wiki:coordinators-meeting/meetings/2014-01-09

Version 1 (modified by Jamie McClelland, 10 years ago) (diff)

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Coordinators Meeting 2014-01-09

13:00 EST, 9 January 2014

Present: Juan Geraldo (chair), Alfredo, Jamie, Enrique, Hilary, Abi, Mallory

Agenda:

  1. Precisions on how work groups will operate (rotation of coordinators and others)
  2. Work Group Status *Confirmed members en each work group. *Name of Coordinator.
  3. Report Back *Activities *Decisions
  4. Desicions for LC *Priorities *2014 Program
  5. Designation of Chair (s) for each Weekly Meeting

Precisions on how work groups will operate (rotation of coordinators and others)

Enrique: LC tenure is a short time to develop leadership among our members. I believe we should think about increasing the time that the LC representatives play their role. Last year the LC didn't have a chance to properly close its different discussions and we weren't able to report on achivements and challenges. I would like to share this . thoughtIf we have longer periods of time on the LC it will allow us to rotate our coordinators, especially if we want people to have more opportunities to be a part of decision-making processes. That is what the weekly coordinators meeting is for.

Alfredo: Can you explain the concrete proposal?

JG: Enrique dropped, maybe I can explain.

Enrique: I'm back. The proposal that Jamie, Alfredo and Hilary presented to describe the coordinator's meeting creates an intermediary body between the LC assembly and the working groups. One of the goals of the meeting is to report what are the working groups doing every week and also to make decisions. Coordinators should rotate because of the power of the positions. And, as Jamie said, we need at least one year for coordinators to develop leadership so rotation doesn't make much sense in present condition. Therefore, I propose that we expand the LC term of service. One year isn't enough if we want to rotate. Two years, at least, would be necessary to develop projects as well as more than one coordinator in each working group.

JG: I understand the proposal is to expand the LC role. Can we first agree that one year is the term for coordinators? I believe we can agree on this. The LC period would be a decision for the membership meeting, correct?

Alfredo: I think you're correct.

JG: So we can agree on this period for coordinators of one year and then revisit the period of membership to the LC at the yearly member's meeting.

Jamie: I think we're still unclear about how many coordinators from each WG meeting we're talking about. These meetings are open to all LC members and even all members. But it's the coordinators that are responsible for the decisions. How many coordinators are we talking about?

Alfredo: We're talking about two I think. The WG should decide how many coordinators they have. What is the purpose of the coordinator's meeting? There's some confusion about this - maybe political and ideological difference. It's a practical meeting. The work groups are subcommittees of the leadership comittee. It's not anticipated that the WG make new policy. Enrique's proposal highlights this whole issue. We have no power other than the power given to us by the LC. Our role is to implement decisions. And the LC is to implement decisions from the membership committee. How many times or how long it is exists is not an LC decisions, it's a members meeting decision - that's where the principcle power over the organization lies. It's our decision to figure out how this stuff works. Our coordinator role is a practical role. We're discussing the implementation of decisions made by the LC. Design is from work teams. When we have to come to an agreement in practical ways, we do that here. It's important that the cooridnators meeting try to respect decisions made by the work teams. If the WG violates an LC decisions or isn't prioritizing correctly, the coordinators are going to bring that up. But we don't run the teams. Its role is to coordinate.

Hilary: I like the idea of the coordinators meeting and I hope that as this gets more solidified... What needs to be clarified is how decisions get made even in the team level. Some plans have political dimensions and others are administrative. Are we always going to be delaying ourselves by going to the coordinators meeting or going to the LC.

Mallory: I agree with Hilary. We need budgets and workplans that can then be approved by the LC.

Jamie: Yes. The LC approvs the plan in the February meeting and then they can spend the rest of the year implementing their work plans.

Alfredo: Lines of policy rather than lines of implementation. Sometimes there is crossover. When they have to make a decision on their own? Membership is an important issue. When they make the proposal, is it implementable immediately or does it need to go to the LC? It's pretty clear that it has to go to the LC. Then it's probably a membership issue, too. A work group can help the LC think through this with a proposal. The guideline should be: does the implementation of your decision, is it the implementation of a decision already made by the LC? Does the implementation that you're doing *expand* a decision by the LC? Then the LC should decide. I wish that I had a set of firm criteria based on 50 years but this is a question of authority and responsibility that can never be completely answered.

JG: This isn't a new decision to be brought to the LC, except expanding the period of coordinators, it's clear how Alfredo has explained the work group decision making. Any work plan should be promptly derived. Let's go to the second point.

