[OpenSpending] [openspending-dev] Mission of OpenSpending
Steve Adcock
gsaintheusa at gmail.com
Wed Oct 16 21:20:22 UTC 2013
Wow, you've jumped into it Tryggvi. Great effort and much needed, if not
always appreciated:)
Please keep in mind that this effort and documentation will become the
central foundation of the organization's data and knowledge management
efforts and abilities. As this is a knowledge/data management organization,
I'd call this fundamental to the goals, whatever they are chosen to be. I
would hate for us to operate on a "do as I say and not as I do" basis. If
we encourage data to proliferate without knowledgable organization, we will
only serve to obscure the truth.
Tryggvi has provided us links to two documents for this discussion. The
existing governance document from the website:
http://community.openspending.org/about/governance/#Principles
and the "elevator talking points for four questions" called OpenSpending -
Next Steps:
1. What are we trying to do? (The mission statement)
2. Why are we doing this? (The opportunities if we succeed)
3. How diverse is the project? (What are the areas of collaboration for us)
4. Who can participate? (anybody - but this is about skills we're looking
for)
or in a later email: What I want to achieve with this is:
* Mission statement = What?
* Opportunities = Why?
* Areas of collaboration = How?
* Skills required = Who?
I have some general comments and will add a few comments to the
OpenSpending Next steps document:
1. I recommend approaching this effort as a prototype and template for
the governance documents of OKFN as well as it's other projects.
Constructed correctly, we can make this a staged and dynamic document which
can easily support existing and new open efforts by providing project
management tools and business models which allow users to largely bypass
the pain of setting up a local community and initiating a community data
access/analysis/visualization effort. I believe our OpenSpending goals at
this point should be
1. dissemination of the existing tools and workflows,
2. establishment of feedback/improvement loops, and
3. building an engagement process for volunteers
2. "What are we trying to do?" - This is a broader question than it
appears, because it depends on the granularity of the project. In general,
we should consider having a Vision: Where we would like to be someday; a
Mission: What methods we will employ to get there, and Goals: Specific
umbrellas, or silos, of effort intended to foster our Mission and under
which we can organize our projects around processes and workflows.
3. In general, we should divide a governance document into these
sections:
1. Purpose. This includes Vision, Mission, Goals, and Limitations,
or boundaries of the effort. It should address your "What" and "Why"
questions.
2. Roles and Responsibilities. Here we identify and define all
permanent and temporary work functions, and who will perform
them. We also
identify and define the roles of OKFN and OpenSpending as well as their
relationship. This section addresses your "who" and Skills required"
questions.
3. Policies. Includes ethics and principals as part of introduction
to this section.
4. Procedures and Guidelines. Since this is a crowd source effort, we
must also identify and define which positions are necessary to
implement a
project or continue work on one. This section identifies and defines key
processes, workflows, and data flows. We maintain and support
the software
and coding development and management projects from within this
section, as
well as data wrangling projects, new communities, volunteer engagement,
etc. Project management should be specifically covered in the Governance
document under Procedures and Guidelines and there should also
be Policies
related to them (life cycle and management of projects, etc.).
5. Standards and Formats. In this section we identify and define
standards for data formats, software tools used, workflow steps and
processes which must be supported, audit and edit requirements
(DQA), etc.
4. "Why are we doing this", or Opportunities. "Why" goes under Purpose
in it's simplest form as a core statement. It's expanded from that core
statement into marketing and the blogosphere, but should remain relatively
static over the years within the Governance document. That is, our primary
purpose should be pretty much the same over the foreseeable future.
Opportunities presented don't really belong in this document except as they
are portrayed/implied within the Vision statement. I think the place for
Opportunities, is as metadata for Project justification and as part of
business planning discussions. I don't see a real need for documenting them
under Governance.
5. Who can participate: This should be defined under Roles and
Responsibilities.
6. "OpenSpending aims to map, analyse, understand, and display every
government financial transaction, plan, and contract." This might qualify
as a vision, but even for that it's a bit overreaching. The opportunities
you mention could be crafted into vision statements:
# Opportunities (based on Friedrich's text)
Increased participation in political processes, strenghtened government
accountability, and less corruption.
# Opportunities (based on initial version)
Everyone will be able to understand government spending, and use that
understanding to affect positive social and political change.
I think reaching too far, or attempting to encompass all activity needed,
is a recipe for failure. As in the real world, project creep is a killer.
Let me make some suggestions. Perhaps these preliminary Vision, Mission,
and Goals statements would serve the same purpose and still capture the
spirit of what we're discussing.: *Purpose*
1. Vision: To create an international organization and website where
internet users can access online tools, expertise, and
volunteers to freely
assist in gathering, documenting, analyzing, and publishing public
expenditure data and information.
2. Mission: To test, evaluate, and disseminate open source tools and
data sets for gathering, analyzing, displaying, and publishing public
expenditures, and to foster projects which build our community, increase
our analysis and display capabilities, and enhance and expand
our data sets.
