During our last board call, Johannes shared the work he has been doing with the community at large around identifying a list of potential priorities for the OIDF Board. The list is rather exhaustive and can be found here:
http://wiki.openid.net/index.php?title=OpenID_Foundation/Strategy There was significant overlap between this and the work I have been doing on a short-term action plan to help promote transparency and increase membership in the OIDF. The feedback Johannes gathered boils down to focus on the following four areas: 1) Security. The proposal is to hire an outside consultant to write up a report. 2) Executive Director. Complete the hiring of the new ED. 3) Customer Research. Obtain feedback from both OpenID adopters and those who have chosen not to adopt. 4) Member Engagement. Put in place tools for communicating with the community, specifically by creating a membership newsletter. Looking over the short-term action plan I had discussed with other board members, it was clear that all of the items fit into the above 4 priorities. I'd like to outline specific short-term action items that we can discuss here and (hopefully) vote on during the 8/28/2008 board call. Note: there is an action item below for the Membership committee (Bill, David, Gary & DeWitt). 1) Security Security is clearly a priority and I'm proposing that Tony Nadalin of IBM chair a security committee. The goal of the security committee will be to identify ways we can address security concerns around OpenID. Status: Scott will propose this during the 8/28/2008 board call for vote. 2) Executive Director The hiring committee (Scott, Raj and David) have forwarded a position description for the Executive Director last week. Status: PD has been reviewed by board and recruiting committee will publish to OpenID general list week of 8/25/2008 and potentially retain a recruiter to help fill the position. Status: More discussion to happen 8/28/2008 board call. 3) Customer Research We need to know more from current and potential users of OpenID what they need to make it more relevant for them. What's missing? What's not? Johannes has agreed to participate in these discussions and I'm also very interested in participating. Status: Johannes and Scott will work on identifying other volunteers and a course of action to be proposed on the board list in the coming weeks. 4) Member engagement There are several short-term action items we can be doing here to encourage more community engagement: Deploy membership tools: Bill Washburn has been working with RefreshMedia to deliver a set of tools that make it easier to become a member of the OIDF as well as gives the ability to vote with your OpenID. Bill gave a report on this during the 8/14/2008 call. Status: completed ... https://openid.net/foundation/members/registration Elect an Executive Committee: The board needs to vote to create an executive committee and then vote on who should be its members. The Executive Committee will be focused on the day-to-day activities of driving the organization as well as work closely with the new ED to make sure we're on track. This committee will also act as the 'Board Development Committee' that will be tasked with identifying potential new board members both corporate and community and encourage them to participate. The Executive Committee will also help the board focus with its increasing size (see below). Status: completed ... created on 8/14/2008 call and discussions continuing on make-up of the committee on board mailing list. Expand the Board size: There has been significant interest in expanding the number of corporate board seats (and thus community seats). I am proposing that we add 5 more corporate board seats and 5 more community seats. Ideally this would happen around election time for the original community board seats. The goal is to empower those that are interested in participating in the OIDF to do so. Status: Scott will propose this on the 8/28/2008 board phone call. Solicit applications for corporate board seats: If/when we add the new corporate board seats we will need to identify potential companies looking to join. The new membership system allows potential corporate board members to easily apply. The Executive Director and Executive Committee will begin recruiting of new board members. After the application deadline, the board will vote to elect which members to join the board. Ideally this will happen during the membership drive with the selections happening before the election of the community board members (or should this be directly after?). Status: Pending and dependent on decision to expand board size. Membership drive: During the months of August and September, the membership committee (Bill, David, Gary and DeWitt) will work with the rest of the board members to help with a membership drive. This drive should be substantially easier with the new membership tools that Bill has been working to get implemented. Ideally each board member would do some personal PR (via blog, twitter, etc) and Bill should do an email to the General OpenID mailing list to elicit participation. This needs to get started as soon as the membership tools are completed and released to the public. We'll need to set a proposed completion date on this and schedule community elections immediately after. Status: Membership committee needs to propose a membership drive plan-of-attack. Community board seat elections: Once we have a sufficient membership, we will hold elections for the community board seats. At that time, we'll elect in 12 community board members. The election committee (Mike and Bill) will determine the logistics for nomination and voting from our membership. Ideally they will be supported by the membership committee. Status: Pending membership drive. We agreed on the last board call to each consider these priorities as board members and come back with any comments and volunteer for areas of interest. - Scott _______________________________________________ board mailing list [email protected] http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board
