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Open Governance
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Definitions
Hi all,
As you may have understood from the way I introduced
myself to this community, I don't have lots of direct first
hand experience in this space.
To help me think (or at least try to think!) constructively
on this topic, I think it might be useful to have some common
definitions (I think this was raised elsewhere, specifically
regarding what constitutes governance) - if tight definitions
are difficult, at least some common understanding of the
terms we are using.
I don't feel experienced enough to drive some definitions,
but perhaps I can contribute by highlighting the terms that
are not entirely clear to me.
Open Communities:
- are we only focused on communities which build open
source software? If not, what other open communities
fall within scope?
- given that open source development communities are
within scope, do we differentiate between the scale of
the communities - I guess small communities have less
problems/issues than larger ones
-- are we just focused on larger communities?
-- do we have any understanding of how large a community
needs to be before giving rise to significant problems?
- does it make any sense to differentiate between projects
in which a commercial entity has an interest and those which
are of no interest to the commercial world? If so, how can
this be done?
Participants:
- do we differentiate between participants in a community?
-- it would seem that different participants are involved for
different reasons, which would seem to have implications
for management of the community
-- eg students could be involved in open source development
for fun and raising profile; others could be involved because
they believe in a cause and employees of a commercial
organization could be involved because it somehow delivers
value for the organization
Governance:
- how broad do we think of governance
-- are we thinking of a loose set of operating rules to enable
a community to more or less operate
-- are we thinking of mechanisms in which there is a legal
foundation and people/organizations can be liable if things
go wrong
I hope these are not newbie questions and that I'm not just
making noise in the forum here. If I am, let me know.
BR,
Seán.
Hey Sean: I wouldn't use the term "newbie" questions. On the contrary, these are some of the big questions I am also trying to answer.
I think to some degree it's ok to have our own definitions, as long as we make sure to explain what they are when we generalize from them.
Some more specific thoughts:
* Open communities. This might be our opportunity to define the term ;-) The Wikipedia article is very short and cites not references. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_community - nevertheless, I do like how it describes an open community.
* Looking at open source software communities (as one example), there are definitely different types of participants - and I suspect we can generalize that. Individual participants will have different motivations, and will take different roles and responsibilities - it could be interesting to analyze these roles in some detail with respect to leadership and governance.
* Governance: there are lots of ways to look at that, but at the broadest level, I think your idea of "enabling communities to more or less operate" seems fine. The legal foundation can be part of that. In the case of P2PU we are thinking a lot about the legal foundation at the moment, but more because we don't want the law to mess with the way the community more or less gets things done right now ;-)