Interesting watching a new org model come together. I’m a little lost about this idea of Topic Ambassadors. Either you have an Advisory committee or a Ambassador Committee. It’s the same thing. Every OKFN member will be a local member, most of who will have interests around a global topic.

The OKFN already has a well developed groups of WG’s, which as topic/subject placeholders, need to be Global. Even if the OZ chapter wants to set up national WGs for the same topics, the same Categories need to be used – “Open” being the unifying one. So e.g. Geek and Technical is a subset of “”Open Culture”. Although I’d suggest “Open Networks” so we might have a chance of getting the web and internet guys together.

A common (global) calender will be necessary for all WGs, so that, as a National chapter organises a local event, OKFN members will have a global perspective on a topic. This will be quite important as webinars are used more, and real time comms starts to be treated more seriously.

PS OKFN does not have many active elists. The problem here is that every www domain usually have lots of WGs, who elist & records, etc remain in “their” little domain. They are rarely seen to collaborate on a global basis, or recognise different professional approaches to the same goals. The challenge for OKFN is in providing a platform and tools that might encourage the siloists to be seen to be collaborating.

Made a few edits to the front page, if you like. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BohZsN9HumpUV7I6-LDy4prJfLs0saV5XfXCM

P.S. Topic Ambassadors may be useful if they can get new projects to use the OKFN platform (for a small fee of course). E.g. These guys could use it to run an Open Innovation WG. http://beta.digitalsocial.eu/ (they obviously need some help:)

That would be one Innovation for the EC’s DG Connect guys. i.e. Not having to watch another EC “project” setting up a site for (what are) WGs, and reinventing the wheel, again and again and again:)