Humanitarian OSM Team/Board/Board Meeting Minutes/24 January 2013
Summary
These may not be entirely self-explanatory, so let me just touch on some of the high level points. Overall, we are working to make the details of how HOT operates explicit and clear. Some of this is too rough or ambiguous or not sufficient in our Bylaws. Other needs are clear policies which exist in many of our heads, but certainly have divergent points. It's not glamorous work! but totally necessary to have a solid structure to support the inspirational work happening across the globe in our community. We are respected and called for by humanitarians everywhere, and its our obligation to have our house in order. Onward.
Most of the issues collected under Board and Membership can roughly be covered under the need to update HOT's Bylaws (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/U.S._Bylaws). I've taken it on myself to help organize the questions, lay out the answers, and present some solid recommendations to the Board. I'm not doing this alone! So will be asking for help from all you governance geeks out there ;).
We spoke substantially about the issue of paid staff on the Board. There are issues of proper accountability and best business practice, but also the reality of HOT being an active and young organization. We are satisfied that things are ok for now, but recognize we need to especially have well thought through policy on the issue. I suppose this is part of the Bylaws review as well.
We also touched on the role of staff, the ED, and the Board, of our internal checks and balances to be fully accountable to the HOT community and our supporters. The leaders of HOT are meeting regularly, which is helping well with coordination. For the Board, we are asking Kate, Nicolas, and Severin to come up with a short and clear reporting structure that isn't onerous to anyone to write or read, but gives us a good useful picture of our work.
The Strategic Plan (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iN1g-YMuwIvW5Jpw-GPqdymHohkLdOTFCdsSHtL-iJw/edit) still needs review and implementation. We as the Board resolved to read it again, and really get to grips with how HOT will digest it.
The item on HOT-GroundTruth MoU is meant to cover conflict of interest for myself, having a role in both organizations. There have been a couple instances of overlapping clients and partners, and we need a little more clear way than standard conflict of interest practice, to resolve those when they may come up.
Other policy questions are Code of Conduct, Activation Protocols, Project Definitions, Security and Emergency and Liability. All of the Board members are splitting up their time to focus on these.
Ok! Thanks for reading all this if you've gotten this far. The Board can't tackle all of this governance work alone, please help us out! Finally, I really appreciate the time the Board is putting in, especially our new members Pierre and Joseph.