Open Knowledge Foundation

Strategic Planning Q2 2013

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[In confidence]

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Empowering through open knowledge

Contents

• What we'd like from you!
• Vision & Mission
• Strategic plan
• Reflections and questions

What we'd like from you!

Input on strategy

- Does this make sense?

- Sustainability - are we missing things here?

- How could it go wrong?

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Domain and other specialist expertise

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Thoughts for core fundraising (planning & networking)

- high net worth individuals

- grants and organisational philanthropy

- is there anything else we should try?

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Advice on organisational separation options

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Who else should we be talking to?

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Vision

Our vision describes the perfect world we want to achieve:

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A vibrant open knowledge commons empowering citizens and enabling fair, sustainable and effective societies

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Mission

Our mission describes how we go about changing the world:

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To advocate and campaign for open knowledge to be created and used, through a global network of people and organisations,

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and to be a home for open knowledge projects of all kinds, so that their work can be supported, amplified and have maximum impact

Strategy

What's different in the strategy

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- We are focussing on one specific plan

- We feel this is strong and addresses many of our reasons for creating a strategy

- We are clearer that the Network is a means to an end not the end in itself

- A key element of being a "home" for projects and activities of all kinds

- More clarity around what we would stop doing

- More thinking about resourcing

The Open Knowledge Foundation Network

We are a global movement to open up knowledge around the world and see it used and useful

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by bringing together a diverse community, creating a network of individuals, organisations and projects, founded on key principles.

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We are trusted, pioneering, passionate, and practitioners as well as advocates.

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We make change by educating, advocating, creating and making.

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The OKF itself advocates for openness, initiating campaigns and setting agendas.

The OKF is a home for community projects that drive and support "open", providing them with legal, technical and social infrastructure.

Advocacy & campaigning

• We advocate and campaign for open knowledge to be released and used.
• Much of this work is done through our network - our members are individuals and organisations, brought together through events, news and thought leadership, founded on key tenets (Open Definition)
• (But) OKF "central" play a leading role in setting the agenda, initiating campaigns and coordinating activity
• As part of this we may commission discrete high-impact time-delimited exemplars (e.g. Europe's Energy)
• The network includes regional and topic groups (science, culture etc), with activity focused on campaigns
• The focus on different knowledge domains and also activity types (policy campaign, grassroots tech project, events etc) will vary with time according to community demand and topicality.
• Active members drive and participate in campaigns, organise local and topical working parties, campaigns and events, and evangelise

Home for Community Projects

• Community projects can find a home here - we offer legal, technical and social infrastructure for suitable projects. Projects may be technical or non-technical, as long as they are non-profit open knowledge endeavours
• Projects are autonomous - they are not run by OKF paid staff
• e.g. DCMI, CrowdCrafting, Farm Subsidies and some of our existing projects would become clearly designated as autonomous projects (e.g. school of data, open spending, CKAN as software (not consulting projects))
• This will need strong governance and framework structures (see below)

Home for technical Projects

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• We act as an incubator for projects from our developer and wrangler community, supporting and helping them grow, providing a home for all kinds of open data hacks, projects and products. We are also a home for established and upcoming open source software projects, offering a copyright assignment option, shared or free hosting costs, etc, ensuring that
• more substantial projects can benefit from a neutral and independent organisation.
• data oriented projects with large databases can benefit from cheaper hosting (ideally sponsored by industry!)
• We will have a dedicated working group ("Labs") providing a central place for the more tech and data geek community

Differences and Comments

• A key point is that projects are still delivered as they are today, both purely volunteer-run and funded, but that the OKF itself runs such projects somewhat hands off, rather than being deeply involved. Global Network staff don't deliver such projects - they focus on the network side (see next slide) and the structures necessary to support standalone projects
• Projects may have funds delivered to the OKF and use them to pay contractors but projects are responsible for managing themselves (albeit with some oversight from a relevant governance body at the OKF). Project staff aren't OKF staff.
• This is a reflection of the OKF's roots as an "apache for open knowledge" and will meet what we believe will be ongoing demand for small projects to find a home, although they are likely to be seeking different things to what code projects sought at Apache (reduced overhead administration costs; cheaper data storage; etc)

