[FOSS4G-Oceania] Governance

[adam steer]

hey folks

had a great and deep discussion with John about governance over
#geobeersCBR yesterday - we traversed much territory mostly revolving
around how to create as few rules as possible - the conundrum being that if
we create lots of rules to govern an organisation, we end up rule-ing
ourselves into corners the organisation can’t easily move from in the
future, and risks becoming constrained and stale. On the other hand, if the
rules are too few or too vague, we risk being a chaotic organisation.

I think we can agree that we wish to form a legal entity to back future
conferences and other things.

Looking over the governance doc again, it seems we’re bootstrapping it. A
course of action might be to review (again) governance models of
organisations we like, and seek to emulate; and then return to our doc and
see what bits fit and don’t - if we haven’t already done that (apologies if
so). I’d suggest OSGeo would be one model, based on the fact that they’re
still here and have survived multiple crises. OSMF might be another model,
which also survives multiple crises and manages to do good. EFA is another
model we might look at - I don’t know much about them. Please suggest any
others of interest!

Another organisation I’m involved in (Earth Observation Australia,
http://eoa.org.au) is also going through parts of this conversation -
transition from a collective of volunteers to a formal organisation -
although they already have a name and a governance model in mind - which
makes things easier. They’ve chosen the company limited by guarantee path.

Happy to be involved in future discussions, cognisant that this
conversation is so far a chat between mid-career white blokes - I’ll tap a
few folks directly on the shoulder and invite them to join in.

Cheers
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/foss4g-oceania/attachments/20181204/399b2949/attachment.html>