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Open Governance

Syllabus for Open Governance

Philipp Schmidt's picture
Wed, 2010-08-25 18:24

Have a look at this blog post, which gives some of the background and motivation for running the course: http://sharing-nicely.net/2010/08/open-governance


Logistics

  • Participants will post answer to the weekly tasks on their individual blogs (set up a blog prior to the course at wordpress.com if you don't have one)
  • All discussion, including discussion of blog posts will take place in the discussion forum in this course
  • We will set up synchronous seminars as appropriate and needed, taking into account different time zones -- choosing a time that works for most people -- and connectivity


Week 1 - Introduction - Shaping the course together

Goals:

  • Getting to know the other participants.
  • Review the course syllabus and extend / update as a group.
     

Week 2 - "Learning to act like baboons!" Cultural norms transfer

Open innovation communities are characterized by cultural norms that vary greatly from the hierarchical structures common to firm-based employment (and sometimes university study). Governance processes rest on a foundation of norms and behaviors, some explicit and others implicit. As open communities grow, the transfer of these norms and behaviors to new community members is important to preserve stable governance mechanisms. Readings will look at community norms in baboons to highlight the mechanisms of norm transfer. The task will be to find examples for norm transfer in open communities and discuss them in the group.

Mini Case

  • Opening up the gang discussion list at P2PU

Week 3 - Groups and Networks

Guest facilitator: Leigh Blackall

In 2006 I recorded a video of Stephen Downes explaining his position on Groups vs Networks, and wrote a blog post around it. Please consider that video and blog post and join us in a 1 week forum conversation about it. Questions we might mull over could be:

  1. Is governance an appropriate framework for thinking about online projects?
  2. Will the desire to organise, centralise and ultimately govern, always be a need for people in an online future?
  3. Is the individualism implicit in networks too problematic for people with cultural, family or political backgrounds that value collective identities?

After, before or during the discussion event, please consider adopting a question stemming from this topic, and cover it in your blog with links and references to support perspectives. Multi media welcome of course. Share your work in the discussion forum and I'll aggregate it in a post of my own after the week.

Regards
Leigh

Case study - Debian, Ubuntu (with Mako Hill)

Conversation with Benjamin Mako Hill about governance in various open source software projects he has been instrumentally involved in. Mako wrote much of the Code of Conduct that forms the foundation of the Ubuntu Community model. 

Discussion topics as outlined by Greg Grossmeier (who is a participant in this course);

  1. What did you see as the problems in other communities that you were trying to avoid with the newly formed Ubuntu project? And how did you attempt to address/avoid those problems?
  2. In my first blog post assignment for this course I mentioned how I see much of the transmission of the social norms in the Ubuntu community is done through process (Membership approval, which I am on the America's board for, QA Team, MOTU, etc) but I failed to contrast that with the Ubuntu CoC. How do you see the relation of the CoC to the creation and transmission of social norms within the community?
  3. One of the initial articles[0] we read for this class was about a troop of baboons that lost most of their alpha-male figures due to a freak accident. The resulting culture of that baboon troop was much more welcoming and gentle. This persisted even after new males joined the group due to, it is believe, the fact that the females greeted the new males more openly and sooner than they normally would have. Even though most FLOSS projects have a SABDFL or similar role, what mechanism do you envision could be used to mitigate some of the negative effects of that figure? This should not preclude simply saying "have a nicer alpha-male."
  4. What were the lessons you learned from the creation of the founding documents/processes of the Ubuntu community and the subsequent real world testing of those materials? Anything specific you would suggest to individuals working to create a culture of Open Governance in their community, FLOSS project or not?

Ideas for Additional Weeks (we didn't get to)

Moving from informal to formal (governance structures and processes) Review charter documents, articles of incorporation, by laws, and other formal definition

  • Joomla
  • Wikimedia Foundation
  • WikiEducator

Possible guests:

  • Charles Armstron, One Click Orgs (TBD) - Questions that arise when moving from informal to formal / challenges / tensions .... 