Work Group Status

[Workgroup name

*Name of Coordinator *Confirmed members en each work group]

Infrastructure and security

  • Jamie
  • Abi
  • Gráinne
  • Enrique
  • Stephen
  • Mallory

Jamie: Do we need to pick two people only to be coordinators? There are another 5-7 mfpl members who participate regularly with this team. Mallory: inquiry re possibility of including her in infra/sec work group

Communications and Outreach workgroup: meeting this evening. We have several responses, some LC memberes and some members. Have not named coordinators. Alfredo, Hilary, Jerome, Martiza.

Erq proposed: Pablo (LC members) and Aaron (former LC member)

Membership and Administration: Hilary: a few people have signed on: Maritza, Enrique, Louis, Stephen. We met last week - just Hilary and Stephen. Coordinators were not chosen. Hilary was nominated.

International: Mallory: JG and Stephen expressed interest. Haven't met yet. Mallory tentative coordinator.

Enrique: Internationalization group should be included. They should be called and invited to join.

Jamie: We should do something with the internationalization team, which as done interpretation and translation. We should find a home for them. Membership and administration could also be a possible home because they work primarily on the membership meeting. We need to decide where they fit best and then invite them to participate.

Mallory: What about communcations since they're using their skill for communications work?

Enrique: I think it's a bad idea to consider the internationalization group as a support to membership and administration working teambecause in order to create the interpretation by a support team, the political perspective of this work. Either international or communications/outreach teams will increase their political profile for better results.

Jamie: Ensuring no one is excluded because of the language they speak is an argument for having them in membership and administration, that is focused on engaging our members. On the level of doing the newsletter, which is the primary needs that we have for translations, is probably going to be a project of the membership/administration team.

Hilary: Since we dont' even know who leads the Lowdown, we could create a new page for the news and rebrand, we could also put this in outreach. So because there's so much overlap. And there's so much work going into those two teams in particular. We're not sure the lowdown is definitely the project of the membership.

JG: we will discuss the placement of the internationalization team in the next international work team meeting.

Report Back

[Work group

*Activities *Decisions]

Infrastructure and security: Jamie: First Saturday of the month, we meet for the entire day. We meet in person in NY and Mexico City. We've recently formalized our discussion time between 1 and 3 pm New York time. If anyone wants to participate, they can do so remotely. We discussed the proposal and had some comments:

  • Replace security with "data sovereignty" because security makes things unclear. It's a more accurate term and reflects our goals as a team and organization.
  • We began discussing our 2014 workplan and budget. The discussions will continue this month. The team will approve a workplan and budget at our February meeting in time for the LC meeting.
  • APC project to request funds for an international meeting of organizations like us to discuss DDoS and legal attacks. Daniel and Abi are interested in getting involved. They're interesting candidates because dkg is now a fellow with the ACLU and Abi is with the NLG. Ross is also participating in doing extensive work as a protector of our infrastructure.
  • Barcelona in the third week of April based on our collaboration with Pangea, based in Barcelona. Europe was chose because it's central for APC participants.
  • Workteam has 2 paid staff people and all members of our team are going to be asked to submit a plan for how they will engage in the support team (both paid and unpaid) and and evaluation period in the summer will be a useful way to provide supervision to the paid staff and to everyone.
  • Four people from the team will be emergency contacts. The LC implemented this years ago. People who are willing to pick up the phone and give immediate attention to emergency situations (dkg, Abi, Grainne, Stephen and Jamie).
  • Our most pressing task is to upgrade all of our servers to the most recent OS. This will engage us for the next few months.

Ross: The evaluation buddy season idea, is a proposal not approved by the group yet. We will decide if we go with this model later on.

Jamie: Nothing that needs immediate coordination.

Alfredo: Are we expecting all groups to present a year budget at the LC meeting? Is that the plan?

Jamie: I'm under that assumption. All teams are expected to present a plan and a budget.

Alfredo: Are those budgets going to be discussed by the coordinators first before going to the LC?

JG: All work groups should have the work plan and budget for the face-to-face LC meeting. Only if soem work plan or budget overlaps another work group they should be discussed previously at the coordinators meeting.

Alfredo: The political problem with the budget is if we come forward with a budget we're going to be presenting a combined budget that the four work budgets are going to exceed the amount of money that we have. My work group is going to put forward a budget that is much more than half the money that we generate. Budgeting in an organization always begins with a wish list number. Then in coordination we start chopping it down. What are the other bdugets and how important is that work to the entire organisation? And how much money do we have and how much do we need to raise?

JG: Maybe we can have a special meeting face-to-face to talk about budget before the LC face-to-face.

Jamie: I agree with that proposal.

