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

[Rufus Pollock]

2009/11/21 Claudia Mueller-Birn <clmb at cs.cmu.edu>:
[...]
> Introduction
> Wouldn't it be useful to add some general objectives here? I mean, why is there a need for the open knowledge foundation? Perhaps we should add a set of goals. Each project/working group should somehow working on reaching these goals.

Very good questions. We talked about the "why and what" of the OKF
quite a bit during the "vision" discussions earlier in the summer
which also led to this thread on governance. Here's the wiki page
where that discussion has been partially summarized:

<http://wiki.okfn.org/Vision>

I've recently started trying to condense this down into a short
"1-pager" which summarises the "OKF vision". I've just posted this on
google docs (and on the wiki for those who prefer) in a state that
lets anyone edit:

<http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dctxb39c_19q7mv88c4>
<http://wiki.okfn.org/Vision/Draft>

People should feel free to edit/amend/annotate :)

> Structure
> Are organization not allowed to be members of the foundation. Just imagine, a small free software project, organized by a non-profit organization, would like to join OKF. That is not possible?

Very good question Claudia. I think you are right that it might make
sense for an organization to be a member (though one alternative
possibility that would not require organizational membership is for
individuals members of that organization to join).

> Projects/Working Groups
> Maybe this is common sense knowledge, but IMO there should be some explanations about, how the work of these organizational units differs. I mean, a working group is part of a project therefore more a sub-project, isn't it? Therefore, I suggest to add the words long-term and short-term in the description.

Another very good question to ask. In my mind the relationship was
more the other way round with projects being associated to working
groups (in a many to one type relation). The reason for having any
distinction between working groups and projects is that working groups
are more broadly based and tend to be less focused on building or
doing one thing (like a project) and more on covering a particular
subject area.

> Communication
>
> I am dealing in my research amongst other things with free/open source software ecologies. In my recent research I have a very interesting case because for an outsider the whole community is not understandable because it is very diverse (e.g. in terms of mailing lists). Therefore, I think it is very very important for the future work of the OKF to organize all communications, collaborations, and interactions around as few as possible sw tools. For

Again you've hit on something that we've been thinking hard about
(without a good answer). We want to both support a fairly
decentralized setup but we also need to pull different projects,
working groups and services together into a coherent whole that makes
it

a) easy for people (whether already involved or a casual visitor to
our website) to find out what is going on and how to get involved
(i.e. anyone who comes to our website).

b) make it easy to manage projects/workings groups, people and their services.

At the moment we're definitely struggling on some of this. For example
projects have a page on http://www.okfn.org/ but this is often out of
data or out of sync with the corresponding page on
http://knowledgeforge.net/project/ which actually handles the
project's source code, bug tracker etc etc.

> example, mailing lists should be only provided by one provider, documents/information available on only one website or closely related sites. I think it is one major responsibility to promote the OK idea and to gain more visibility and members. Therefore, the whole

Very much agreed and I almost think we should have a dedicated
project/working group whose job is OK(FN) "evangelism/activism", i.e.
telling people about open knowledge and the foundation's activities
etc etc.

> governance structure should be as less complex as possible that any newbie can join the OKF easily.

I completely agree and we should aim to keep this really simple or at
least to have a very simple frontend website. I don't think
http://www.okfn.org/ is up to mark on this at present and any
suggestions for what needs improvement (or volunteers to help make
changes directly) would be very welcome.

Regards,

Rufus