who we are

“Open Knowledge Australia is like an upside-down umbrella, supporting and empowering the myriad of communities across Australia who believe in open knowledge.” Pia Waugh

The Open Knowledge Australia Board, Ambassadors and Advisors are all here to help you.  If you are not sure where to begin, please tweet or ask on our discussion forum.

  • Our Governance model is a “do-ocracy” (a kind of meritocracy). We don’t tell or suggest what things people should do, we do stuff ourselves, in the open, with the hope that like-minded do-gooders will join in.
  • We use the buddy system to assure redundancy in our network of volunteers.
  • Please contact the team using our Twitter handles below.

There are five volunteer roles in which members should declare themselves to be officially associated as a member of Open Knowledge Australia. Volunteer rolls are listed In order of the most commitment to the least commitment:

  1. Local Ambassador
  2. Topic Ambassador
  3. Advisor
  4. Executive Board Member
  5. Board Member

Guidelines and suggested activities are described for each of the Board, Ambassador and Advisor roles; though all members should be empowered to push forward Open Knowledge as they see fit.  It is mandatory that each member of Open Knowledge Australia abide by our code of conduct and is aware of our model rules.

3 thoughts on “who we are”

  1. Pingback: OKCon 2013 Guest Post: Is Open Source Drug Discovery Practical? | Design Interaction

  2. Hmmm,

    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:)

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