[foundation-board] Update on OpenTrials

[Pavel Richter]

Dear Board,

I just shared the following update about OpenTrials with the whole team:

Dear all,

Let me share some recent developments around OpenTrials with you:
While we are preparing for phase II of OpenTrials, we expect several
changes happening to the project. The biggest one is that we are following
Ben Goldacre's suggestion and move all technical development and design
work to a dedicated team, staffed and run by the University of Oxford. Ben
made it clear that for phase II he prefers to have the technical team sit
alongside the domain expertise team in Oxford.
This is not what we planned for; we were hoping to use the next three
months (and some additional funding from the Arnold Foundation) to continue
work on phase I of OpenTrials, as well as figuring out the potential for a
better partnership with Oxford. However, this did not work out, the Arnold
Foundation made it clear that we can not use the available funds for this.

We do not agree with the assessment of Ben that the development work is
better done at the University of Oxford. We do believe that phase I has
proven that the OKI tech team is very much capable of delivering excellent
work, and that the main reason for some problems in phase I was the lack of
dedicated resources in Oxford.

However, a partnership works only when both parties believe in it. So we
decided to go along with Ben's suggestion to concentrate tech and design
work in Oxford (this does not mean that there will be no technical work be
done by OKI, but that our involvement will be reduced significantly).

So the  immediate consequence of this is that we will have to reduce the
OpenTrials team, which means that Georgiana, Victor and Ben Meghreblian
will leave OKI within the next 4 weeks. All three did exceptional work on
OpenTrials, and we hope to get them on board again for other projects.

As another consequence of this development, we will shift our focus on the
OpenTrials project, namely to a greater policy role in the project,
bringing the solution to the attention of Civil Society Organisations and
growing the user base of OpenTrials beyond the academic arena that Oxford
has covered. We will present OpenTrials to the broader open knowledge
community and promote activities to to make good use of the OpenTrials
data, to improve people's lives.
Chris will be reaching out to project and product managers across OKI to
identify opportunities and incorporate these changes in the plan for phase
II.

We (Chris and me, supported by Paul) will be working on a proposal that
will allow OKI to be involved with phase II of OpenTrials. The strategic
importance of this project is not measured by the size of our involvement,
but by the potential impact OpenTrials can have on people's lives, and our
impact as an organisation on the project. The last months of OpenTrials
were not easy ones. Our relationship with Ben Goldacre is not without
challenges. We do believe that there is a fruitful involvement of and a
strategic role for OKI in the future of OpenTrials, if OKI and the
University of Oxford can agree on a framework of governance and on common
goals and interests for phase II.  This is what we are working on for the
next several weeks.

I share this with you in this length, because it is important that we not
only share our successes with each other, but also failures and
developments such as this.

-- 
Kind regards

Pavel Richter
CEO
Open Knowledge International
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