Membership of Governance Taskforce

Governance & Processes
1

This is to keep visible a list of current members of the Governance Taskforce. Any member of the Alliance can join at any time - to do so, please comment below.

2

I’m in! As the secretariat (see interim role description here until such things are rebooted)

3

I tried to look for the definition of “member of the alliance” but I could not find any here or on the website.
The wiki makes use of the following expressions: member of the public; working group member, forum member.

I realize that membership is not well-defined, therefore the membrane of IoP is not explicitly delineated. Perhaps contributors to IoP have their own ideas about membership and perhaps there is an implicit shared definition.

Now I am very confused myself :slight_smile: Am I a member of the IoP Alliance? Can I call myself a member of a working group, for example of the Governance Task Force? I am contributing to Governance, am I a member of this working group? What’s the threshold / requirement to become a member?
I think I am definitely a member of the forum, I am active here.

I’d like opt in for the Governance TAsk force with this comment, but nowhere I can see is this would be acceptable by the rest of the community, because I haven’t fully accessed the implicit shared knowledge of the group.

No need to answer here… we will certainly address this in the Process to design governance. Membrane / Membership and other important things are part of the Governance Canvas.

4

:slight_smile: 100% agree Tiberius - that’s one of the priorities we have for the governance work!

5

Hi Tibi,
Indeed, it is one of the elements we need to refine/redefine.
I will caveat that the elements below are subject to much redefinition and evolution:
Current practice:

  • To become an official member of the alliance, there is a vote by the council. This happens every so often, but does not have a set rhythm (3 times over the last 18months for example)
  • Participation in the work of the alliance (working groups, task force, conversations on the forum, slack) is open to anyone, and some have been loosely calling that “being part of the community”.

It’s a very basic starting point. And one of the reasons that the governance task force is looking to move forward on these topics.

6

Great! In my opinion, it is preferable, in most cases, for practice to proceed formalized structure. So if this organization is mature enough to have some established practices, we can actually start by documenting the practice and make the implicit explicit what @BarbaraSchack just did). Then we can ask ourselves if the organization can benefit from more clarity and strict processes, from formal structures (which is not always the case!). The Membership question is a very important one for this type of organization, because it affects allocation (or self-allocation) of resources, commitment, responsibility. So it definitely needs to be addressed. If we start from the practice it’s easy, because there is already an implicit consensus.

One way to introduce structure (#governance-processes or other) is to

  1. abstract from practice
  2. propose a formal structure (new rule, tool or method) and
  3. allow a period of experimentation / observation / refinement
  4. have that become the norm, if people are OK with it, don’t oppose or red flag it
  5. optional: ritualise it by having some type of group procedure, vote or other, in order to officialese,
  6. explicitly record this new structural element in Register (which is a reference).
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