[okfn-discuss] Open Knowledge Foundation Strategy slides

Sat Jul 20 22:06:02 UTC 2013

While I personally sympathize with your sentiment, I lean toward pragmatism, a quality also highlighted on slide 9.

We use Google Docs at my organization, and instead of fighting it, I realize it helps folks collaborate and get on with their work.

For the coder within me, I too would love to see truly open alternatives to Github (for example, Gitorious) embraced. That said, while Github itself is closed source, its overall functioning and capabilities are very complementary to the practice, if not the ideals, of open source.

On Jul 20, 2013, at 1:51 PM, Tim McNamara <paperless at timmcnamara.co.nz> wrote:

> One of the trends I've noticed is that OKFN is moving away from open source
> software for much of its activities. These slides are hosted on Google
> Drive, for example. Code is hosted in GitHub. To me, this trend goes
> against the first slide, which is "Open as natural, open as good".
> 
> On 21 July 2013 03:32, Gene Shackman <eval_gene at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for posting the slides
>> http://okfn.org/about/strategy/
>> 
>> Couple of suggestions
>> 
>> 1. slide 9. I don't know that you need to say "not fanatic". Just
>> "pragmatic" is good enough. Are you saying someone else -is- fanatic?
>> 
>> 2. slides 7 and 9. You do define 'talking' as advocacy on slide 7, but
>> when I got to slide 9, I'm sorry to say I didn't really remember seeing the
>> previous definition, so all I saw on slide 9 was "talking", which doesn't
>> sound very useful. Can you change that to "advocacy and creating"? That's
>> immediately understandable, and looks like you are -doing- something.
>> 
>> 3. Slide 10. Now that I've been on this list a little while, I see there
>> are many organizations about 'open'. Slide 10 seems kind of like an
>> advertisement, why okf is better than other organizations. No real harm in
>> it, but just seems kind of marketing.
>> 
>> Gene
>> 
>> 