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

[Claudia Mueller-Birn]

Hi,

Thank you very much for your comments :-) 

On Nov 23, 2009, at 1:38 PM, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> 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>

In the vision document the societal impacts are mentioned: 

	• A better democracy: ....
	• A better culture: ...
	• A better economy: ...

What is about technology?? Isn't is important for research and development as well to have open data?! Well, maybe someone could argue that there is no relation to society and I don't think so. Technology changes our life and without  technology our society would be different. Technology has high impact on society, therefore it should be part of the 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 :)

Done. I added a couple of comments and would like to discuss these points. As you know, I am quite new in this community and I am still trying to understand the overall direction.

>> 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).

Well, of course. Both is possible. But what do we want? This is related to my comments in the Google Doc.

> 
>> 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.

lol, you see, would be good, to have a short description. 

> 
>> 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).

Okay, the website, the different channels of communication should be much better arranged. Regarding the website, why do you use this software? Maybe I shouldn't touch this topic...I am just curious. KnowledgeForge is using Wordpress and ??.

> 
> 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.

Yes, this should be definitely somehow integrated. Well, maybe this is just a technical problem. Isn't it possible to include pages? 

> 
>> 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.

Yes. :-)

> 
>> 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.

Well, yes. Let's start with my first question about the Wiki software. And what is about the design? How made it? Shouldn't be the logo appear on the website and the logo has a green part, shouldn't be the website green as well?

Please, I don't want to sound annoying, I just hope I can help a bit. 

> Regards,
> 
> Rufus

:::claudia