Next steps: By end of this week 1/17
- Add resources
- Add names for guest speakers (not necessary in every week)
- Add names of people we want to pull in
Title: Open Governance
Tagline: How do open organizations and communties govern themselves? How could their practices and processes applied to your organization / community / work?
Who is the audience?
- People who are involved in open governance - coordinating/leading initiatives, projects, organizations, countries...
- People from different cultural and governance backgrounds
- People interested in finding how open governance approaches could be applied in their (open or non open) organizations
- Anyone who wants to learn about open governance (really).
What is the goal?
- More organizations make effective use of open governance
- Handy resource for folks who want to lead openly
- Share different open ways of governing
- Discrete (and concrete) methods that could be applied to any organization
- Explore how open might be applied in all sorts of ways, the unexpected
- Increase participation in your organization/initiative
- Goal for Jane: Lead (School of Open) openly (communicating, planning, documenting, decision-making, managing, imagining, collecting, writing, reading, learning, debating, thinking, collaborating)
Target Timeline
- October: Develop basic outline with some background resources and sign-up contributors. Share with participants at Open Policy Institute meeting.
- November: Present at MozFest (as part of Fireside Chat) to promote and recruit more collaborators and learners
- December: Incorporate feedback, finalize the model
- January: Official start
Guest speakers
- Scratch - Amos Blanton, community manager - confirmed already!
- Jono Bacon (community management / Canonical, Ubuntu)
- Gunner - community facilitation practices, especially at f2f workshops
- Mark Surman - Mozilla community
- Greg Grossmeier - LRMI project, managing various stakeholders from individuals to academic publishers
- Students for Free Culture - ping their list to see who is most appropriate to talk about their governance: http://freeculture.org/about/
- Asheesh Laroia - OpenHatch community
- Opensource.com/Red Hat - who?
- Ubuntu - Ben Mako Hill (maybe instead of Red Hat?)
- Anonymous guest speaker - how would that work? :) - I actually know someone.. not sure if I'm supposed to say their name though.
- Someone from Wenger-Trayner? (http://wenger-trayner.com/map-of-resources/) - Piet recommended resource
- Code for America - rep: http://codeforamerica.org/
- Philipp on starting P2PU - confirmed
- Ushahidi http://ushahidi.com/ (two Ushahidi folks are MIT Media Lab Director's fellows, I can ask them. Or maybe better to ask Heather Leeson, who organied crisis camp before joining them)
- http://opengovernment.org/pages/about - david
- Sunlight foundation
To participate
- Pieter Kleymeer - Open.Michigan
- Students for Free Culture - whoever in their community is interested
- Jessica Coates - CC Global Network Manager
- Shuttleworth foundation - Karien, Helen
- People who participated in Mozfest open gov session
- OKFN community
- Open source communities?
- P2PU board members (no harm in inviting)
- CC affiliates/community
How the course works:
- Logistics
- Decide on a meeting method (skype, google hangout, free conf call, etc.)
- Blog placement (personal + RSS, or just one)
- Each week has a different theme
- We provide a very short description of the theme (with one or two background resources)
- Each participants writes a blog post related to the theme
- Participants add resources they find useful
- For some of the weeks we invite guest speakers to join us
- Group prepares questions in advance
Weekly Ask:
- Find a good resources and share it
- Write a blog post
- with your experience, methods, what you've done
Notes:
- Does the below account for community building generally?
Additional resources (don't know where it fits in below):
Topics:
Week 1 - Introduction & Examples
- Introduction - What are some of the challenges we are facing? (Why are we here)?
- Define individual learning goals
- Review and edit the course structure and content (flesh out content together)
- Share failures
- Examples
- What do we mean by open governance?
- Historical examples (old principles & new technology?)
