OBO governance

[Melissa Haendel]

Hi all,

I’m starting this thread to discuss the possibility of hosting an OBO community forum on governance.

I’d like to see OBO mature as a standards body, and one of the most important things a standards organization does is to promote strong governance over decision making, evaluation, and maturity of its standards. I think this could help OBO be even more impactful.

I also think such governance could create greater inclusivity and a more welcoming environment to newcomers.

You might ask, what needs governing? Things like committee membership and terms, Principle adherence evaluation metrics, inclusion/exclusion criteria for the OBO Library, how to manage relations and interoperability with other standards outside the OBO library, how to identify overlaps/gaps/obsoletion/senescence, maturity models, attribution policies, keeping the code of conduct up to date and having a plan when it is violated, etc.

To prepare for such a community discussion, I’d like to gather 3-6 volunteers to examine our current principles, strategies, website, activities, etc. to see what they see as some of the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps. These volunteers should be people that have been less involved in the day-to-day workings of the OBO committees, so that they can provide a more agnostic view of things. We could also invite someone from another standards organization to participate. Once the small task team is ready, their ideas and documentation can then be shared with the whole community for discussion and brainstorming.

Please let me know if you are interested, there is also a governance channel on the OBO slack org.

Thanks for your interest!
Melissa Haendel

[jgra...@stanford.edu]

Hi Melissa, I think your approach here is a good one, for the reasons you mentioned. Having clear communications about such things is really nice for the new folks.

If you would have me as a volunteer, I am willing. I would definitely fit in the category of "less involved in the day-to-day workings", but I do have some compensating skills and experience. 

John

[Melissa Haendel]

John I think you’d be terrific to help inform this! Thank you for volunteering:-)

Sent from my iPhone

On May 13, 2021, at 5:18 PM, jgra...@stanford.edu <jgra...@stanford.edu> wrote:

Hi Melissa, I think your approach here is a good one, for the reasons you mentioned. Having clear communications about such things is really nice for the new folks.

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[Melanie Courtot]

Hi,

Happy to help if I can. I have co written a couple of governance documents and I found that overall it was great to have expiry dates on things like committee membership as it allows new people to participate and increases diversity. 

The Data Use Ontology governance policy is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Mxochx9zzYNA7jWi2jhQBzsAFYoSWDWTjjB49eYSvs/edit# It highlights criteria to request modification ot the ontology.

The OWLED steering committee policy: http://webont.org/owled/steering.html and similar the ICBO steering committee policy: http://icbo.buffalo.edu/icboSteering.html. Both of those are now outdated but may provide inspiration for committee membership rotation.

Cheers,

Melanie

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/obo-discuss/B3148919-C9E4-4EA5-829A-A01797AF0472%40tislab.org.

[Ramona Walls]

Thanks for starting this discussion, Melissa. OBO Foundry already has governance in the form of the operations committee and our attempts to document and apply rules, procedures, and policies. However, I am very much in favor of having external or semi-external people do a review. I would like to request that someone from TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) be included. Happy to send you names of people offline. 

My main concern is that if we form a new governance that still relies on volunteers, it is unlikely to be any more effective than our current governance (which has some issues, but I think does a great job for free). So if there is a new governance plan, I would like to see a sustainability plan to accompany it. 

Ramona

[Melissa Haendel]

Just to you. 

There is significant bullying and no recourse. There are a few people who make all the decisions, and no accountability to the principles. I think there are some policies and some are good, but in my mind one of the biggest issues in obo is the lack of actual governance -who makes decisions, how long are the terms on committees, what is the process for policy violations? How do we decide ontology metrics? Among other things. It’s what prevents obo from becoming a real standards org. 

After the last person called me on the phone crying after being bullied I couldn’t take it anymore. This has happened multiple times. It’s not right. 

I will reply to your email positively but I don’t agree that what we have is really governance. 

FWIW, the task team will not be creating a new governance plan. The community would need to do that. I do agree sustainability is an important goal. 

I hope this provides some context. 

Sorry to be Debbie downer- it’s not all bad!

 

Sent from my iPhone

On May 18, 2021, at 1:56 PM, Ramona Walls <rlwal...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for starting this discussion, Melissa. OBO Foundry already has governance in the form of the operations committee and our attempts to document and apply rules, procedures, and policies. However, I am very much in favor of having external or semi-external people do a review. I would like to request that someone from TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) be included. Happy to send you names of people offline. 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/obo-discuss/d51f1954-b3ca-4b50-ae00-8d9c4ee9e3bbn%40googlegroups.com.

[Melissa Haendel]

Well I guess that cat is out of the bag, I did not intend to send to obo-discuss, but now you know why I started this task.

*embarassed* but I will own it.

Melissa

[Nico Matentzoglu]

I think this is a great motivation (seeing bullying and wanting to stop it) to start something, so no argument there! But obviously this is not the only reason why we need to at least talk about governance - so, regardless of what you feel personally, let’s see how it manifests itself in a general proposal! 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/obo-discuss/838090D5-1755-4115-87D8-54923BCB2076%40tislab.org.

[John Graybeal]

Introducing myself and returning to the question of viability. I’ve been involved for 17 years in metadata and semantic initiatives, starting with the Marine Metadata community-building project and MMI repository (based on BioPortal backend at the time, and still operational!). I’ve come back around to be the technical lead of BioPortal (and CEDAR) under Mark Musen, and recently helped start the OntoPortal initiative. I’ve led or participated in several standardization efforts in that period. 

Based on sometimes-hard experience, I too worry about sustainability and scoping. I’ve had relative successes and failures, but always struggled to bring about good governance without funding it (or having a dedicated lead always creating and maximizing opportunities to progress). 

In this case I want to learn from and support OBO (and Melissa’s motivation for robust and fair processes), but worry my personal time commitment may be inadequate to the goals. I’ll do my best to be responsive, and can probably respond best to direct requests for work (including pointers to specific documents to read or review). Hope that, together with my general perspective, sufficiently helps. 

John

[Ramona Walls]

Melissa, I totally get where you are coming from. I am aware of the many problems we have along with the good we do. My main concern was that I want to make sure we have the resources to do something better. Governance without any funds is almost certain to break down. I fully support your effort!

Ramona