4Oct

Learning Open Governance

I’m on an adventure to learn more about open governance for communities. For the past 10 months, I’ve volunteered with many amazing people to build CrisisCommons. We are a new volunteer technical community aimed at helping crowdsource information and technology in times of crisis. Learning and researching practices for open communities has brought me near and far talking with technical communities such as Mozilla or my peers who attended the International Conference on Crisis Mapping. I’ve spoken with experts at Creative Commons and with consultant David Eaves. As a co-lead for the CrisisCommons.org Community Working Group, I consider it a priority to learn about community governance.

Fortunately, I found and enrolled in the Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) Open Governance course. We collaborate online and learn from each other. In the coming weeks, I will be posting items for the course.

What do Baboons, transgenders, and bent fox ears have in common with Open Governance of Communities?

Our first week’s assignment was to write about Radiolab’s podcast: New Normal? The show seeks to identify change triggers in communities. Using two separate scientific studies, they pose the question that a baboon troupe and a breed of foxes can change with alterations to patterns resulting in culling aggressive creatures. Another example talks about the town of Silvertown, Oregon accepting a gradual change of a transgender resident. “Under the right circumstances, a small town can change.” What can trigger change in a community?

What are some of the norms in communities you are a participant in that affect governance of that community?
CrisisCommons is just beginning to formalize our strategic governance. It is both flexible and fragile. As an open community we respond to governance questions via our CrisisCommons google group. There is also a wiki open for edits.

The norm is that there is no norm yet. Anyone can contribute and the decisions are in flux.

The same stands for CrisisCamps. We have some model examples to share. We are working on CrisisCamp in a Box – a project to help mentor and share camp standards. Again, the norm is that all content is open for discussion and change.

How are these norms communicated to new joiners?
We need to work how to communicate norms to new joiners. Our community culture is evolving with each response action. We try to mentor new CrisisCamp cities. When it comes to individual volunteers, we need to improve on communicating norms and facilitating volunteer experiences.

How important is it to explicitly state the norms? How much can be picked up from “observing”?
We know that standards would help our community, but too much structure might not be accepted. There is a balance yet to be struck between more governance and less governance proponents. CrisisCommons needs to set a minimum frame of what and when we will respond and vice versa. This discussion is ongoing, but we know that clarity will help us grow.

Observing norms? Well, our community is evolving fast. I actually find this question hard. We need to make it more stable and clear so that there is potential for a volunteer to be able to “observe norms”. I consider that a 6 month goal for our community.


Note
: Radiolab is partially funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. CrisisCommons is currently preparing our trustee proposal for the same organization. Small world.

Share this Story

About Heather

2 comments

  1. Hey Heather:

    I really enjoyed reading about CrisisCommons. You seem to be growing at such amazing speed that looking at norms and governance is interesting. Maybe thinking of governance as something that can be very flexible and lightweight, rather than very detailed rules and regulations, is more appropriate in your community.

    I’d be interested to find out a little more about how you make decisions. Even if there are no stated rules, often the community trusts some people more than others, and sometimes some people simply make decisions more easily than others (with community input or not). There are always norms, they might just not be clear yet.

    I read through a lot of the Ubuntu governance documents that Greg linked to from hist post and liked the overall style that seems to say – “here are the rules, but they are pretty flexible, and we learn as we go along” yet also very clear on some aspects, for example the fact that Mark Shuttleworth is the ultimate decision maker on many aspects of the project. I like that they state that so clearly.

    Greg’s post is here – http://blog.grossmeier.net/2010/09/27/primates-humans-and-ubuntu/

  2. Thank Philipp, I agree that we will need to be lightweight. This is why I am so excited to learn more about decentralized, participatory communities.

    With the Sloan Trustee Proposal work, the community has been included in writing the documents. But there is a structure in applying for foundations. Some community decisions are made based on the people who lead. For example, CrisisCamp UK along with some folks from Calgary and Montreal spearheaded our Pakistan Floods response. Our community had a number of long conference calls about this effort. Very touch questions were posed and we did not always agree. However, our UK team carried us through and the rest of the world followed. We don’t really have a cadence for decisions yet. Each new response adds another complicated layer and lessons learned.

    We actually have reviewed the Ubuntu code of conduct and consider it fairly close to where we want to be. But, this really needs to be a community vote. We haven’t set up a voting structure either. Something to consider.

    I feel fortunate to be in course so that I can be exposed to other thoughts in this space. I want to help our community and the first step is research.

    Thanks again for your comment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*


4 × = twenty four

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

© Copyright 2016, All Rights Reserved