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

Sun Sep 12 12:06:14 UTC 2010

Jo

I'm guessing you're back from your conference, so now's a good time to respond.  Please forgive me for being blunt, but I think that there are a number of important points to clear up:

On 7 Sep 2010, at 15:06, Jo Walsh wrote:

> 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...

Please try to remember the simple fact that the OKF is not OSGeo. I'm not sure if the OSGeo model (how it once was or how it is now) is what at least I for one want the OKF to be.

Regardless of valve problems, it seems that there is a very simple alternative to "saying nothing at all".  It's called telling the board that you feel sensitive about asking in private and and asking about or suggesting a way *in the middle of a governance review* to make this public.

I think it's rather more than a simple substitution of "request" and "suggest" and again I do feel very strongly that this kind of conversation on coord is very counterproductive. After talking to several advisory board members in the past week, I have to say I'm not the only one.

We now I think have a duty to make sure that this issue and the true factual situation are cleared up on coord. I think that we the board should have a discussion before anything is posted there.

> 
>> 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.

Let's parse this correctly:

-- Jonathan gets paid for being our community co-ordinator
-- Mark was brought on board to help out on project management in a process you approved, which is "meta management" as you called it in your original email.
-- If Rufus isn't accepting the pay, he isn't getting paid for his 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... 

I don't know how it could be any clearer.

-- The OKF gets a project. 
-- That project has a budget
-- a percentage of that budget goes to pay the contractor
-- a percentage gets retained by OKF for overhead and to invest in further open knowledge projects.  It's not a "tithe" or a "super tithe" it is the net after contracting costs.

The work I'm doing, is pretty clear:
-- I'm a subcontractor on a project.

All the work I do on "meta management" -- improving OKF -- is unpaid.

For people like Mark (or Jonathan), these are payments from core funds -- ie money not tied to a project! So again:

-- Jonathan gets paid for being our community co-ordinator
-- Mark was brought on board to help out on project management in a process you approved, which is "meta management" as you called it in your original email.
-- If Rufus isn't accepting the pay, he isn't getting paid for his time!

And I'll add to this

-- I and all the other board members are acting unpaid for everything that isn't project work.

> 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.

I agree that this is a problem -- indeed that is the very reason we've been trying to restructure the OKF!

> 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.

Yes, and speaking of communication,  I think the way that was raised to the CKAN list was counterproductive.

> 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.

It is very important to keep in mind that the difference in rate is *not* OKF's "profit" in any sense.  We have ongoing costs, which will continue to increase as we get more organised and professional on the commercial side of what we do. Also please keep in mind that often in contracting orgs get paid for one day at a rate that allows them to spend two days doing the work.  So that difference also gets used to buy *more* days of contractor time.

This sounds like an example of the very thing we're trying to avoid by being going through this process of being more transparent.  I do think that you're right that we're on track to deal with this issue.

> 
>>> 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.

If you contract to the OKF, I see part of your right as a contractor to sub-contract out part of the work.  However let me be clear on my opinion of Paola so far.  She

-- is relatively new to the OKF, so doesn't seem to have much of a sense of how we work
-- does not run any of our projects (so slight question as to why she's on coord in the first place and how valuable she can be)
-- has a style of communication that I feel is very divisive to others trying to participate
-- confesses herself that she doesn't take the time to properly look up most if not all of the issues she talks about on coord, and
-- her lack of putting in the time investigating issues means that she wastes a lot of other people's time and our resources

Having met her and seen the kinds of output she has onlist, I'm not sure she has the kind of skills where I would feel comfortable devolving any project responsibility to her whatsoever.

> 
>> -- 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.

I am not sure what the right answer is, but I'd like to talk about ways we can improve the process so far.

Thanks

~Jordan

> 
> 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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____
Mr. Jordan S Hatcher, JD, LLM

More at: <http://www.jordanhatcher.com>
Co-founder:  <http://www.opendatacommons.org>
Open Knowledge: <http://www.okfn.org/>