- Open Source Communities - Exploring how they work
- Eric Raymond: Bazaar & Cathedral
- Governments that have employed citizen participation methods (local, state, and national)
- a couple resources/readings
- Cathedral & Bazaar
- Wikimedia
- Is open better? When? When is it not? Discussing pro's and con's
- Personal Projects (Optional)
- Pick a personal project to work on, e.g. implement an open governance component into your organization, draft a community manifesto, open up the decision making process
- = case studies for next course
Week 2 - Transparency
- Different types and applications (and spectrum) of transparency
- Tools for transparency
- (Too) many mailing lists
- The elusive community call
- Documentation for posterity
- Communicating to public at large vs community members
- How do open communities
should we communicate and deal with (embarassing) failures? - Finding the time for transparency
- What prevents you from being completely transparent? What do you imagine are barriers for others?
- Examples: open gov, local citizen participation projects
Week 3 - Making decisions openly and Getting stuff done
- What is the difference between being transparent and making decisions openly?
- Making decisions
- Getting stuff done
Week 4 - The role of leadership in an open community
- What is /leadership/?
- Leadership for what and of whom?
- How can leadership help communities navigate (big) changes
- Are leaders necessary for an open community? Are there /leaderless/ communities, e.g. Anonymous.
- How is leadership determined? (How is it changed?)
- Resources:
Week 5 - Values and norms
- Are values and norms even important to articulate?
- Pathways through roles & increasing responsibilities
- Having an effect on the initiative, making a difference
- Making it easy for new joiners to figure out how things work
- Communicating values & norms
- Tone & voice
Week 6 - Wrap-up
- What do we think are the essential elements/components of a open (community) ecosystem?
- Presentation of personal projects
- Group project: Review & Improve the course structure, content, resources ...
4 open practices
- use and build on
- facilitate sharing
- enable reuse and adaptation
- support transparency
using
3 types of resources
1) use and build on
- Find and read existing resources about open leadership, some academic publicatoins (theory), some examplesc/case studies of practice. Blog about what you are reading and your reactions. CC license your blog and any other writings that come from this exploration.
- Find others leading similar initiatives such as yours and share blogs. Discuss readings with your peers. Debate about which methods work and don't work. Share resources you find.
- Decide to come up with some open leadership guidelines together, building on readings and what's already out there (under open licenses).
- Share rough open leadership guidelines with world and invite feedback (under open license).
- For all of the above, use open source platforms wherever it is possible and appropriate.
2) facilitate sharing
3) enable reuse and adaptation
- Draft description of project in collaboration with community -- by drafting with volunteers and then sending it back out to community for feedback. And continuing evolution of document over time.
- Provide communications channels/tools where people can discuss project and give feedback, eg. School of Open discussion list/google group.
- Create your own content and share it to set an example, eg. course on CC licenses. Ask for feedback on course and help building. Build on existing CC license educational resources and give credit to original authors; invite authors to help adapt to new course at p2pu.
- Openly license as much documentation related to running the project as possible (leadership resources above). Host it openly w/proper license marking, etc.
- Openly license the project's /about and related resources.
- Make sure the open license is marked properly, machine-readable, etc.
- Upload resources as relevant to as many different CC enabled platforms as possible.
- Openly license the project's courses on p2pu.org (by default CC BY-SA).
4) support transparency
- Communicate what you are going to do before you do it. (transparency?) (gunner's 3 step process -> (1) tell them what you'll tell them, (2) tell them, (3) tell them what you told them)
- Get community buy-in to project by holding virtual sprints, offline workshops where possible, and using open communication tools to create pieces of the project. (transparency?)
- Document everything and share it on website/blog under open license.
- Clearly outline at what points I am welcoming feedback and how that feedback will be incorporated/received. Provide place for that feedback, eg. listserv, pad, etc. eg. map of feedback loop?
- Expose process for what is and is not an "open" course, and provide way to get feedback.
- Clearly explain CC and P2PU's roles/collaboration to community, and other volunteers' roles. How this all relates to each org's mission, etc.
- Encourage others to do the same in terms of sharing their own process of building an "open" course. (Advocate for open)
Some additional topic suggestions:
- How do I facilitate collective decision making in open communities?
- What are legal limits to openness in formal organizations?
- Communicating openly and effectively
- Building values & culture
Culture - shared values and practices
Community - sense of belonging
Leadership - direction
Making mistakes - fail fast and open, rinse, and try again
http://piratepad.net/SaHfYlVasi