Task:

If you are involved in a project that has some aspects of open governance, please review and analyse the organisation's governance structures in the following dimensions (alternatively, choose an existing open community and analyse it following the same criteria):

  • Formal documents that set out decision making processes, roles and responsibilities [provide links to these documents]
  • Describe the organizational structure (often defined in the formal documents above) and how the organization makes decisions
  • Outline the informal practices of working together and decision-making, especially where they contrast with or go beyond the formal structures
  • Describe community norms around responsibility and decision-making (provide links to guidelines or values if available)


Case Study - Free Software / Ubuntu

Guest facilitator(s): Joshua Gay, Mako (TBD)

Optional - Transparency - Can you have too much of a good thing?

Task:

  • Give an example from your own experience where transparency has been used effectively, insufficiently or used to the detriment of a good outcome.

Other options:

  • TBD - Case Study - Free Software or One Laptop Per Child project
    Possible case study week where we look at free software or OLPC. See comment below.
  • TBD - Leadership in open communities (Ronald A. Heifetz)
  • TBD - Decision making in groups (Cass Sunstein, Infotopia)

Notes

Ideas for seminars

  • Maha Shaik (LSE)
  • Charles Armstrong (One Click Org) to speak about the relationship between incorporation and community norms / processes
  • Joseph Hardin (University Michigan, Sakai) to speak about Sakai
  • Mark Surman (Mozilla Foundation) or someone in Mozilla to speak about Module Ownership in Mozilla
  • Achal Prabhala / Tomas Buckup to speak about Wikipedia Chapters
  • Wayne Mackintosh to speak about WikiEducator (also invite Leigh Blackall to speak about challenges during the start-up process?)
  • Eugene to speak about Wikipedia in general?
  • Tonya Surman to speak about Constellation Model (or other ideas)

Readings

  • Review: Managing without managers - pdf
  • Google talk on dealing with problems in your community (search own blog)

Example Tasks / Problems

  • Inviting attendants to the P2PU community meeting. How to make the decision.
  • How much transparency is appropriate? Relationship between board responsibilities and community involvement when open communities incorporate.
  • There are legal requirements that specify board activities, which are not always appropriate for governance of fluid, open, volunteer communities.

Comments

I had some additional ideas,

Joshua Gay's picture
Joshua Gay
Wed, 2010-08-25 21:34

I had some additional ideas, mainly focused on free/libre/open-source software.

Possible additional formal governance structures

Possible topics

  • The GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation
    • What are the key philosophical, legal, technological, social, and ethical doctrines, processes, and structures that underly the GNU Project?
    • What are the differences between the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation?
    • Does the FSF's role of accepting copyright assignments on behalf of contributors to GNU projects help or hurt the GNU community?
  • Ubuntu/Canonical
    • Examine the relationship between the Ubuntu project and the Canonical corporation.
  • OLPC
    • Explore the difference between "OLPC" (the foundation) and "olpc" (the movement)
    • What lessons could OLPC and olpc learn from studying the relationship of GNU Project and the FSF; and is this a fair comparison to be making?

Possible additional people/guest speakers?

  • Richard M. Stallman
  • Mako Hill
  • SJ Klein
  • Mark Shuttleworth
  • Jono Bacon
  • Chris Kelty

Possible additional readings

Thanks Joshua! This is great

Philipp Schmidt's picture
Philipp Schmidt
Fri, 2010-08-27 14:35

Thanks Joshua! This is great feedback. Are you interested in co-facilitating one of the weeks - either looking at governance examples in free software communities, or OLPC (both are interesting, but I think too much for one week) and drill down on some of the issues you raise?

Joshua's comment is really

Greg Grossmeier's picture
Greg Grossmeier
Fri, 2010-08-27 17:31

Joshua's comment is really useful and I would just like to highlight a couple of his suggestions.

Mostly in the additional speakers list. Benjamin Mako Hill and Jono Bacon would be two great individuals to have speak on the Ubuntu community's governance structure. Mako because he helped establish it and Jono because of his current role as community manager. And Mako is actively doing research in this area and is a member of many communities so I imagine he would be able to present multiple perspectives.

