OMF Organization and Governance Discussion (October 2020 Workshop)

[cmbarton]

Issues Discussed

Membership

• Organizations (what kinds)
  • organizations have a charter or something like that. Other kind of formalization?
  • sponsors vs. members
  • Individual "affiliates" (non voting)?
  • think about what to call different members/affiliation classes
• Member responsibilities
  • need statement of responsibilities
• Member rights and voting (on what)
• Member benefits
  • participates in standards setting
  • incentives for best practices
  • accreditation/certification in best practices
• Membership fees
  • Useful for long term sustainability but tricky to set
  • May want to start OMF and have the initial members discuss this
• How do members join or admitted to membership?
  • Importance of making it possible for commercial organizations to join
  • needs statement of principles or something that all members agree to in order to join

What are starting Working Groups

• How are new Working Groups formed?
  • Should working groups have their own charters/missions to specify what they do?
  • Regular sunset review for working groups
• How are Working Groups governed/managed? Needs to be specified in charter/mission document

Governance

• Members Council (rights and responsibilities)
  • Quorum
  • 1 vote per organization
• Executive Board (rights and responsibilities)
  • Working Group leaders
  • Reps from Members Council
  • Executive Director
    • Needs fixed term: more than 1 year, less than 5. Potentially renewable
    • Needs independent financial person or fiduciary board
    • Does the Exec Dir come from the Exec Board?
  • Ex-officio members?
  • How chosen?
  • Alternative is that board is separate in activities and membership from the members council and working groups (OGC model)
• Advisory Committee?

Sustainability

• How sustained?
• All volunteer or some paid positions?
• Future as non-profit?

[BruceEdmonds]

Important: Who is invited onto working groups, how are people retired from them? (in the sense of how the processes that do this are constituted and governed)

[chrstngyn]

for free omf membership, could we require potential free members to utilize related platforms (like comses net) to upload 1 model? it could encourage best practices for model upload and sharing

[platipodium]

for free omf membership, could we require potential free members to utilize related platforms (like comses net) to upload 1 model? it could encourage best practices for model upload and sharing

There could be membership by merit (examples above)

[BruceEdmonds]

An advisory council is a good idea - just a group of "the great and the good" who implicitly endorse the OMF but also promote it and accept that they can be occasionally bothered for advice.

[chporter]

Another large organization that includes both individual and organization memberships: https://www.rd-alliance.org/