On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Rufus Pollock<[email protected]> wrote: > Five years on from the Foundation's start, now is a good time to have > a discussion of what the next 5 years (and beyond) of the Open > Knowledge Foundation should be. > > I've started some notes here: <http://wiki.okfn.org/Vision> and to get > the ball rolling here are some specific questions I'd love to hear > people's views on: > > * What do you think the Open Knowledge Foundation is? > > * What do you think it should be doing? > > * What impact should it be having? > > Look forward to hearing what people think ...
OKF has, as I see it, three issues: 1) what is OKF's motivation and philosophy? In other words, why are we promoting open? Is it just a fuzzy sense that open is good, or can we get more specific? The 'about' page defines open, but doesn't say why open is a good thing. I think having some clear sense of that would help clarify a lot around what it is, where it is going, etc. (This may be written down somewhere, and if so, I apologize, but it seems worth putting front and center either way.) 2) there are a variety of organizations similar to OKF out there now- CC is the highest profile, but we can all probably list a few others that have more or less overlap with what CC does, like resource.org, openlibrary.org, etc. How is OKF distinguishing itself? Is it merely better at executing on what it does, or is there some organizational or philosophical differences that make us stand out? If so, focusing on those differences may make good strategic sense. 3) How is OKF preparing for the day when open 'wins'? The Open Source Initiative, ten years in, is now horribly floundering because, in some sense, they've won- open source is not dominant, but it is broadly accepted as part of the tool kit of software developers. Much of what used to be important/controversial for them (license approval, primarily) is now routine and uninteresting, and they have no other sense of what they should be doing. It would be good if OKF starting thinking now about 'what happens when open knowledge is routine', because I think we're already edging in that direction- we're seeing it in the slow proliferation of licenses, slow proliferation of groups in the space, etc. Does OKF then just fade away? Become a data repository? Become a source of licenses? a source of license proliferation? a government lobbying group, pushing for more open data 'at the margins'? Hope this helps spark some discussion- Luis _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