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Exemplars today

• We already have projects and approaches which suggest this model:
• DCMI as an independent organisation seeking to become an OKF project
• Collaborations such as Sloan-funded CrowdCrafting
• FarmSubsidies seeking technical infrastructure and other support
• Public Domain Review, which operates fairly autonomously already
• Various Labs projects
• CKAN core codebase, which could better be supported by the community of developers and deployers and users
• OpenSpending, already a mixture of community project and OKF/funded project, and which could benefit from more community focus again now

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Global Network - a potential budget

• CEO $100k
• fundraiser $60k
• conf organiser $60k
• campaign coordination & thought leadership $100k
• WG & LG & project coordination $150k
• publicity $60k
• finance & hr & sysadmin $150k
• seed/support funding for groups $150k (flexible)
• travel $80k
• adverts & merchandise $20k
• total per year $1m

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(depending on the levels of projects "homed" here, additional operational and project management might be needed)

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Global Network - revenue sources

• Membership fees
• individual
• corporate / organisational
• potentially 'franchise' style fees from local groups
• Hosted project overheads and fees
• Core grants - core team plus payments for coordinators for local groups and working groups
• Grants for fellowships and awards
• Donations
• Crowdfunding or grants for specific campaigns

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Global Network & Home for projects

- a comparison

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• Although this is one organisation with one shared mission, it's worth explaining the two elements as distinct areas of activity
• The Global Network and Home for Projects reinforce each other, but do have some differences
• The Global Network includes campaigns and thought leadership which are lead by the core organisational team, with materials and support created by core, but the majority of the work is delivered by volunteers through the network
• The Home for Projects is very hands-off by the core organisational team, although they deliver some of the administrative support aspects, and core management team will have a role in governance of projects, as well as community-run governance
• Both elements will be aspects of the offering of the OKF for core fundraising, and both will benefit from core funds

Governance

• Projects, Working Groups and Local Groups
• All must be chartered in some way
• Need for some approval (and removal) process - international council / WG council / projects council and associated processes
• Each is likely to have one or more incubating phases
• There may be some spur from the thought-leadership function in the core team to encourage the community to raise funds and pursue goals, but this isn't followed through by doing by core if the community doesn't step up
• Project decision making has two elements
• community-managed (around assessing open knowledge elements, team, maturity, etc)
• OKF-corporate-managed (assessing legal and financial risk)

Outline Offers (1/2)

• As open knowledge evangelist
• meet and collaborate with others
• campaigns to join, projects to contribute to
• brand and authority
• potential for fellowships
• As an open data company
• News and insight
• Events to attend and present at
• A group to support who will push for open data
• As a data company
• Place to dock open tools
• News, insight, events

Outline Offers (2/2)

• As a funder/granter/foundation
• reassurance that you can fund a well governed, small, but high impact effort
• more chance of success because of mentoring and support
• As a project creator / contributor
• mentoring and encouragement
• Collaborators
• Technical infrastructure (hosting for data, code etc)
• brand and authority
• Legal infrastructure
• Can receive money and/or certain types of grants etc
• An official legal home
• Can hold assets (spectrum licenses, trademarks, cash, copyright assignments)

Evolution

(how will this change stuff - very early draft only)

Global Network - transition

• The Global Network is similar to our current Network unit, with some of the grand-funded work in our current Long Term Projects unit added in (particularly that with a community focus).
• We would need to recruit a CEO or executive director at some point

- What will happen to School of Data

- What will happen to CKAN

- Where will money come from

- Who will be members

- Governance structures

- Can other orgs become members or associates (even if there is a local group in that region)?

