[okfn-advisory] Advisory Board Meeting tomorrow

Tue Jul 5 10:17:17 UTC 2011

On 4 July 2011 10:56, Jo Walsh <jo at frot.org> wrote:
> On 03/07/2011 23:24, Lucy Chambers wrote:
>>
>> As we had a fantastic and very productive meeting in Berlin
>> The notes from saturday's meeting in their raw form can be found here:
>
>> http://coord.okfnpad.org/berlin-away-day
>
> Lucy, thanks. It was great to put faces to all the new OKF people.
>
> I stood down as a director of Open Knowledge Foundation Limited yesterday,
> and am now re-joining the advisory board (which i never officially left,
> when i joined the main board in 2007).
>
> Four years is a fairly long time on the personal timescale, wanted to step
> down before reaching burnout. Been playing Cassandra too much, constantly
> drawing attention to problems that we don't yet have.
>
> Have no experience of scaling an organisation from community roots to
> million-pound budgets and government contracts. Was just introduced to
> someone who took a community transport organisation through this process,
> and if we manage to meet up in Manchester next week i'll report back any
> learning experiences to this list.

That would be very useful.

> The notes show a renewed commitment to delegating more of the *strategic
> direction* of OKF to a wider community group. There's a proposal taking form
> which i guess we'll see circulated to discuss.
> In the past there's been the problem that people in projects and working
> groups don't have time/headspace for administrative tasks; maybe being able
> to disburse small amounts of funds to new projects,
> combined with more influence, would encourage people to engage.
>
> Quick question: this list currently has closed archives / membership list -
> i'm hoping these are the default settings and that there's not a reason for
> this, could we set them to be open please?
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-advisory

This is an interesting question. At the moment the archives are
closed, the logic being that Advisory Board members should be able to
offer their advice freely (and be consulted freely) without having to
worry that these discussions would be publicly viewable. I think this
is important esp re being able to be candid about e.g. other orgs,
strategy etc (and this is why advisory list has generally been closed
at other organizations I've seen).

This may be a less relevant concern here and we'd of course be happy
to change this if AB members wish the archives to be open but the
original setting of list archives as private was not an accidental
default.

> be well all, won't make this evening's meeting but will look forward to
> future ones.

:-)

Rufus