[foundation-board] Blog post to accompany publication of Board minutes

Mon Jan 10 15:55:44 UTC 2011

Hi everyone

I've worked up a draft blog post to accompany the publication of the
minutes we approved last meeting. Comments and suggestions for
improvement welcome.

Cheers

Becky

Begin blog post//

It is with a mix of regret and pride that today, on behalf of the OKF
Board of Directors, I'm publishing minutes of OKF Board meetings
dating back to May 2009. Regret because these minutes should have been
made public much earlier than now, and it's just been one of those
items on the Board's to do list that has been put off and put off
again in favour of other items, either more immediately pressing or
more exciting. And pride because together this set of minutes
documents, if only from one rather dry perspective, the growth and
development of an organisation and community that has achieved rather
a lot in the last 18 months.

It's a story worth telling. In May 2009, the OKF Board met face to
face in the Cambridgeshire countryside for a day-long brainstorming
session about how best it could contribute to the network's future.
Here, we outlined a shared vision for the organisation as one that
supports autonomous projects loosely joined by their endorsement and
promotion of open knowledge (as set out in the open knowledge
definition). We looked in detail at compliance issues, sketched out
projected outgoings, and discussed three promising looking income
streams: consultancy projects (whose operating profits could be
"tithed" back to the community), grants, and fundraising from the
network.

That meeting defined much of the work that was to come. That Summer,
while Jordan Hatcher put in a lot of pro bono time cementing
compliance processes, I produced a selection of potential financial
plans, and Paula le Dieu worked up a more detailed reflection of the
OKF vision that would eventually be put out for consultation with the
community at the end of the year. In the meantime the OKF began
working with the Cabinet Office, 4IP and others (such as
farmsubsidy.org and aid.info), contributing legal and technical
expertise to realise various projects, including data.gov.uk and Where
Does My Money Go? Rufus Pollock maintained an overview of this work,
reporting financial and legal issues to the Board at monthly
conference call meetings, while Martin Keegan contributed accounting
expertise, helping prepare for the year-end accounts, submitted  in
February 2010.

The following August, when the Board met again for an away day in
Cambridgeshire, the organisation it was discussing was in radically
different shape. Thanks to a number of ongoing consultancy projects, a
significant cash surplus had been accrued. And the profile of the
organisation had increased dramatically. Rufus Pollock was on the
verge of accepting a year-long fellowship at the Shuttleworth
Foundation to continue driving forward the open data agenda. The
number of potential consultancy and grant-funded projects had
multiplied, and now included significant EU grant funding on the
horizon.

It was all good news, but it did present the Board with a number of
new challenges. Firstly, the proliferation of projects combined with
his new role at Shuttleworth made it clear that Rufus could no longer
act as liaison between the day-to-day operations of the various arms
of the OKF, and the Board. So we resolved to recruit for a new role -
that of Project Coordinator. Seen as a compliment to the excellent
work conducted by Jonathan Gray as Community Coordinator, the Project
Coordinator would keep an eye on all contracted and grant-funded
projects and report back to the Board so that we could continue our
legal and finacial oversight role.

The second - and nicest - challenge was how best to manage the
operating surplus so that we could distribute it to those parts of the
community that could do with it most. Our attempts to address this
challenge remain ongoing, but at the August meeting we resolved to
take an incremental, experimental approach, devolving discussion of
the possibilities to the Coordination Committee, chaired at that time
by Board Member Jo Walsh.

The third challenge is in some sense the driving force behind this
blog post. Since that meeting in May 2009 we have been acutely aware
of the qualities that set OKF apart from other organisations, and of
our duty as a Board to maintain those qualities. OKF is first and
foremost a community, and thus the Board's role in shaping OKF's
future should be limited to maintaining the financial and legal
viability of the organisation. The Board has consciously avoided
appointing anyone as its Executive Director. We feel that the
strategic direction in which the organisation travels should be
defined as far as possible by active members of the OKF community.

It may seem odd, then, that we have not published these minutes
sooner. And it is odd - in fact, the number of times an ACTION item is
listed in these minutes to "progress publishing the minutes" is almost
comical, if it weren't, from the Board's perspective, so regrettable.

We have delayed publishing minutes of our discussions from the past 18
months not from lack of will, but from lack of time, as we have been
running to keep up with the pace with which open knowledge has
rocketed up the national and international agenda. As well as
resolving to publish the minutes as soonas they have been officially
approved and adopted, this year the Board will be focussing on more
ways to get the community involved in strategic decision-making at
OKF. We're already speaking with members of other collaborative
organisations, such as the Apache Software Foundation, about models
that we could adapt or adopt.

As a read through of the last 18 months' worth of minutes will
confirm, governance is rarely sexy. But speaking as one person who has
been part of this Board during this exciting phase of OKF's
development, I think it can still be rewarding. I hope that if you do
take time to read through the minutes we've published, you're inspired
by the work that we've done. After all, the reason we come together
regularly to discuss VAT registration, financial compliance, and
contractual committments is because we're inspired by the work that
you do.

//ends