[open-linguistics] Call for ideas about organisational structure for OWLG until April 12th

Tue Apr 2 09:25:15 UTC 2013

> "Admin" is too technical, I would rather go for "curator" for
> content-focussed tasks or coordinator, if it is used with "with" as in
> "coordinates with OKFN", e.g. for reporting.
>

I totally agree that communication with OKFN needs to be improved, as well
as communication within the working group, but these are two independent
goals. Actually, until his sabbatical as of last February, Jonathan Gray
from OKFN was very much involved with the group and embodied our link to
OKFN. Coming back to the proposal to have 2-3 "administrators" (resp.
"coordinators" or whatever) from each community, there should be at least
one (more?) person responsible for OKFN communication among them.

The main rationale behind my proposal is that I am not sure that many
people will reliably commit themselves for any permanent obligations, even
if they are minimal. (There has never been a shortage of volunteers for
short-term obligations for us, but this is a different story.) To find
three to five people is certainly realistic. If we have more, this would be
phantastic, and we can implement elaborate mid-to-longterm responsibilities
as Sebastian suggests, but this increased level of specialization calls for
improved coordination, again, so that a small number of active people
channelling the information flow is required nevertheless. So, maybe we
should treat these both aspects, resource management/the concrete tasks at
hand, and the "facilitate communication" task, independently.

For the latter, a single coordinator position would not be appropriate, but
several people reflecting all participating communities (I suggested
typology/academic linguistics, CompLing/NLP, IT/SemWeb, before, but we can
extend this list), in order to make sure that community-specific demands,
resources, expertise, and goals are faithfully respected in all OWLG
announcements and activities. And to keep the work load minimal, their main
obligation would be to attend to the telcos, and to take care of concrete
problems and tasks (including but not limited to those from Sebastian's
list) if they arise. Here, "taking care" means to attempt to find a
volunteer for a task, not necessarily to do it themselves.

> However, imagine, if we, as a group, were to produce all the things in the
> expected results column. I would be very proud of our community.
>

We all would be :)

All the best,
Christian
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