Community Roles

This page outlines all of the roles that community members, volunteers and staff alike, fulfill. Most of the roles take less than half an hour per week and the OKFN strongly encourages participation from newcomers. If you would like to participate or would like further advice, please fill out our get involved form. Thanks for your interest.

= Coordinators =

Foundation Coordinator

 * Oversee Foundation projects and working groups and collect information for Board perusal

Chapter Coordinator
See also the Chapter Lead page

Primary coordinator and lead for a chapter. Chapters are geographically based, rather than disciplinary.

Project Coordinator
See the /Project Coordinator page

Primary manager and coordinator for a project.

Community Coordinator
See also the Community Coordinator page.

The Community Coordinator will be responsible for expanding and diversifying the Foundation's network, for helping to bring the Foundation's activities to a wider audience, and for identifying new potential collaborations, projects and activities with external partners. He or she will be one of several people at the Open Knowledge Foundation who work in this area.

Project Community Coordinator
See also the Project Community Coordinator page.

In many ways linked to the overall community coordinator role, but with project-specific focus.

Working Group Coordinator
See Working Group Coordinator

Coordinates a working groups; acts as a group manager.

Volunteer Coordinator
See also the Volunteer Coordinator page.

Keeps the community's volunteers happy, busy and engaged.

Foundation Coordinator
See also the Funding Coordinator page.

Identifies and realises opportunities for funding.

Funding Coordinator
See also the Foundation Coordinator page.

Acts as a representative of the foundation and provides oversight.

Merchandise Coordinator
See also the Merchandise Coordinator page.

Responsible for OKFN merchandise

Fundraising Administrative Coordinator
See also the Fundraising Administrative Coordinator page.

Tracks donations, keeps supporters up-to-date and engaged and coordinates fundraising drives

= Ambassadors =

Community Ambassador
See also the Community Ambassador page.

Nominated spokespeople for the OKFN.

= Editors, Authors and Curators =

Website Editor
See also the Website Editor page.

Helps out with managing the content (and discussion) around Foundation's general websites and blogs. This includes spam detection and flag up any particularly useful comments and post for discussion on okfn-discuss.

Newsletter Editor
See also the Newsletter Editor page.

Assists with the drafting and publication of the newsletter.

Bulletin Editor
Community Roles/Bulletin Editor

Assists with preparing Bulletins like the Open Government Data Bulletin.

Contributing Blogger
See also the Contributing Blogger page.

Writes blog posts for the OKFN Blog.

Editor for getthedata.org
See also the Editor for getthedata.org page.

Finds and improves questions on http://getthedata.org/. This includes editing tags, voting where appropriate and so forth.

Ideas Curator
See also the Ideas Curator page.

Reviews submissions, organises and promotes the use of ideas.okfn.org.

= Sysadmin and Webministration =

Sysadmin
See also the Sysadmin page.


 * Fixes and manages simple site components.
 * (un)installs software and apps

Webministrator
See Community Roles/Webministrator.

Helps manage websites at general level (not sysadmin level) e.g. spam detection and elimination, comment management, user management etc.

Wiki Gardener
See also the Wiki Gardener page.

Helps keep the wiki looking polished, removes spam etc.

= Designer and Developers =

Graphic Designer
See also the Graphic Designer page.

Support's the OKFN's message with effective visual design.

Website Designer
Design sites, write HTML and CSS

Developer
Development code especially for webapps -- Python, PHP, javascript ...

= Project Specific =

NB: many project roles are listed on the project's own website or wiki. Items here are usually for projects without there own dedicated space for this sort of material.

Open Definition: Conformance Process Coordinator

 * Time: < 2h per month though can be more if you get super-interested -- we'd be delighted if, for example, you wanted started to dig into the minutiae of licenses but it isn't required!)
 * Skills needed: email

Quite a few new "open" licenses are getting created across the world at the moment. The primary purpose of http://OpenDefinition.org is to create criterion for checking whether these licenses really are open (in particular that they don't add any niggly conditions which break compatibility).

The job of checking license conformance falls to the Open Definition Advisory Council.

However, someone is required to:
 * keep an eye on the mailing list
 * queue up queries when they come in (e.g. this one)
 * once every month or two ping the list (and possibly advisory council members directly) about looking at this and making a vote on conformance.