[foundation-board] Benchmarking the OKF's activities

[Jonathan Gray]

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Jo Walsh <jo at frot.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 11:36 AM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
>> more systematically measuring things
>
>> would be very useful for decision making and strategy
>
> Yes it sounds very interesting. One set of decisions has to do with
> the surplus that OKF has acculated; spending it in ways that will
> repay investment and engage a community.

++1. We also need to use this wisely to make sure that the OKF is
still around in 5, 10, 15 years. Unwise to make 80% of our activities
depend on paid contractors. Need to make sure we expend resources to
build sustainable community. Not just 'volunteers' a la Wikipedia, but
partnerships (with other orgs, research bodies, etc), and synergies
with communities / actors who are working in this area anyway (folks
working in universities, cultural heritage bodies, designers, journos,
etc).

> Tyler Mitchell gathers this sort of data for OSGeo, graphs of code
> commits and mailing list subscriptions, probably has some scripts...

*Amazing* - might you be able to ping him / liaise with OSGeo about
any bits of this we could reuse? ;-)

> I wouldn't see it as primarily intended for the board, more the coord
> group and the wider "community"...

++1. The only bits I thought would be *particularly* useful for the
board were allocation of paid time / resources, to help plan around
taking new projects on, etc. I'd also be keen to check with
contractors before publishing details on hours + details on resources.
Balancing privacy / transparency, etc.

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-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
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