• We imagine that the core Foundation could have a main web presence (openknowledgefoundation.org) which is focussed on the foundation entity
• And the Network uses the Open Knowledge Foundation Network branding and the website okfn.org showcases network activity etc...

Branding ideas

Subsidiaries

(Bolt-ons or standalone...)

We have two likely subsidiary or standalone activities:

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• Technical and professional consultancy around open data publication, visualisation, training and more

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• Data Insights, a specialist consultancy working with CSOs, journalists and others to find the insights in data

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These are described in more detail on the following slides...

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Professional and technical consultancy

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• Technical and professional services around open data and open knowledge
• A home for existing technical and professional consultancy activities, such as CKAN deployments for national governments

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Professional and technical consultancy - transition

• This is similar to our existing Services unit
• As a commercial consultancy it should be self-sustaining financially
• an open question is whether enough surplus could be generated to make it worthwhile as a meaningful element of support for the Global Network
• the ability to take on capital (either VC or social impact funds) could be beneficial to build stronger open data products
• either a for-profit or social enterprise could be viable if this was a standalone organisation

Data Insights

A small, specialist consultancy

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Working with CSOs, journalists and others to find the insights in data - and to open up their data as appropriate.

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May be a separate organisation, or a wholly owned subsiduary; a social enterprise/CIC or a conventional for-profit company

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Data Insights - transition

This is a higher risk component and would operate as a standalone startup

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We have little work in this area today

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As a smaller organisation it could either seek capital or look for consultancy work to bootstrap itself

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Rufus would be particularly keen to work on this

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Questions &

reflections

Routes to sustainability

- Our community

Donations

Membership fees (corporate, institutional, individual)

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- Funders who wish to support this community

General support for the network

Grant support for specific projects / activities

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- Convening and Events

Event surplus – note this isn’t possible for all types of events!

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- ?? Surplus from Consulting, professional and technical, and trading

organisational structure

• Should these components be in one organisation or separate out?
• shared infrastructure and administration could be an advantage, along with shared use of our primary brand asset (the OKF name).
• The consultancy may benefit from taking on investment to boost product development, but equally today's developer team claim that the ties to the "doing good" side of the OKF is important to them.
• We have received quite a lot of advice that splitting out is a bad idea, and that separate organisations would probably grow apart. Equally we already see tensions between these different units today; but perhaps the clarification offered by this plan would ease those?

How could this go wrong?

In what ways could this path go wrong?

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How can we avoid these?

International aspects

The Global Network is a good fit with our current international model but we will need to structure how we work globally a little more than we have to date.

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In particular if we have a paid membership model, how will that connect with local groups? How do we support local groups as they follow our current path to independent entities? Would a more structured franchise-style system be better?

external environment / competition

OGP ?

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Some of our present potential competitors (mySociety, Sunlight) become less relevant as competition, and could be partners

What might we miss out on?

What might we miss out / miss the boat on on if it’s not in our 3 year strategy? Here are some things we think will be big in the next three years in the open knowledge space...

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• mass contribution
• data protocols
• openness mapping
• mass training / education
• basic ‘small data’ infrastructure components

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How could these fit within the plan? For the ones which don't fit in, are we happy to miss the boat?

Are there other upcoming areas we should consider in this vein?

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Key questions

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• financial sustainability and development of reserves
• plausibility of separating into multiple organisations, or plausibility of running very different units within one organisation
• maintain strong legacy from nearly a decade of OKF
• does this give us the greatest impact?

