Meeting #2
24 Aug 2020, 14:00 UTC
On call
- Gayatri
- Marina
- Greg
- Ji
- Julieta
- Jenny
- Paz
- Juan Pedro M
- Obasegun
Agenda
1. Welcome. Identification of volunteers to take minutes of the meeting.
Julieta is taking notes.
2. Recap of key points discussed in the last meeting and action taken since then. [Paz]
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Paz not here - Gayatri does the recap.
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Last time the discussion included if we had to work on everything in these 2 months or come up with stuff and give a new deadline.
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Evolving process - Check guiding principles (manifesto, roadmap, Marina worked on this), domains of control and assets (Greg)
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Opening up the forum (Jenny did)
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Today: what can we achieve and timeline, tentative plan to communicate, check Greg’s updates, Marina’s, and ask Greg for feedback
3. Revisit the map of domains of control, assets, outputs, governance values. [Greg]
Greg posted a response to Marina & Francois’ contributions to the map
- Adding event organizers to the map (besides importance, have control to assets like Drive, Twitter, grant applications, etc)
- Francois: values should emerge from community, should be more flexible to change & evolve with input from communities (open question)
- Added roadmap under decision-making
- Next: who decides and how
- Pen made an interesting thread on how to make decisions
4. Discussion on governance values pulled out from a review of the Manifesto. [Marina]
- GWG values - Manifesto and Code of Conduct
- Marina took the manifesto and code of conduct, and tried to summarize in terms of importance (see below)
- Gayatri: values of the collective are not to be changed, strong statements we all can relate to and accept, very important. Roadmap is only journey to goal, but values shouldn’t be changed.
- Julieta: changing values shouldn’t be focus imho right now but a general discussion on values with the whole community can be sth for the future “council” to discuss and have in its mandate
Some highlights to guide our governance (from Marina’s post)
- Accessible + transparent:
- Our documents have to be understandable and communicative;
- The tools involved and necessary to participate on governance (decision making, communicating, etc.) should be open, free ( libre ), and licensed as such (unless there are no open source option available);
- Prioritize communal, accessible, shared and collaborative practices and tools;
- Avoid practices, tools and actions that will privilege institutional groups, or global north groups;
- Decentralized - We don’t have central authority, we have community champions;
- Whenever possible, it should not limit the participation in any instance.
- How do we change what?
- Values + goals -
- Governance structure
- Roadmap
- Individual programs (funded or not)…
- Gunner: you want to be clear in values applying to defining gov structure, didn’t mean to finalize a set of permanent values for the community. Which are fundamental drivers behind gov structure? It’s about more concrete stuff that can change and evolve
- Greg: manifesto has been successful in engaging wide range of ppl, core thing not to change much, gov values emerge from those, we’re interpreting same doc for application
- Gunner: Manifesto is broader than scope of this, this is a checklist to refer to when having to decide on mechanisms/tensions come up, and in gov domains
- centralization/decentralization
- simplicity/complexity
- accessible/less accessible
- transparency/opacity
- structure/less structure
- standardization/autonomy: clear boundaries of ownership and transparency, but if decisions want to be made in different ways, should be able to
- Gayatri: does this also include values regarding who the community should be, how to reach out to diverse communities, etc? Future gov structure would consider those, but should we discuss that
- maximize diversity, equity, inclusion
- same demographic targets as for events?
- Greg: The key control point for diversity should be controlling who goes to events, who makes decisions. Mozilla and other groups do it.
