New Field Guide: ‘The Tech We Want | Who Decides? A Quick Guide to Governance’

At the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), we have championed the development of public interest open technologies and standards for over two decades. Some of our technologies are now celebrated as digital public goods; others have found new homes with alternative organisations; while yet others have been deprecated or abandoned.

Sustaining projects is a challenge for small and non-profit tech builders, especially those like us who build with the community. That’s why we decided to create a field guide to share what we’ve learned about what really sustains a project: its governance.

We are publishing the results today: The Tech We Want | Who Decides? A Quick Guide to Governance.

The guide is part of The Tech We Want initiative, our ongoing conversation about how to create digital tools that are simple, long-lasting, and genuinely useful as a counterpoint to the overengineered stacks of Big Tech companies.

Key content of the guide includes:

🙋🏾‍♀️ 8 questions every team should ask at the start of a public interest tech project, from “Who should have a voice in decisions?” to “Who is your community?”

📝 5 steps to a community governance framework, with each step to identify possible obstacles and awkward situations that are sure to arise during the project’s lifetime.

🤗 Practical tips on designing a governance model for your community, and what roles are usually in place to keep everyone committed, listened and engaged.

✍️ A hands-on community governance template to help teams reflect on how power is balanced within the project and what ways the community can truly collaborate.

The main message is simple: clear governance ⚖️ helps enable meaningful community participation, although there is no 📐 one-size-fits-all approach. The governing body of your public interest technology should iterate on approaches according to your needs – but you need to know what they are!

Read the Guide Here

We’d love to know: how have you overcome decision-making issues in your public interest tech projects? Share your reflections with us at info@okfn.org and over our social channels #TheTechWeWant. Let’s keep learning (and unlearning) together.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Ramya Chandrasekhar and Valérian Guillier of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CIS-CNRS) for their field research on community governance, which forms the basis of this guide.