3. Goals don't really belong in the Governance Document, but I list
some here to demonstrate how this knowledge management schema
works heirarchically (i.e. The Vision implies the Mission which
uses Goals
to create Results [accomplished through Workflows using
Processes guided by
Procedures and Guidelines] under the constraints/limitations of the
organization's Policies or mandates). The number of concurrent Goals
should be minimized so that we can use them as umbrellas under which to
operate projects and manage the data and information from those project
s:
1. Create Policies
1. Create a Data Governance Policy
2. Create a Roles and Responsibilities Policy
1. Create a Policy identifying and defining the relationship
between OKFN and OpenSpending
2. Create a Policy defining multiple levels of volunteer
roles and their responsibilities
3. Create a Data Preservation and Archival Policy
4. Create a Data Veracity Policy
5. Create Data Quality Assurance and Audit Policies
6. Create a Partnership and Joint Venture Policy
7. Create a Sponsorship Policy
8. Create Management and Administration Policies
9. Create a Project Management Policy
2. Create a Roles and Responsibilities document (contains contact
information and identifies people and their group
associations) specifying
all roles and their responsibilities (real people must be
identified as
champions for Administration, Goals and Projects and for each level of
granularity).
3. Create and maintain machine readable Standards and Formats for
financial public expenditure data
1. Support public definitions and standards
2. Create and maintain OpenSpending input and output standards
3. Review, research and establish a social network tool for
enhancing public expenditure data with appropriate
provenance and quality
assurance metadata.
4. Create and maintain testing, evaluation, and recommendation
procedures for open source software used in data analysis,
display, and
publication
5. Establish Workflows for Data Veracity Audits
6. Establish Workflows with Procedures, Guidelines and Standards
which help automate and descirbe the process of data capture, quality
control, verification, analysis, display, publication, and archival.
Each goal can be treated as a master project with it's own set of
sub-projects, tasks, and timelines. Obviously these efforts must be
multi-threaded and each Goal requires a champion, just as will each
Project.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Steve Adcock
On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 5:50 AM, Tryggvi Björgvinsson <
tryggvi.bjorgvinsson at okfn.org> wrote:
> On mið 16.okt 2013 05:05, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:
>
> interesting to see this discussion :) One comment I have would be that
> these statements are somewhat focused on the 'how' instead of the 'why'. I
> think (without much experience) that a mission statement should put its
> focus on the latter aspect. It's also hard to explain the 'how' in a
> sentence, which is why we end up with very abstract language ('map,
> analyse, understand, and display').
>
>
> Hmmm... What I want to achieve with this is:
>
> * Mission statement = What?
> * Opportunities = Why?
> * Areas of collaboration = How?
> * Skills required = Who?
>
> Then in the next "phase" (i.e. what we can do when we have this nailed
> down) is to create our strategy with goals and measurable objectives. That
> would be a more detailed "how". But we can't really do that unless we agree
> on these four things (imo).
>
> If the what, why, (generic) how, and why doesn't shine through we need a
> better phrasing of each question/text. I think these should be really short
> -- Elevator pitches. We could even try to go for "Twitter pitches" (less
> than 140 chars) but I think that would be difficult without losing too much
> information, but it would be interesting to try nonetheless.
>
> Btw. I got an updated mission statement sent offlist yesterday. Here it is:
>
> # Mission statement
>
> OpenSpending is a community run project that aims to map, analyse,
> understand, and display every government financial transaction, plan, and
> contract.
>
>
> Perhaps something along these lines: "OpenSpending promotes participation
> in political processes, strengthens government accountability and fights
> corruption by making available information on government budgeting and
> expenditure processes in an accessible and detailed form to citizens,
> researchers, civil society and policy makers." ?
>
>
> I think this is mixing up the mission and the opportunities. From this
> would we could simplify the mission statement and the opportunities.
>
> So here is an updated mission statement (I like explicitly naming
> transaction, plans (budgets) and contract instead of budgeting and
> expenditure processes, so I'm sticking to that). I also don't think we need
> to explicitly state who our target groups are (or do we?).
>
> I removed "is a community run project". After thinking about it, I don't
> think it's necessary to state that, even though it's a fundamental part of
> what we, as a project, are. I'll write up both versions (based on
> Friedrich's text and based on the initial one) so you can choose.
>
> # Mission statement (based on Friedrich's text)
>
> OpenSpending aims to make every government financial transaction, plan,
> and contract available in an accessible and detailed way.
>
> # Mission statement (based on initial version)
>
> OpenSpending aims to map, analyse, understand, and display every
> government financial transaction, plan, and contract.
>
>
> Then we have the opportunities. I'm also putting out two versions here.
> One based on Friedrich's text (I would like a nicer flow than just a "list"
> but I'm being dense and can't really phrase it that way -- I'm now trying
> to see if this can be done in 140 characters or less but that's probably
> destroying the goal of this text).
>
> Friedrich, just let me know if I'm butchering your text.
>
> Anyways, I also updated the initial version. Looking at it and talking
> about the financial world around us, isn't really correct after leaving the
> enterprise world to the the more experienced professionals ;-) So I
> rephrased it a bit to talk about government spending (and shortened it to
> less than 140 chars).
>
> # Opportunities (based on Friedrich's text)
>
> Increased participation in political processes, strenghtened government
> accountability, and less corruption.
>
> # Opportunities (based on initial version)
>
> Everyone will be able to understand government spending, and use that
> understanding to affect positive social and political change.
>
>
> So which mission statement do you think is better? Which opportunities
> section?
> As you can see everything is still very much floating so you can still put
> in what you see OpenSpending as a project to be about and why you want to
> participate in it.
>
> This is going to be a long thread, but I think it is an important one.
>
>
> --
>
> Tryggvi Björgvinsson
>
> Technical Lead, OpenSpending
>
> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org>
>
> *Empowering through Open Knowledge*
>
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>
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