[foundation-board] Fwd: [okfn-coord] OKF tasks and the cost of coordination

Tue Sep 7 14:06:00 UTC 2010

hi Jordan,
dear Jordan, all,

My flight's delayed several hours, i'm offline, but bumped into a "Skype 
Access" thing, lets see if this works.

On 07/09/2010 09:50, Jordan S Hatcher wrote:
> we didn't vote to move any general budget power over to coord
> ... this very public discussion.
> Paying you for your time (which is of course an option) seems to me
> to be the kind of discussion that is a board decision.

Right, my error there was the word "request" rather than "suggest".
I definitely didn't mean to imply that coord would have decision-making 
power over money, this is not the case. I broached the subject there, 
rather than here, because I want to be public about this. I don't see 
that there is any benefit in asking in private, and i feel a bit 
sensitive about asking the board to give me money in exchange for time,
in private. Part of the problem here is that there's no public board 
list (as there is in OSGeo, that is archived and anyone can join) or 
private coord list. I wanted the request/suggestion to be logged.
And see my later point on coord, which i've noted here before, that 
other people seem to have a valve that stops them saying things, but 
mine appears to be missing, the alternative is saying nothing at all...

> making it look like most everyone gets paid.

It looks to me as if everyone else actively working on OKF governance 
(yourself, Jonny, Mark, Rufus (whether or not he is accepting the pay))
is being paid for their time.

You mention your own example, that you're being paid through project 
work. In his review, Mark is taking the tack of treating OKF as a 
project in itself, i like that approach. OKF surplus funds, the 
super-tithe, come from the same place as project funds. To me the 
difference isn't clear...

Another thing that makes my position unusual is that Will, Archer's 
father, is doing a lot of contract programming and sysadmin work for 
Rufus at the moment. (Bibliographica, briefly WDMMG, now handling the 
CKAN crisis.) I find out more about what is happening operationally with 
OKF, over a beer with Will of an evening, than i find out in my role as 
a board member or as chair of the coord group. That concerns me.

CKAN fell over a couple of times at the end of last week / this weekend, 
outages of many hours, at a critical time (the work on rebuilding the 
Linked Open Data cloud diagram using CKAN) and a lot of this seemed to 
come down to coordination and communication problems.
I'm digressing.

I also had the conversation with Will that goes, "I just found out what 
data.gov.uk is paying OKF for my time, i.e. three times what OKF is 
paying me, i feel uneasy about that." Reinforcing the need for 
accounting transparency, openess about what the money is being used to 
do or not do. But we are on track to deal with that, i think.

>> In addition, Paola DM is offering me valuable bursts of advice, as
> I also think that it is inappropriate to bring this up on coord as
> well.

Right, i went too far here, but it makes sense to me, perhaps i can 
handle this myself (e.g. build a tithe for Paola into what i am 
requesting). I can ask Paola to back off from the coord list and just 
talk to me, and i'll relay the key points without the abrasion.

> -- move the kinds of discussion that has been happening on coord to a
> different list, such as okfn-governance.  It is counter-productive
> and antagonistic when we need to be cooperative and productive.  See
> Ian Ibbotson's email on coord.
> -- get coord to a place where it can help project people do projects

I don't see, if one moves the governance discussion away, what coord is 
then left with, in the short term. I've asked there in the past for 
indulgence of patience from WG leaders who may otherwise be confused by 
the scaling/transition problems OKF is facing.

It starts to get recursive, as coord has to figure out what coord is 
for, but this can't be done just by talking about what coord is for.
I would like to improve focus - for example by working through with 
Francis Irving what his requirements are for bringing Public Whip and 
Election Leaflets to OKF as projects, and set an example. This then 
informs the discussions about governance and standards. Francis has been 
near to and supportive of OKF for a long time. If this puts him off then 
i will change tactics based on the reasons why, and put even more time 
to working through it collaboratively and clearly.

As i said there too, i hope this is short term, i see it being fixed by 
New Year, a new era of expansion, coherence and success dawning, etc.

> I suggest we focus on governance almost exclusively at our next
> meeting.

Sounds good to me, also thinking of something i overheard John Bywater 
said yesterday, "discussion about process, discussion about systems, 
they converge on requirements." I want to act the talk, as it where, to 
try to be concrete, and process discussions can quickly become 
un-usefully abstract (though i keep starting them, i try to keep some 
grounding in action always contained in them). I thought Ian Ibbotson's 
mail was thoughtful and collected. Another person who's been around 
awhile and has patience.

> Thanks

I am told: "Western culture is far too addicted to explicit acts of 
thanks and giving, yet such overt acts eventually trap us in matrix of 
ever-perpetuating expectation, largely losing sight of the original 
reasons. At the extreme it becomes a surrogate for whatever was 
originally important. Almost a false economy of emotions."

I don't know if that helps :)

love,

jo
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