Draft of Standards Table memo

[Greg Bloom]

Hi folks - 

Earlier this week, I shared an early draft of a memo describing my proposed structure and process for our Local Teams (currently piloting in SF Bay and DC). 

Now I'm wrapping up the week with an early draft of a companion memo describing my proposed structure and process for our Standards Table. 

These are both elaborations of the Process section already shared (and met with 'lazy consensus) in Open Referral's 'Public Documentation.' 

I encourage you to read through this, welcome your questions, suggestions, concerns, etc. I will plan to host weekly video chat to discuss this, starting next week -- and of course, I'm happy to chat with anyone one-on-one.

Some notes: 

• This is meant to be a starting point for discussion, not a set of edicts. It represents my best effort to synthesize a wide range of best practices on one hand, and issue-specific feedback on the other. I expect that a) it will be reshaped as we get feedback, and b) the actual course of our work may shape up differently, and that may be okay

• I intend to practice the general flow of this structure/process on the evolution of the documents themselves. In other words, we're gonna collect a lot of feedback over the course of the next month, and I'm going to synthesize this feedback and make decisions (giving priority to the perspectives of stakeholders, i.e. people who work for institutions that provide direct services) and document them. Then we'll have opportunities to evaluate those decisions and reconsider through future iteration.

• For the first iteration of this cycle, to keep things simple, I propose a stripped down version of this process: one working group, including a) designated leader and coordinator, b) subject matter experts, c) stakeholder representatives, and d) system developers, progressing through each phase one by one over the course of the next two months. This will bring us right up to a summit (date TBA, hopefully in June, location SF Bay). By then, ideally we'll have a rough-draft 'stack' that can be presented, evaluated, tweaked, and prepared for implementation on the spot. 

This email is long enough, and it's Friday. Enjoy your weekend, y'all -- looking forward to dive in with you next week!

~greg

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• gjb •

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