As a trustee with a duty to monitor rather than direct, I'm interested in necessary, accurate and easy to consume reporting. The Board needs to know that our investment in staff and office is well spent. Jon and I have talked about the option of one-page dashboard style reports that might be maintained publicly on-wiki so everyone can get an idea what is going on.
At the moment we have an "office" wiki where staff and board can see loads of (mostly rather dull) stuff including the weekly one-page operations report which Jon calls the Chief Exec report. It contains some detail we ought to keep confidential such as exactly who has been part of what meetings (for example, it says that Edward Buckner came in for a friendly chat last week with generally positive results, but I hope you realize that I would not tell you all that on a public list unless Edward had written about the experience himself in another public place) and how many bids we have had for the Train the Trainers requirement. However, I see no reason to avoid being open about the non-confidential stuff and our most eager critics may be just the right people to find new angles on hard problems. It is important that any reporting does not become a massive burden compared to its value, but simple reporting of key metrics, necessary tracking of risks and issues and progress to plan might be the sort of things to make public so our widest possible community can review and contribute early to opportunities for improvement based on the best "live" data on the weekly and monthly level. Stevie had some ideas about what a one-screen full Operations page on our wiki might contain (including our live IRC channel as part of a mash-up to keep it interesting?). This coming week we are all going to be committed to having a great WikiConference UK, but this would be a useful topic to kick about and think of pragmatic ways of doing it, and for Jon to pick up on in a couple more weeks. Please, however, try to be kind to the lovely staff we have with their fragile egos, and keep your expectations realistic for the small but smart organization we believe we all are part of. I can assure you they are not sitting around drinking tea from Wiki mugs editing articles about celebritards. Apart from lunch times. ;-) Cheers, Fae
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