Mike Thanks for this great piece of comparative governance - very helpful.
Regards Andrew -----Original Message----- From: okfn-discuss-boun...@lists.okfn.org [mailto:okfn-discuss-boun...@lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Mike Linksvayer Sent: 15 July 2013 20:50 To: Open Knowledge Foundation discussion list Subject: Re: [okfn-discuss] Open Knowledge Foundation Governance On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 4:34 AM, Abbas Mahmoud <abbas...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm interested in knowing how the Open Knowledge Foundation Board of > Directors are selected. I'm pretty new to the OKFN movement, so I'd highly > appreciate some pointers to relevant links, if any. > > Also, has the OKF ever considered empowering the community to (s)elect some > seats at the Board Level? I know that other like-minded organisations like > Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons usually does that, which tends to > give the community a sense of belonging and a voice at the decision-making > level. FWIW, Creative Commons doesn't really do that, or a weak version of it anyway. In 2011 it asked affiliates for suggested board members, and the board elected one https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/29109 Now (closing today) it is asking the public for suggested board members https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/38704 In both cases, the community is only empowered to make suggestions. Wikimedia, comprehensively documented at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_of_Trustees has had some community elected directors from 2004 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_of_Trustees which is fantastic, but they do have one advantage of an easy metric for who gets to vote -- edits to Wikimedia projects. Since 2008 Wikimedia has also had chapter-elected directors, which is something CC probably could do easily (they know who affiliates are) and maybe OKF too, though I don't know the formalities of OKF affiliates. > Your thoughts? I think more open governance of putatively open (yes in a different sense, largely) organizations is a good idea, good for OKF for talking about it. There are some other nearby examples. The Open Source Initiative is in the middle of a multi-year process of converting its board to be completely community elected, some from affiliate organizations, some from paying individual members (another easy way to decide who gets to vote), see http://opensource.org/node/601 and the current in process individual member election at http://wiki.opensource.org/elections:2013 http://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Riehle-MOSDF-v12-Final-Web. pdf summarized at http://acawiki.org/A_Model_of_Open_Source_Developer_Foundations has a section on governance, adding meritocratic means of gaining decision making powers, using a model built by investigating a bunch of open source project foundations. I don't know the details, but I think KDE eV and GNOME Foundation are well known examples that have had a meritocratic-democratic structure (members elect, members have to be nominated by other members, have contributed to projects) from their inceptions. Back to CC and Wikimedia, Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack: Epistemic Communities and Social Movements: Transnational Dynamics in the Case of Creative Commons. http://www.mpifg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp08-8.pdf and Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack: Managing Boundaries between Organizations and Communities: Comparing Wikimedia and Creative Commons. http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/Dobusch-Quack-Paper. pdf are also quite interesting. Enjoy & good luck, Mike _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list okfn-discuss@lists.okfn.org http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list okfn-discuss@lists.okfn.org http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss