How do you govern open collaboration projects?
by P
In the past few months, I have participated in the open courseware consortium‘s governance discussions. The consortium is a network of (mostly) universities who are committed to publishing and using open courseware, and who have so far released over 4200 university level courses under free and open licenses. Until now MIT has hosted and incubated the consortium, but it’s time to grow up, and we need a structure that can deal with a diversifying membership, sustainability pains, and ensure that the community remains vibrant and active.
In our discussions some interesting questions were raised and I think many open collaboration projects face similar challenges. For example, who has the authority (and what authority) to make decisions on behalf of the group? How do you define group members and non-members? If participants are not paid for their contribution they are likely to “vote with their feet” – by doing what they believe in and choosing to work with those who have similar goals, and ways of working. On the other hand, the industrial production model usually has a pyramid structure of increasingly centralised control and responsibility, in which some people tell other people what to do, and a lot of people are very comfortable with this arrangement.
I have prepared one of three suggested models for the consortium and would love to get some feedback from a wider community – not just the open courseware consortium members. The model was initially called the “participatory meritocracy”, a term I heard from Joseph Hardin, who set up the Sakai Foundation and is based at the University of Michigan. He spoke about participant driven decision making and a lot of things resonated with my own enthusiasm for the way open source software projects work (and the way I like to work).
I just posted the first draft of the
“participation-driven community” (the new name) governance model on the wiki and would be interested what you think about it.
http://ocwcforum.org/wiki/index.php?title=Participation-Driven_Commmunity
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