Hilary: Administration and financials and oversight and whether that is encapsulated in committees that are already formed. Do we need a separate body to do this work?

ALfredo: I don't know. Having trouble figuring out the need - it's all so new. Handling of money is in the hands of the membership/admin. It *is* a huge amount of responsible and is politically loaded, but not sure what a separate body would do. Perhaps if emergencies arise - need for special committee. Perhaps that would be a topic for the coordinators meeting.

Mallory: Coordinator implies management of the budget. I think coordinators can do it together in this meeting. Rather than a new body, figure out processes. A pre-meeting for face2face is problematic: decisions made without input of teams. Instead: create guidelines for teams and their budget. We put together figures for 2013 - that is the guideline. Do LC members know what our budget for last year was? If we do this - we won't need a separate body or a separate meeting.

Hilary: I agree with those points. My concerns are nitty gritty - checks and balances and separation. If the Membership and Admin team does all accounting. For example - I don't write checks - that's what Jamie does (and he is not in this team).

Alfredo: the original proposal put budget/finance in the hands of Membership/Admin team. That work team as part of it's budget will most likely propose Hilary as staff. Remember: all work teams have their own staff. The question of who write checks? Should be written by that work group. Jamie could join that work group temporarily - and we don't have to rigid here, but control should come from that group. Maybe coordinators should handle oversite.

JG: In general I agree - still not sure if it's necessary to have a pre-meeting. We do need previous information for each work team - history of our expenses are important. Information on our fixed and variable expenses.

Jamie: perhaps we can table this until we've had a chance to review the budget info

Hilary: I can provide the previous years budget - not fully reconciled, but gives general overview.

Decisions For LC

JG: one has been raised by Enrique: time for LC members should serve (increase to 2 terms) Erq: pending to decide on placement of Internaionalization work group

JG: How do we tak the priorities from membership meeting to our workplans?

Jamie: Some are clear. Others are vague and open. Our work groups need to be creative and make them more concrete. The LC need to review that and come to an agreement.

JG: Could we agree that each WG picks out the priorities that correspond to that working group? We can introduce our workplans at the next meeting by presenting which priorities are being taken up by which working group?

Jamie: That's a good idea. It might take a copule of weeks.

Enrique: I agree.

Mallory: I agree, too.

JG: "2014 program" on the agenda is perhaps not necessary right now. When we have work plans, we can integrate them all into a program of work for 2014.

Enrique: Agree.

Jamie: Agree.

Chairing weekly coordination meetings

JG: It may be difficult for one person to always be available. Propose that we have several possible chairs for each meeting and that they communicate prior to the meeting to establish who will chair.

Jamie: I'm available to chair these meetings.

JG: Alfredo said that he was going to propose another temporary co-chair. Is that other person effective?

Jamie: I don't know. I wonder if other people on this call could chair in a rotation?

Abi: Is this somethign that we will reallybenefit from having the same person every time? Or can we share this responsiblity?

Jamie: It's more administrative and would benefit if we have several people roate. And notes have to rotate too.

Mallory: if we had a standing agenda it would be easier to rotate the facilitator

Abi: Where do we keep the notes for all of these meetings? What if we have a spot for all notes and a standing agenda. A flexible place to see all of this.

Jamie: Both good ideas. JG's agenda for this meeting could be used. It's report backs from the work teams followed by decisions for the LC. Abi is correct in finding some place where we can post all of our notes. We can take this back to the infrastructure and data sovereignty group for a recommendation.

Abi: The agenda is an email-based process. This adds another unnecessary layer. Would be great to get rid of all of those emails.

JG: Email the next chair agenda points.

Jamie: Agrees to chair next week. That we agree on the next chair at the end of each meeting.

Abi: Will take notes next time.

Enrique: Lorea has been proposed as a platform by Stephen. Membership and administration will have a discussion about it. Other LC members are worried about how to rely on more convenient platforms to collaborate. Who is coming to the face-to-face meeting in February? We need to reserve hosting. We need to know next week. Carlos Fazio resigned his position. And I made a proposal to invite Jaime Montejo in order to replace him, he is another MFPL member. Five people voted in favor. How do we move forward with this?

JG: Do we not need members to vote on LC members? I'm not against Jaime on the LC.

Jamie: We've never had a situation like this before. This is the first time we've ever done something like this. Objecting to it on policy grounds is reasonable. Enrique's question is about what we do when we only have 5 people responded - we don't have quorum. We need to have 50% participating for it to pass. The only thing we can do is to resubmit the proposal to the LC and ask people to vote in the next two days. It was submitted during the holidays and possibly lost.