[okfn-discuss] Open Knowledge Foundation Governance

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 4:34 AM, Abbas Mahmoud <abbasjnr at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm interested in knowing how the Open Knowledge Foundation Board of
> Directors are selected. I'm pretty new to the OKFN movement, so I'd highly
> appreciate some pointers to relevant links, if any.
>
> Also, has the OKF ever considered empowering the community to (s)elect some
> seats at the Board Level? I know that other like-minded organisations like
> Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons usually does that, which tends to
> give the community a sense of belonging and a voice at the decision-making
> level.

FWIW, Creative Commons doesn't really do that, or a weak version of it
anyway. In 2011 it asked affiliates for suggested board members, and
the board elected one https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/29109

Now (closing today) it is asking the public for suggested board
members https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/38704

In both cases, the community is only empowered to make suggestions.

Wikimedia, comprehensively documented at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_of_Trustees has had
some community elected directors from 2004
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_of_Trustees which is
fantastic, but they do have one advantage of an easy metric for who
gets to vote -- edits to Wikimedia projects.

Since 2008 Wikimedia has also had chapter-elected directors, which is
something CC probably could do easily (they know who affiliates are)
and maybe OKF too, though I don't know the formalities of OKF
affiliates.

> Your thoughts?

I think more open governance of putatively open (yes in a different
sense, largely) organizations is a good idea, good for OKF for talking
about it.

There are some other nearby examples. The Open Source Initiative is in
the middle of a multi-year process of converting its board to be
completely community elected, some from affiliate organizations, some
from paying individual members (another easy way to decide who gets to
vote), see http://opensource.org/node/601 and the current in process
individual member election at
http://wiki.opensource.org/elections:2013

http://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Riehle-MOSDF-v12-Final-Web.pdf
summarized at http://acawiki.org/A_Model_of_Open_Source_Developer_Foundations
has a section on governance, adding meritocratic means of gaining
decision making powers, using a model built by investigating a bunch
of open source project foundations.

I don't know the details, but I think KDE eV and GNOME Foundation are
well known examples that have had a meritocratic-democratic structure
(members elect, members have to be nominated by other members, have
contributed to projects) from their inceptions.

Back to CC and Wikimedia,

Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack: Epistemic Communities and Social
Movements: Transnational Dynamics in the Case of Creative Commons.
http://www.mpifg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp08-8.pdf

and

Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack: Managing Boundaries between
Organizations and Communities: Comparing Wikimedia and Creative
Commons.  http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/Dobusch-Quack-Paper.pdf

are also quite interesting.

Enjoy & good luck,
Mike