Workgroup:Amendments to Open Community Governance Policy/Workgroup report

=Introduction=

The purpose of this workgroup from October 2009 to March 2010 was to catalyse discussion and activity around refining the Open Community Governance Policy and produce a 2nd Draft Policy for approval at the Third WikiEducator Community Council meeting and this workgroup report.

The workgroup was established after the second WikiEducator community Council meeting in response to item "Amendments to Open Community Governance Policy".

The activities of the workgroup were specified as follows:

The 2nd Draft Policy is ready for presentation and review.

=Workgroup Formation and Charter=

Council members were invited by The Chair to join the policy amendment workgroup on 27 September 2009.

The Charter for this workgroup was based on the boilerplate for workgroups and developed in accordance with the policy for Community Workgroups.

The charter page was set up at the end of September 2009 with 8 core members who fleshed out and accepted (6/8) the charter during the first few weeks of October 2009 (after its announcement on 1 October inviting community participation).

Fourteen WikiEducator Community Council members had approved the charter by 20 November 2009 by which time the work was already well under way.

=Process=

Preparation
Inspired by agile methodologies (e.g. FDD), a colour-coded template for Issues was prepared to make it easy to assess progress. This was used in conjunction with a template for highlighting proposed wording: Themed Captioned Box (tcb).

A "Resources on Governance" page was set up to gather resources for the participants (and others) to learn about governance.

Prompting Participation
Near change of month, resolved issues were marked "done" (which changes them green), the second draft was updated accordingly, and e-mails were circulated to the three mailing lists (WikiEducator Community Council, WE Teacher Collaboration Forum and the general WikiEducator list) to invite participation and stimulate discussion.

A "wiki blog" was maintained (below) to record actions for quick and future reference, and to help in preparing this report.

Ordering and Resolution of Issues
The issues deemed most challenging (e.g. whether WikiEducator should have a Patron and Removal of council members) were prioritised for attention early in the process on account of uncertainty about how long they would take to resolve.

Using the Issues template, active issues were in an open collapsible table, while closed or inactive issues were in collapsed tables, with the colours indicating the priority (urgency), estimated difficulty and progress.

Activity
November proved the most active month in terms of discussion and the high priority issues were resolved in December along with most of the other issues. January and February were quiet months and the outstanding issues were finally resolved by including changes in the document if no objections had been raised within 21 days. Several "JIT Issues ("just-in-time issues) were posted on a separate page with a single working week for comment or objections before being moved into the main issue tracker and resolved.

Significant Decisions
Details of all the discussions and issues may be found on the Issues page.

Articulation of Values
Commonwealth and WikiEducator values were merged into the following statement under "Background":

The policy is imbued with the following shared values which have emerged in the process: "diversity, freedom, innovation, transparency, equality, inclusivity, empowerment, human dignity, wellbeing and sustainability."

Statement of Purpose [of WikiEducator]
To further distinguish the purpose of WikiEducator from that of the OER Foundation:

"The purpose of WikiEducator is to provide an international and sustainable on-line collaboration environment for communities of educators (teachers, lecturers, trainers) and other professionals from the formal and informal sectors. WikiEducator is a platform for communities of educators to cooperate on: ...."

Members: Number, tenure and qualification

 * The number of Council members shall be between eleven (11) and twenty-five (25).
 * The number of elected members shall be between seven (7) and fifteen (15).
 * The number of additional nominated members shall be between four (4) and ten (10), with the number of nominated members not exceeding the number of elected members.

Meetings: Minutes
"Minutes will be recorded on WikiEducator during the meetings. Where this is not feasible (e.g. privacy law issues), minutes will be prepared and published on WikiEducator within 30 days."

WikiEducator Patron
All references to "WikiEducator Patron" were removed. The role and benefits of a WikiEducator Patron may be achieved via other means than embedding it into this policy.

Removal of Members
"In case of misconduct, or when Council considers it in the best interests of the WikiEducator Community, a member may be removed by 75% supermajority vote of the full membership of the Council."

"In the unlikely event of a call to remove a member from Council, notice will be served upon the member by the Chair or vice-Chair, and a hearing followed by a defense will be convened via the usual communications mechanisms in use by the WikiEducator Community Council."

Removal of Officers
In case of misconduct, or when Council considers it in the best interests of the WikiEducator Community, an officer or agent elected or appointed by the WikiEducator Community Council may be removed from office by 75% supermajority vote of the full membership of the Council.

In the unlikely event of a call to remove a member from office, notice will be served upon the member by the Chair or vice-Chair of the Council, and a hearing followed by a defense will be convened via the usual communications mechanisms in use by the WikiEducator Community Council.

Current Status
All posted issues have been marked "done" and the document has been updated accordingly. Further comment will be welcome during the weeks leading up to the Third WikiEducator Community Council meeting and "just in time issues" may be added.

=Lessons Learned=

What worked, what didn't? How may we improve our processes?


 * Suggestion: have a separate page for WCC approvals of Community workgroups.
 * Consider best practices with the issue tracker. For example, does it help to collapse the tables containing closed issues? Some like this, others prefer to keep them all open and be able to scroll across all issues, closed or not.
 * ... please add ...

=Conclusion=

Mission accomplished?

It is hoped that the activities of the workgroup will continue in some form, with on-going refinement of the policy as we learn from experience.

=References=