Additionally, another freely available reading would be Jono Bacon's Art of Community (very practical view into the Ubuntu community's structure).

Philipp, sure, I would love

Joshua Gay's picture
Joshua Gay
Mon, 2010-08-30 20:06

Philipp, sure, I would love to co-facilitate a week! I'd love to do free software and maybe I can rope in Mako or someone else to join us.

Hey Phillip--looks like an

timothy vollmer's picture
timothy vollmer
Wed, 2010-09-01 16:38

Hey Phillip--looks like an interesting course! Here's a few other people, ideas, readings that immediately came to mind:

Steven Weber's "The Success of Open Source" http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018587

Collaborative development and iteration of open licensing - how are licenses created, improved, retired, etc.; and related how do social norms work in collaboration with legal and technical ones, e.g. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Public_Domain_Norms, http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/

Open access/OCW policies at universities - who decides this, and how?

David Bollier - "Viral Spiral" and other writings, most recently http://onthecommons.org/expanding-circle

Chuck Severance from University of Michigan

Martin Dougiamas from Moodle

Hi, two years ago I wrote a

Philipp Mueller's picture
Philipp Mueller
Fri, 2010-09-03 13:26

Hi, two years ago I wrote a teaching case on the OLPC project that I have used at the Harvard Kennedy School, in Germany, and Mexico. It is a bit dated, but can be used to discussion questions of open organization around one of the biggest planetary policy challenges: primary school education. You can find it here: http://www.globalize.de/olpc/ - I had also copied some links from my gov20 course, but the forum spamfilter did not allow posting it and I did not find your email anywhere... :)

Hi Philipp - The case looks

Philipp Schmidt's picture
Philipp Schmidt
Fri, 2010-09-03 15:05

Hi Philipp - The case looks great. Please feel free to suggest amendments to the Syllabus and see where it could fit into the overall structure and aims of the course. If you are happy to facilitate the discussion during that week, that would be great!

Philipp, can you make that

Leigh Blackall's picture
Leigh Blackall
Wed, 2010-09-15 05:56

Philipp, can you make that image align right at 250px? I gotta run and wrestled with the WYSIWYG editor to no avail

@Leigh - the week sounds

Philipp Schmidt's picture
Philipp Schmidt
Thu, 2010-09-16 03:30

@Leigh - the week sounds awesome. The WYSYWG editor defied me too and I just used plain old HTML in the end. Great photo!

Just a quick note: OpenStack

Greg Grossmeier's picture
Greg Grossmeier
Thu, 2010-09-16 15:52

Just a quick note:

OpenStack (the new, "up and coming" cloud infrastructure software) just posted their governance structure/document. http://openstack.org/blog/2010/09/openstack-governance/ and http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance

I haven't had a chance to digest it yet, but it is very synergistic timing :)

Hi Philipp et al, I just

Greg Grossmeier's picture
Greg Grossmeier
Sat, 2010-10-09 16:14

Hi Philipp et al,

I just wanted to point you towards a paper that is being presented at this year's Free Culture Research Conference in Berline (right now).

Commercial providers of infrastructure for collective action online. Case studies comparison: Flickr ­Corporation model and Wikihow Enterprise model.
By: Mayo Fuster Morell

PDF available here: http://ur1.ca/20m0d

This appears to be a small portion of the author's PhD dissertation, abstract available here: http://www.onlinecreation.info/?p=373

The wikihow case study section really relates to some of the issues we've already talked about (alpha males, nurturing new comers, etc). Not sure where it would fit in the syllabus but it might be of interest to some anyway.

Greg

Hey Greg: This looks great.

Philipp Schmidt's picture
Philipp Schmidt
Mon, 2010-10-11 12:38

Hey Greg: This looks great. I've met Mayo at Wikimania conferences, and could ask her to join us for a session. I am starting to think we might have to add a few weeks to the course outline as we come across more and more interesting and relevant content.