[okfn-discuss] Our vision: Why, How and What for the Open Knowledge Foundation

Tue Jul 14 16:50:11 UTC 2009

2009/7/14 Mike Linksvayer <ml at creativecommons.org>:
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 8:47 AM, Rufus Pollock<rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
[...]
>> (I hope i'm not offending
>> anyone with this analogy!): i.e. a community built around a network of
>> projects (and working groups) joined by shared understanding of
>> openness (and its value) -- as opposed to something centrally driven
>> and organized (and very strongly committed to a particular
>> philosophy).
>>
>> * A clear espousal of openness with explicit application across a
>> variety of domains (so not just content, not just data -- genes to
>> geodata, sonnets to statistics ...). Many other groups/orgs are
>> focused on one particular thing (e.g. openlibrary)
>
> The Apache umbrella analogy for OKF really helps me understand what
> the OKF is and/or is trying to be, more than anything I've ever read
> before -- I've never really understood exactly how all of the projects
> I see mentioned in relation to the OKF hang together other than "very
> loosely" but ASF-like makes that answer make sense to me.

Thanks Mike -- this is really useful feedback.

We do have a governance document which tries to make this a bit
clearer: <http://www.okfn.org/governance/>

However I think this is rather under-read and I think we probably want
a nice diagram.

Rufus