- Guyatri
- a criteria can be what Greg said, folks going to international events
- but also applying diversity criteria for this potential committee
- permanent committees not good idea, rotation better but not too often
- Gunner: there must be sth/place for conversations to happen, not perpetuity but not flipping too often either (e.g. not 6 months); community complex enough to demand some focal point, evaluate design is maybe long term
- Gayatri: rotate, not change all members at once; demands set of very passionate ppl about the community if even at some point they’re not in gov group
- non-profit board: Jenny/Shannon, independent of potential committee, legal decisions, not debatable stuff [Jenny]
- Committee: community gov
- Greg: the map had the purpose to identify requirements
- Gunner: next step is min variable is to come up with text-based list of things to be governed. In diagram, not good if things intersect, pieces should be distinct from one another, unless gov overlaps? too complex
- Paz: can we make these meetings longer
- Juli: more asynchronous work, read, and discuss in the meetings
- Greg: I struggle with bigger conversation, prefer to subdivide into small groups, work the items and then use this meeting to evaluate the approaches taken and conclusions from the subgroups after giving it some thought
5. Next steps, suggestions from Gunner. [Gunner]
- List of things to be governed
- Decisions to be made in each of those domains
- Decisions that demand whole community/decisions that not (e.g. changing core manifesto values)
Community questions from open call to consider in this list
- Structure and terms of community governance group(s)
- What types of decisions are located in community governance group(s) and which in the broader community
- How decisions are made and discussed
- How meetings and input processes will be facilitated
- How the community gets involved in the decision-making process
- How membership of the community governance group(s) turns over
- How new members are brought on the community governance group(s) and onboarded
- How do disagreements at the level of community governance group(s) get mediated
- How to indicate conflicts of interest
- Specification and responsibilities for the GOSH Community Manager
- How do decisions from the community move to either the Board and/or grant PI’s to ensure spending is within the guidelines and directive of each set of funds
- How decisions are made about whether a project, grant, etc is fiscally sponsored under GOSH
- How PI’s of fiscally sponsored activities are involved into decisions for core GOSH activities.
- And others to be determined…
6. Decide a timeline and deliverables for the WG that can be shared with the community.
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Juli: What are we supposed to deliver? G: you don’t need to figure everything out, best to lay out the landscape
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Paz: timeline?
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Gayatri: map gov needed now, besides map done on community before
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Jenny: legal stuff, includes board<->staff governance, will share that with WG; community manager role specs can be left aside, can be a task of the gov group (but role description is important in terms of hiring timing 2-3 months). However if it’s distracting Jenny/shannon can come up with sth for discussion
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Greg: should come up with comm mgr description, can make a facilitated session to come up with it faster
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Marina: Is it only 1 person?
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Greg: first come up with gov structure
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Gayatri: is this role locked or can be changed after decisions, etc, is it possible?
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Jenny: CM intended to be a support person, not gov person, very specific tasks demanded by Sloan Foundation, can be shaped but not 100%. 1 FT position for the duration of grant (2y), it could be 2 people but no more, changing will be a bit complex.
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Marina: CM description can include this person has to interact with community/respond, etc, so description is linked to gov
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Jenny: role desc will be used to hire, must be detailed enough but around things can shift
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Gayatri: +1 Marina do sth broader now and fine tune later, can open up to community on what should be this role
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Greg: we’re in process of practical visioning, creating a future vision that doesn’t exist right now, there’s lot of thinking around constraints but we should come up with interesting things, it’s an opportunity to come up with sth cool to bring back to community (JP +1)
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Gayatri: work in smaller groups
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Paz: wrote a paragraph on code of conduct for ppl, how WG is working (sticky note to go to the top of forum posts) → open to review
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Gayatri: timeline, 2 months?
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Obasegun: we can do in 2 months if we use central doc and work on that
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Gunner: let community know about changing timelines
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Gayatri: work on a centralized doc and contribute in the way we can do it
7. Volunteer for coordination and facilitation of the next WG meeting.
- Greg: let’s have an hour every week to know we’re working on stuff, can facilitate
8. Julieta: can we add the footer reminding everyone of the GOSH CoC?
No objections
To do’s
- Review Paz paragraph to stick on top of posts of the open topics
- Post minutes to forum [Julieta]
- Set up global document to work on, send meeting reminders [Greg]
- Tentative list of first things to do in this doc:
- List of things to be governed
- Decisions to be made in each of those domains
- Decisions that demand whole community/decisions that not (e.g. changing core manifesto values)
- A basic role description of CM (though later on)
