Ways to improve community input in GV's governance

Suggested by: --David Sasaki 18:38, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

One of the biggest challenges for Global Voices over the past year has been to establish an independent institution in order to sustain and further our mission without creating unnecessary hierarchy and bureaucracy. As a reminder, we are a Netherlands-based NGO that is governed by a board of seven directors. Debbie is the representative of all Global Voices volunteers and Amira is the representative for paid staff. Then there is a core management team to direct the various GV projects, and several teams of editors based on region, language, Lingua site, and subject. Each of those smaller groups tends to have its own mailing list with internal discussions. It is practically impossible for anyone to stay up to date on what happens in every corner of the Global Voices universe.

At a core meeting in Amsterdam last year we identified four processes that can improve greater participation, communication, and transparency in the management of Global Voices:

• Disseminating info - when a group within GV has a meeting that is relevant for the wider community, it should write a brief re-cap to the wider group. Notes from board meetings are now being distributed on the mailing list. IRC meetings are also good for disseminating information across the community.
• Encouraging more community involvement in strategizing and prioritizing - we have set up feedback.globalvoicesonline.org where you can vote on specific suggestions about how Global Voices can be improved and where we should be heading in the future. You can also make new suggestions. (More on this later in a separate email.)
• Developing a road map - We have yet to have a community-wide discussion about where we'd like to see Global Voices in 1, 2, and 5 years. Such a discussion could happen on the mailing lists, via blog posts, or on the wiki. Ideally we can have it offline also at the next GV summit.
• Assigning tasks - Often times the same idea comes up over and over again every year, such as "create a book based on content from GV" or "Improve the GV authors' guide", but they never get carried out because we haven't developed a good project management system to delegate tasks and check on their status. We discussed the possibility of using a system like Basecamp or tasks.globalvoicesonline.org but in the end came to the conclusion that such systems are not realistic and that we will need to stick to email as our primary way to delegating tasks and checking up on their status.

This workshop would build on the conversation that took place in Amsterdam to ensure that Global Voices' future is decided by its community. At the end of the workshop we will report back to the larger community and to the board of directors a specific set of processes, rules, and enforcements to ensure that the large volunteer community of Global Voices has influential power in developing Global Voices' future projects and in shaping the governance of the organization.

Lingua - Growing more and more

Suggested by: --Juan Arellano 1:15, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

While there are new lingua sites adding to the community and facing known problems such as how to recruit volunteers, how to design their work schedule or how to make themselves known and read in their blogospheres, older ones are facing different challenges, some of them known but some others still to identify.

I think that those linguas must meet and discuss about these challenges. If we can identify them all before the summit maybe we could coordinate with our directives the presence of some adviser to help us find a better way of doing the things we neeed to do. But if that were not possible, anyway we'd have made some progres in discovering how to improve and grow.

Some of the challenges might be:

- How to grow at the same time into various and diverses countries without travelling there -- Lingua spanish and french cases.

- How to get media gets our contents and use them.

- How to recruit video subtitlers (a personal challenge for me)

Copyright and licensing issues

Our copyright and permissions guide is here - http://globalvoicesonline.org/gv-authors/copyright-and-permissions-guide/ - do we want to update it?

What should be published where

In addition to Global Voices main site and the various Lingua sites we also have Global Voices Advocacy, Rising Voices, Threatened Voices, and the Technology for Transparency Network. How do we decide what content gets published on what site and how can we make the workflow easier.

Feel free to add ideas for discussions and workshops!!