Hi all,

After last nights discussion in the advisory board telco, I did a little research re governance of grass-roots community projects:

*W3C*
http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/cover.html
Very comprehensive and structured, (paying) W3C members have voting rights.

*Apache Foundation*
http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html
Based on meritocracy.

*Debian*
http://www.debian.org/intro/organization

*Wikipedia*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_policies_and_guidelines
From the active Wikipedians elected administrators ultimately decide about conflicts.


When researching the matter I also found p2pfoundation (http://p2pfoundation.net), whose goals seem complementry to OKFN. They also have a document comparing different practices of "peer" governance as they call it:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Governance
There seem to exist also quite a number of articles and even books about the matter (cf. references on the wiki articles).

However, for now I would recommend to keep it rather simplistic. Maybe with some kind of steering committee, which decides based on a public RFC about the acceptance and status of OKFN projects (e.g. incubator and featured project) and groups (e.g. interest and working group). Maybe we don't even have to distinguish projects and groups?

Sören

--

--------------------------------------------------------------
Sören Auer, AKSW/Computer Science Dept., University of Leipzig
http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer,  Skype: soerenauer

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

Reply via email to