Last revised: 2009-12-15
Contents
Goals of the Open Knowledge Foundation
OKF is dedicated to promoting Open Knowledge. OKF is a collaborative community, serviced by an agile, lightweight core. OKF provides support to a growing network of projects which have open knowledge, as set out in the open knowledge definition, at their core. A dynamic set of working groups supports these projects, and we give the infrastructure so that they can run and hopefully grow.
The Opportunity
The OKF has recently seen a significant rise in organisations who wish to work with or partner with OKF in order to gain from OKF’s unique expertise in open knowledge. This has the potential to provide a valuable income stream for OKF’s core activities and accomplish work that meets our goal of promoting open knowledge.
Our expenses over the past few years have mostly been server costs, company organisational costs, and administrative costs. Over the years, we have succeeded at keeping our organisational overhead really low – though often our directors have had to reach into their own pockets to pay for OKFN expenses.
As we grow we get more and more opportunities to participate in things like EU funding bids, grant opportunities, and to host open knowledge projects we’d like to do two things:
1) Make sure that all OKF expenses are taken care of so that being a director of the organisation doesn’t involve a financial commitment. Directors give up lots of time to be on the board, we don’t want them to have to pay when our income doesn’t cover our costs.
2) Develop the OKF – both the core and the network – so that we can promote the great work we are already doing, put on more events such as OKCon, and be involved in as many open knowledge projects that we have the opportunity and bandwidth to participate in.
Essentially, projects and consulting opportunities come to OKF because OKF can provide:
- Community (£free)
- Informal Advice (£free)
- Infrastructure, such as hosting, admin, a formal home, a corporate structure, and so on (£?)
- Consultancy (technical, strategic) (££)
The Concern
To date we’ve mostly followed a model of having a group of very active directors – being a director for OKF involves getting involved in running projects and our day-to-day activities. Some of our directors also freelance in areas complementary to our work, and so may be directly involved in proposed consulting projects.
OKF needs to steer carefully around conflict-of-interest issues in order to maintain good governance over when OKF decides to act as a consultant or as a project partner, and to make sure that we are serving our purpose (and not just morphing into a consulting company).
We plan to address this problem by adhering to the OKF’s core values of:
- Open discussion
- Meritocracy
- Tolerance
We’ve developed a set of interim guidelines as we try to figure out the bigger picture process of engaging in consulting projects.
The Guidelines
Because we are being approached by projects now, we’ve put into place these four core principles to guide us as we develop a more robust framework:
- OKF should only take on projects related to open knowledge.
- Approval of the project must be by a majority of eligible (non-conflicted) directors. Directors are ineligible to vote if they have a direct financial interest (such as acting as a subcontractor to OKFN on the project).
- Directors contracted onto projects should use their non-profit / discounted rate for their work, if they have one.
- The outputs of the projects should be openly licensed whenever possible.
- We should find ways to turn work for one specific company or person into work for large groups of people. We’re not a consultancy that sells the same advice for a fee to clients over and over again. Instead, once one client pays us to do something, we’d like to make the results openly available for anyone with a similar problem.
Some Possible Concerns and Answers
- OKF Board members who personally profit from consultancy they provide as sub-contractors to the OKF may be conflicted in deciding whether to provide consultancy to potential OKF projects when such decisions are contentious, for example, where the OKF may be approached to provide consultancy on a project which does not fully comply with the Open Knowledge definition or that does not adhere to OKF’s common values / modes.
- The board know the open definition well. Any project may involve some trade offs, but if we trust the board to guide the OKF, that trust should extend to this area as well. We’re all human though, and so we could create an advisory board for consulting projects or use our existing advisory board for additional approval.
- The OKF may be overwhelmed with approaches to provide consultancy that divert it from promoting less financially lucrative open knowledge projects
- If this happens, in many ways we’d be in a lucky position as it means that open knowledge as a concept is really taking off. If so, we could consider creating a wholly owned commercial subsidiary to do consulting work that would gift all profits back to the OKF, much like how MySociety is run.
- The OKF may be approached to provide consultancy on projects that do not wish to publicly associated with the OKF / become part of the OKF community.
- Transparency is important for us as an organisation. We can consider making it a requirement that our clients must be prepared to have the fact that we worked for them be public.
- Members of the OKF community who provide their time for free (eg working group members) may feel they are being exploited when consultancy projects remunerate other OKFN members.
- Consulting under the OKF banner isn’t limited to directors, and ideally we’d like the proceeds from these activities to provide more and more infrastructure for working groups, such as conference call facilities, event budgets, and travel reimbursements.
- The OKF could suffer from a perception that it exists to serve the interests of its Board members, not to promote open knowledge.
- Hopefully this document and going about the consultancy process transparently will help with this perception. Having an advisory panel or even non-executive director(s) or trustee(s) on the board that did not do any consulting projects could be another solution.
- Why not just increase amount of user support instead of doing consulting?
- Having monthly supporters is very important and key to the culture behind the Open Knowledge Foundation, its history, and its future. Having lots of supporters means having infrastructure though, and infrastructure requires support. It’s a self-fulfilling structure. The more infrastructure you need, the more funds you need to raise, and the more infrastructure you need to raise the funds, and so on. Doing consulting work allows us to quickly scale up and down on a project-by-project basis to do open knowledge work without a bunch of overhead.
- Are other organisations doing the same type of thing?
- Yes. The great folks over at MySociety also do consulting, and we’re hoping to build on their experience in this area to help us out.
