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governing the ungovernable ...
philipp (South Africa) · 16/7/2007 16:06 · 46 votes
The Open Courseware 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 the discussions of possible governance structures some interesting questions were raised and I think many open collaboration projects share our challenges - and maybe icommons as well? 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, aren't they 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 tell others 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 great but complicated 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.
I just posted the first draft of the "participation-driven community" (the new name) governance model on the wiki and would be interested to hear what others think:
http://ocwcforum.org/wiki/index.php?title=Participation-Driven_Commmunity
In the discussions of possible governance structures some interesting questions were raised and I think many open collaboration projects share our challenges - and maybe icommons as well? 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, aren't they 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 tell others 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 great but complicated 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.
I just posted the first draft of the "participation-driven community" (the new name) governance model on the wiki and would be interested to hear what others think:
http://ocwcforum.org/wiki/index.php?title=Participation-Driven_Commmunity
tags: International education ocw opencoursewareconsortium
extracted from:Creative Commons
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