[okfn-discuss] Governance and structure of the Open Knowledge Foundation and its activities

Wed Nov 18 19:36:49 UTC 2009

Those are certainly reasonable objections, and many of the tools being  
developed are designed precisely to work around such downfalls.  
Additionally, there's no set requirement that governance be ceded to  
the software (though that is the eventual goal): groups can use it as  
one form of input into decision-making and gradually increase the  
power of that input as they feel comfortable with it.

On Nov 18, 2009, at 2:17 PM, Rob Myers wrote:

> From personal experience, to prevent capture by political cults and
> special interest groups, to avoid organizational perfectionists, and  
> to
> prevent decision-making paralysis.

It is our finding that people tend not to participate in groups unless  
they have some sort of interest in the activity of the group.  
Something like Open Knowledge isn't really a target of political  
heists, is it?

In any event, as I said, most of our tools are consensus-builders, not  
majority-take-all tools. This is not your father's direct  
democracy. :) Majority-rule is a pre-computer form of tabulation. We  
value synthesis over both conflict and compromise, believing that a  
well-built synthesis can bring together a consensus among people who  
might originally feel they are on opposing sides. Many of our tools  
actively promote synthesis while gently down-playing conflict.

Additionally, some systems are completely immune to any sort of  
overtake. Vilfredo is the best example; it is a tool built by  
mathematicians to winnow down ideas to the ones that represent a  
"pareto front." Vilfredo collects everyone's suggestions for a  
solution, then it asks everyone to select all the ideas they agree  
with. It then winnows down the suggestions to the smallest set which  
represents everyone's selections. Then it repeats the process until it  
finds consensus. So there is no way for even one individual to be  
disenfranchised, nor any way for a huge number of people to bully the  
group. It really is quite an elegant tool. It is not really built for  
being a sole governance mechanism yet; so far it is more of a tool to  
help groups build consensus. It can be a great supplement to other  
governance structures.

> Foundations with strongly stated aims within an open society are not  
> the
> same as democratic political parties or public corporations.
> Alternatives can be "forked" easily, and the leadership know this.

But certainly consensus among a large group is better than many small  
groups all working toward different ends. A great example of this  
would be on the consensus side: Mozilla, which is one core development  
structure built by a huge group of people, and on the fraction side:  
bulletin board software, where there are hundreds of open source  
projects; all of which are quite primitive compared to the commercial  
ones.