CKAN future - call for proposal

Major Projects CKAN
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A number of us on the CKAN Steering Committee and CKAN Tech Team received this from the OKI Board today:

Dear Members of the CKAN Community,

As many of you will be aware, the Open Knowledge Board has been thinking about the future of CKAN and the role of Open Knowledge to support this project. Thanks to everyone who engaged with the work undertaken by Ira for the board on this and to Ira for taking this on.

It is clear that the role of resourcing, chairing the steering committee and shepherding this important project into the future could be done better by others than Open Knowledge at this point. As the current stewards of the CKAN website, trademark and code, we are looking for ways for how CKAN can be supported and invested in going forward.

The consultation found that was that there was interest in the community (the current CKAN steering group, technical team and any other CKAN association) in taking this on and to self-organise and determine together the future of CKAN and the CKAN association members. As a consequence the board voted last week for us to get in touch with you in the hope you are up for preparing a proposal.

We would be grateful if you could send a proposal on how you would like to proceed by COB 31st May to me. Beyond the initial proposal, we are happy to consider any requests the CKAN community may have of OKI, but we would like to see a clear plan. If we don’t receive a proposal we will assume that this is not a viable approach.

The main areas we would like to see addressed in a proposal include:

• Scale and pace of CKAN core development (in particular progress on roadmaps and migration to Python 3)
• Leadership of product and community.
• Resourcing, both in terms of time and money, and how this work will be done.
• Governance of processes, stakeholder representation and participation.

What happens to CKAN remains deeply relevant to Open Knowledge and we remain committed to CKAN continuing to be the leading open source data portal software.

Best wishes,

Tim Hubbard on behalf of the Open Knowledge Board

Tim Hubbard
Board Chair, Open Knowledge International

Please do join the discussion on this at https://gitter.im/ckan/chat or here. Steven, myself and a few others are getting together to write a proposal and we’re very keen to include the views from the wider CKAN community, so do let us know where you stand. And we’ll share the proposal for feedback.

David

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Thanks to lots of work from lots of key people in the CKAN community we submitted a community proposal to Open Knowledge of how to reboot the CKAN Association. The plan allows CKAN to be owned, stewarded and controlled in the open by the CKAN community. The CKAN Association will flourish with better structures, more openness and more investment.

It can be read here: CKAN Community Proposal to OKI - Google Docs

We got input from the main vendors: Link Digital, OpenGov, Keitaro and Datopian as well as all the CKAN Tech Team, Canadian government and input from others that we’d reached out to here and on the CKAN gitter chat. We had 3 hours of meetings as we wrote the document and solicited feedback on the points. It has mainly been written in the open by Steven de Costa, Marko Bocevski and David Read.

It was submitted Sunday and we await a response from Open Knowledge Board.

(Just to explain, Open Knowledge needs to be involved because the CKAN community itself doesn’t actually own the CKAN trademark, so Open Knowledge Board make the decisions about all official CKAN bodies.)