The page Organization was created by pdm at Thu 09 of Mar,
2006 [22:26]
You can view the page by following this link:
http://oscom.avantech.net/tiki-index.php?page=Organiza
tion
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The new page content follows below.
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Define Scope and Goals
To establish OSCOM as the number one umbrella organization
for all issues related to Open Source content management, we
need to broaden its scope.
OSCOM should not only be about CMS, but include any kind of
Free Software and Open Source content management
application. This includes, Wikis, Weblogs, etc.
The wider scope makes perfect sense, given that CMS
integrate Wiki and Weblog functionality and vice versa.
Seen from that perspective, it is one of the tasks of OSCOM
to continuously define what is Open Source content
management and bring the players in this area together.
The main goal of OSCOM is to foster innovation in the Open
Source content management segment by creating the potential
for information transfer between all involved persons.
To formulate the main goal in a different way: What is the
unique selling point of OSCOM? It is the potential of
becoming the main information hub for knowledge transfer
within interest groups of the FOSS CMS segment (e.g.
software projects, consultants, solution providers, etc.).
In this segment, information is critical for success. In
this respect, OSCOM can be of benefit in two ways:
1. Distribution of commoditized knowledge, which is
information that has become standard knowledge in our
segment. This could for example be a Wikipedia page
explaining what is WebDAV?
2. Distribution of first-hand information, which is
information only available to an exclusive group of persons.
Typically, such information is exchanged face-to-face at
conferences, during talks or in private talks.
Organizations: Define Involved Groups?
We'd like to involve the following groups in the Open
Source content management segment:
- developers
- project managers
- consultants
- journalists
- vendors
- solution providers
- users/customers
- others? (feel free to add)
This is a list of projects which could be involved:
- MediaWiki
- TikiWiki
- WordPress
- FluxBlog
- Drupal
- Typo3
- Joomla!
- Magnolia
- Plone
- XOOPS
- XIMS
- Mambo?
- others? (feel free to add)
Organization: Define Organizational Structure
In essence, we do not change the organizational structure,
we just define roles more clearly as well as the processes
of participation.
The Apache Foundation-like structure of OSCOM is ok, but has
been anticipated as too exclusive up-to-now. What is needed
is a rather loose interpretation of the existing
organizational structure, to give it a more inclusive spin
and to allow more groups and persons to be involved with a
low barrier of entry.
We want to keep the OSCOM foundation as a legal entity,
mainly for the purpose of financial administration. This
includes that final decision-making concerning financial
matters is bound to the rules defined in the bylaws.
The OSCOM foundation thus only forms the very basic legal
realm for the OSCOM community. All non-financial decisions
should be made within the community, based on defined
processes. These processes ensure that the community is
actually in power of decision-making and that
decision-making is effective.
Bylaws
Unfortunately, oscom.org is not accessible currently. Thus,
I was not able to go through the bylaws and relate them to
this plan.
I assume, that most things stay untouched by this plan.
Nevertheless, if we see that certain things should be
changed in the bylaws, we should do this now, because we
have enough momentum to change things.
The major change I propose is that only the president and
the board members are legal members of the OSCOM
organization. The "normal" members, are not a
legal subject of the OSCOM organization any more. This way,
we strip down the organization to its core to have it deal
with financial and legal matters only. (Following a
suggestion by Paul Everitt)
We need someone in Switzerland, as OSCOM is there registered
as a legal entity, who can fix issues for us.
Define Roles of President, Board, Members, Community
The roles of the president, the board, and the members are
in general laid out in the Bylaws, but we might need to
redefine or clear them a bit.
The president of OSCOM is in charge of representing OSCOM.
He clearly needs to distinguish between his role as the
OSCOM president and any other affiliations. Whenever he acts
within his role as the president, he needs to follow the
principles of OSCOM and pursuit the organization's goals.
The board is only in charge of decision-making when it comes
to financial issues. Other then that, the board members are
part of the OSCOM members and community. I suggest that the
board members should represent the groups of OSCOM, thus it
should include one representative from each group (see
above).
OSCOM members are persons who actively participate in or
already contributed to an OSCOM project, be it maintaining
the events list or organizing a conference, etc. The term
"member" is ambiguous, because it could be
understood as a member of the OSCOM community or a member of
the OSCOM organization. We need to make clear that someone
is only called a member if these two criteria meet:
- the person is currently or has been active in the past
- and the person is elected by other members as a member
The OSCOM community simply comprises all persons interested
in OSCOM, actively or passively.
Define Decision-Making
The basic formula is that we want bottom-up decision-making.
Existing members (which includes board members) can
recommend new members.
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