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Backup Slides

Background

2004: OKF begins

- porting F/OSS concept to "knowledge" (data and content)

- Apache for open knowledge, focused on making

- "promoting and protecting open knowledge in a digital age"

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2008-2012: evolves rapidly in two related but distinct directions

- Community: local groups, working groups, events (some parts of OpenSpending)

- Tools: CKAN, other data tooling (some parts of OpenSpending)

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Now, 3 types of work:

- pure community based

- grant-funded activities

- consulting

Where we are today

Corporate:

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• £1.6m turnover in last 12 months (roughly half trading, half grants covering community work & projects, <£5k donations)
• Over 30FTE across 4 continents (all contractors)
• Fully virtual organisation - all remote workers, clusters in London, Berlin, Cambridge
• Non-profit company based in the UK
• 5 local Chapters, each incorporated as independent non-profits (with basic MOU to OKF core)

Where we are today

Activity - very diverse! Just from core team (not including local groups):

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• Technical client work (eg CKAN deployments and customisation)
• Consultancy - advice & training around open data publication&use
• Technical innovation (open data tools and visualisations; Open Spending)
• Community building (regional and topic groups)
• Events (local meetups; OKFestival; specialist workshops)
• Handbook authoring & editing, and community training, online (MOOC) & offline including peer trainers
• Grant funded projects in various open data and open content areas, including European FP7 consortium projects
• Involvement in standards and research (eg OpenDataCensus)

Strengths, weaknesses,

opportunities and threats

Challenges to address

• We want more focus
• to steer decision-making and enable fundraising
• to provide clearer direction for team and community
• Diversity of activities => do not present a clear image
• Portfolio organisation is possible but may not be very powerful
• Potential conflict between neutral voice and sales of CKAN etc
• Growth of organisation and resulting necessary structure highlights tensions between our activities and teams
• Need for core reserves and additional core funds to support larger organisation, impact evaluation, demands of new activity types (inc OKFest), and employment for current personnel - hard to fundraise with today's diverse activities

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Opportunities

• Openness is as growth area
• No other significant player in open knowledge space
• Could further exploit non-profit status & reputation of OKF
• Open Definition
• significant scope to grow and apply to new domains
• Scope to grow activity in many knowledge domains
• School of Data has huge potential as training/education/accreditation provider
• Open data hype means many funding opportunities and interest in the field
• Proven ourselves - we have managed significant growth, we have completed substantial projects etc (9 years in existence)

Threats

• Current interest (hype) around open data crashes or fades; funding opportunities disappear
• Others orgs dominate the scene who have less long-term commitment to our overall vision or less effective at what they do (e.g. commercial orgs cashing in, ...) - tarnishes the issues, and reduced effectiveness
• ditto for other well-funded big/open data organisations
• Recent organisational growth leads to good staff leaving, reduced quality of work, project failures
• New/rising organisations dominate OK space, with greater funding (eg social enterprises) or agility (given OKF growth)

Key OKF values

We are passionate about

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• open knowledge
• liberating it
• using it - seeing it used and useful
• empowerment / understanding / improvement - a realistic chance to solve real problems
• community - people, ideals, ideas, projects
• the possibilities of open information and technology in the digital age

Key OKF Strengths

• networked, grass-roots, community for open knowledge “digital commons”
• providing key tenets (eg Open Definition) & trusted thought leadership
• being conveners - integrity, neutrality, pragmatic not fanatic
• architecting open ecosystems - technically, legally, socially
• leading by example - providing concrete examples

Note

What are we NOT passionate about?

• direct business development / creation
• detailed policy
• closed knowledge
• quick fixes

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We want to see our network grow and the open knowledge domain grow; but we are not driven to expand the OKF as an organisation for and of itself

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We want open knowledge to be known everywhere, and we need to do better at publicising our successes and our work, but we don’t care about the OKF brand being widely known as an end in itself

Key OKF assets & resources

• community (volunteers/members, donations)
• project funding
• partnerships
• network of funding organisations
• reputation and brand
• strong team
• gatekeepers of the roadmaps of CKAN & OpenSpending
• solid intellectual foundation

note - the international angle

• We are a network of local groups and chapters today
• How does the main strategy affect them?
• How does the main strategy interact with local strategies?
• each local chapter has a different focus and business model today
• How can we best support each other?

Open Knowledge Alliance

• Do we stay as one organisation or become several?
• note that if we transition into more than one organisation, there will still be close ties
• part of a family or alliance
• potentially financial links