[foundation-board] a story about data.gov.uk

Thu Mar 15 22:07:20 UTC 2012

Comments inline:

On 13 Mar 2012, at 14:12, Laura James wrote:

> I have added this to the agenda for next week's board meeting. 
> 
> If the board wished to see more information about this in advance of the meeting, I think Rufus would be best placed to supply it.

I note that this is inadvertently an off list discussion about what seems like a board matter. I've moved this email over to the Board list so that it is available in the archives and to observers.

On 13 Mar 2012, at 14:09, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> On 13 March 2012 13:37, James Casbon <casbon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks, Martin.
>> 
>> Just to be clear on the facts,
>> 
>> Will says "the upper management of OKF showed apparently poor
>> judgement in replacing at several iterations the person who was the
>> interface to the CO".  It may or may not have been poor judgment, but
>> who can we ask to get the history of who was the interface with the
>> CO, Jilly Matthews?
> 
> I would note that we have just (yesterday) ended Jilly's engagement
> with us. This may be the occasion for Will's communication since Jilly
> is based in Edinburgh and was introduced to us by Will.
> 
> I would point out that Jilly has has had little or no responsibility
> for managing the data.gov.uk contract and the reason for ending the
> contract with us had nothing (as far we can tell) to do with our
> handling: it was a simple fact that the government is limited in the
> amount of money it can spend with a specific contractor without going
> to tender.
> 
> The CO have chosen not to go to tender on DGU preferring to continue
> to run it directly and have therefore had to end work with the Open
> Knowledge Foundation directly (from end of this month). I would note
> that (with our support) they have already hired one of our existing
> CKAN developers to continue working on the project for them and seem
> heavily committed to using CKAN into the future.

On the commercial side, as part of the discussion on data.gov.uk, I'd just like to make sure that the risk of hitting this limit with the CO and either the need to compete by tender or that we would lose this contract was identified early on in enough time and in way that helps us manage our income.

Thanks

Jordan

____
Mr. Jordan S Hatcher, JD, LLM

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