manager are perhaps more clearly articulated from the beginning. It
may be that the strategic board has a role to play here for all issues other
than financial?

I am going to leave it here as if you have managed to wade this far then
frankly I have tortured you enough.

 Regards

Paula

On 3 September 2010 12:13, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 2:57 AM, 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 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.
>
> Agreed! The purpose of this heuristic distinction was mainly regarding
> the budget/schedule reporting *requirements* from funders. I.e.
> dedicated central assistance with doing administrative tasks that we
> shouldn't have to rely on community to do. I.e. if we handed over all
> admin tasks for LOD2 or WDMMG to the coord list, I'm pretty sure they
> wouldn't get done? A dedicated project manager could help with this
> kind of stuff. Especially given your own comments on getting response
> from coord list (it takes time!).
>
> > 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.
>
> For the record, I am hard-coded to try to make sure that with nearly
> everything I do (with the exception of discussions about funding,
> sponsorship, backing and forthing with venues, etc) results in one of
> the following:
>
>  * a new person signed up to a public OKF list, preferably
> introducing themselves
>  * a blog post
>  * an action item which is documented on a public list, or the output
> of which is documented on a public list
>
> When I speak with anyone on a call I *always* ask for one of the
> above. (Sometimes when people write they say 'Jonathan asked me to
> ...' sometimes not.) E.g. with a new CKAN instance I say 'write to
> ckan-discuss with a request'. I have been urging Friedrich to lead a
> monthly public call on CKAN. I have started a list of instances
> (http://ckan.okfnpad.org/instances). I have repeatedly suggested that
> as much as possible is linked to from main CKAN site.
>
> > I don't understand what you mean by devolution of responsibility.
>
> I/we still:
>
>  * do list maintenance
>  * contact/invite people to WGs/projects
>  * solicit for guest blog posts in different domains
>  * pursue funding opportunities
>  * talk at events
>  * ...
>
> In my mind WG/project leads should do this. We are slowly getting
> there. Greg organises WG science call. The EU Open Data group is now
> running without me. Daniel and Friedrich are increasingly able to
> represent OKF at events. A major benchmark will be when e.g. Jim
> Pitman migrates a project to OKF, gets funding, pays some devlopers,
> liaises with coord, etc -- and does this all independently.
>
> > 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.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > 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).
>
> Agreed.
>
> > 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)
>
> Jo: I would really like to do more to e.g. populate project sheets for
> coord. My hands are giving me a lot of pain and I'm worried damage may
> be long-term/permanent. If I can take you up on your offer to help me
> type we can do a lot. All it needs is a diary date and some notice.
> I've tried to Skype you a few times. I've been travelling a bit and
> will continue to travel more in next few months. (Sadly I will only be
> home in Berlin for a few weeks in next few months.)
>
> > 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
> > --
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-board mailing list
> > foundation-board at lists.okfn.org
> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-board
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Community Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://blog.okfn.org
>
> http://twitter.com/jwyg
> http://identi.ca/jwyg
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-board mailing list
> foundation-board at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-board
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/private/foundation-board/attachments/20100904/cbbb8ae7/attachment.html>