Our recommendations for Sakai governance are likely to evolve over the next few months as the SEPP community conducts more dialog about these matters.
Our initial recommendations (below), however, can be summarized as governance recommendations that:
- create a Board election (and Board transition) process that gives the SEPP community an early opportunity to seat Directors that best articulate values of the wider SEPP campus community;
- discourage any sense of "inevitability" that Sakai tool developments will necessarily be centralized at the 4 core Sakai universities;
- allow expanded opportunities for commercial affiliate partners to join the community and to help support the community effort through subscription fees.
Note: the following governance items are based in large part upon text from Position Paper #10, which we think supports many of our objectives.
The next generation of SEPP should be called:
The Sakai Collaborative Community (SCC)
Institutional Membership
Initial membership will be the membership of SEPP plus the Core at the time of formation. Thereafter institutional membership will:
- Be open to higher education institutions anywhere in the world
- Require payment of an annual subscription, which should be set by the Board
- Give each Institutional Member 1 vote in electing the Board
Individual Membership
Individual membership will be part of the meritocracy roles/levels. It will:
- Be open to any individual
- Shall not have voting rights
- Require nomination in one or other class by an existing individual member, institutional member, or corporate affiliate member
- Be free
- Individual members are eligible to be elected to the SCC management committees and to the Board
Corporate Affiliate Membership
Corporate affiliate members will:
- Be open to any organization supplying goods or services to the higher education sector
- Require nomination by an institutional member and seconding of the nomination by at least 1/10 of the institutional members
- Require payment of an annual subscription set by the Sakai Board
- Representatives of corporate affiliate members may not be elected to the Board, but are allowed full participation in Project Committees and Dicsussion Groups.
Composition of the Board
Number and Term of Directors
- The Board will be composed of 9 directors
- One third of the Board will be re-elected each year (3 year term for directors) and a director may be removed by a 2/3 vote of Institutional Members
Director Compensation
The Board should not be paid. Motivation to be on the board should be making a contribution to the greater good of higher education as well as recognition and prestige. Board members will be reimbursed for travel expenses for their business travel for the Sakai Collaborative Community.
Election of the Board
- Nominations for election to board vacancies can be made by any member (institutional, individual or corporate affiliate)
- Nominees for the board must be members of one of the institutional universities.
- Nominations should be managed by a "Membership Committee" that creates the slate of nominees for Board positions (reference the Educause model)
- Voting will be at the annual meeting by institutional members only - one institutional member, one vote.
- The first election of the Board will occur in January 2006, and the new Board members will take their seats upon the first day of operation of the new Sakai Collaborative Community.
Transition of the Current Board to the New Board - For continuity, the existing Board shall elect (up to) 3 from amongst its current members to stay on the Board. These 3 members are selected for an initial one year term.
- Three new board members shall be elected for an initial two year term
- Three new board members shall be elected for an initial three year term
- After the initial 2006 Board elections, all subsequent Board elections will be for terms of three years.
Steering Committees
The new Board should review any commitments that have been made during the last year for the creation of Steering Committees. e.g., The proposal that a Sakai Library Steering Committee be formed and that this Steering Committee be populated with only members from the 4 core Sakai universities appears to us to be counterproductive to a transition to a community-based software effort.
The role, creation, membership and duration of any Steering Committee in the new organization needs to be discussed in open forums of the Sakai Collaborative Community before this structure for architectural "steering" might be put in place.
Regarding Tools and Interoperability:
- When new tools are contributed, reasonable amounts of technical and user documentation must be contributed with it.
- Tools should be able to be beta-tested among the SEPP community before they are finished or have been blessed by QA.
- We would like to see a broad variety of tools available for departments and faculty to use. For example it would be great to have three discussion tools to choose from, if they are significantly different in both function and feature. As long as a tool passes the Sakai QA process, then it should be allowed to be distributed in the enterprise bundle. An institution/department should be able to then try out multiple tools (perhaps overlapping in function) and make their own decisions about which ones they will make available to their faculty and research teams.
- The Board will probably need in the future to pay greater attention to data definitions that will set the stage better than is the case now for content interoperability among Sakai applications