[ok-scotland] many and various governance discussions

Thu Jul 8 11:45:07 UTC 2010

dear lovelies,

Forgive my long delay in responding here - I've been very much on
holiday, at Archer's grandparents' place. Mostly i have been sitting on
the porch, feeding peanuts to the squirrels and chipmunks, who the
neighbour has trained to sit up and beg. Reading a lot of J.S. Mill.

So. There seemed to be a couple of interconnected threads - what is Open
Knowledge Scotland good for, how does it relate to the central OKF, and
how is OKF ensuring the existence and persistence of good intentions and
actions to people who may want to bring projects or groups under a
broader banner.

The only thing that's been Open Knowledge Scotland so far is the event
in May. It was originally going to be called OK Edinburgh - then Robin
and Stuart easily persuaded me that OK Scotland would project a bit more
gravitas to influencers, and attract people from further away.

I haven't thought seriously about formalising OK Scotland as an entity
with governance processes, funds, aims etc. I would be interested to
hear if other people thought that would be worth doing - if it would
help reach goals or serve audiences in Scotland that are not being
addressed currently.

I *am* interested in doing more events. Specifically, there's the chance
this September to be on the fringe of the Repository Fringe -
http://www.repositoryfringe.org/ ( nudge, is there 2010 material to go
here: http://wiki.repositoryfringe.org/index.php/Main_Page )

I wrote a bit more about this on the main okfn-discuss list just now,
should have cc'd here, don't want to go on too long in one mail.
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2010-July/007330.html

So onto the OKF governance stuff, hopefully briefly.

I've been on the OKF board for a few years, back when there were three
of us who met at most six-monthly to look over the accounts; the
Foundation was run on a shoe-string, with hosting costs and occasional
paid work by Jonny and John B covered by donations from Rufus.

In the last year or so, Open Data has become terrifically trendy, OKF
had pioneered the setting out of terms with projects like the Open
Definition, Open Data Commons licenses and the CKAN registry software,
and quite a few different funding institutions have come to OKF for
support; the Cabinet Office / TSO paid us to extend CKAN for use within
data.gov.uk, Channel 4's 4iP innovation fund supported a second phase of
work on Where Does My Money Go?, to add annotations, contributed data
and more detailed data visualisations. There's quiet talk of extending
both of these things to Europe-wide projects and efforts, OKF is
involved in a European consortium FP7 project on Linked Open Data which
has yet to start, organised by Soeren Auer. JISC has just funded a
collaborative project on open bibliographic data. IDEA Lab in Edinburgh
put funding towards the Bibliographica project and its underlying ORDF
platform for linked data applications. Um, OSI funded the writing of
some document or other. It is quite possible there are other things I
have forgotten about.

I don't know if all this is really documented anywhere. The rush of
interest has caught everybody up, Rufus seems to spend 12 hours a day in
a constant conference call. There are a host of new working groups in
different areas using OKF as a neutral place to build consensus on open
data sharing - ethics, terms, technical standards.

As far as the Board goes we should be publishing details of our meetings
- i have volunteered to write some up. Also the accounts, we fairly
recently sent last year's off and should publish them, should we be
doing more in terms of more frequent financial summaries (some of the
details of the receivables are a bit sensitive, let us say).

So i should really be taking some of that to the main okfn-discuss list,
where there are occasional threads concerning Foundation and project
governance. The projects committee is a new thing - intended in part to
take all the non-sensitive traffic off the private board list - and to
open up the running of things, create simple guidelines and principles
of involvement if that would be helpful.

http://old.nabble.com/New-Developments-in-Governance%3A-Membership-and-Coordination-Group-td28969692.html
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

There is more we could be doing if reflecting and not just rushing that
would be future helpful, sure.

love,

jo
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