[okfn-discuss] OKFN Governance

Fri Dec 4 07:53:24 UTC 2009

Hi all,

After last nights discussion in the advisory board telco, I did a little 
research re governance of grass-roots community projects:

*W3C*
http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/cover.html
Very comprehensive and structured, (paying) W3C members have voting rights.

*Apache Foundation*
http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html
Based on meritocracy.

*Debian*
http://www.debian.org/intro/organization

*Wikipedia*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_policies_and_guidelines
 From the active Wikipedians elected administrators ultimately decide 
about conflicts.

When researching the matter I also found p2pfoundation 
(http://p2pfoundation.net), whose goals seem complementry to OKFN. They 
also have a document comparing different practices of "peer" governance 
as they call it:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Governance
There seem to exist also quite a number of articles and even books about 
the matter (cf. references on the wiki articles).

However, for now I would recommend to keep it rather simplistic. Maybe 
with some kind of steering committee, which decides based on a public 
RFC about the acceptance and status of OKFN projects (e.g. incubator and 
featured project) and groups (e.g. interest and working group). Maybe we 
don't even have to distinguish projects and groups?

Sören

-- 

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Sören Auer, AKSW/Computer Science Dept., University of Leipzig
http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer,  Skype: soerenauer