[ok-scotland] many and various governance discussions

[Angus Whyte]

Dear Jo

Really interesting and informative...thanks.

cheers,

Angus


On 08/07/2010 12:45, jo at frot.org wrote:
> 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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