Spotlight on Board: Julia Beck on Committee Liaising

[otw_staff]

Spotlight on Board: In this general bi-monthly series, individual OTW Board members will talk about their work, goals, and ideas from a more personal perspective.

Hi, my name is Julia Beck, and I joined the OTW Board of Directors in November 2011. I'm pleased to kick off this series, which will be more informal than our usual OTW blog posts. That also means that all views and opinions expressed in this post are subjective, not representative. Subsequent posts by Board members will help round out the picture, I'm sure.

Today, I wanted to describe my take on one central, but particularly invisible aspect of Board work: liaising. I'll describe what this work looks like first, and will then touch on some inherent problems.

Board appoints members as liaisons to each committee and workgroup. (Here's a short overview of our committees.) The idea is that the committee has an advocate that they can trust in their liaison, someone to back and represent the committee's interests in Board.

The liaison for a committee is selected through a mix of personal affinity, familiarity with the committee, and chair preference. You'd assume that if a Board member is on a committee, they make a natural liaison, but I disagree; and we do try to switch things up in practice in order to prevent lock-in, to help with knowledge transfer and forge fresh alignments.

I’m currently liaison for the following: Volcom (Volunteers & Recruiting), Comms (Communications), Wiki (Fanlore), Survey Workgroup, Translation and I&O (Internationalization & Outreach). Luckily Survey Workgroup and Translation don’t need much Board involvement, and Ira will soon take over liaising I&O.

Here's my approach to liaising in practice: ( Read more... )

Spotlight on Board: Julia Beck on Committee Liaising

[otw-staff.livejournal.com]

Spotlight on Board: In this general bi-monthly series, individual OTW Board members will talk about their work, goals, and ideas from a more personal perspective.

Hi, my name is Julia Beck, and I joined the OTW Board of Directors in November 2011. I'm pleased to kick off this series, which will be more informal than our usual OTW blog posts. That also means that all views and opinions expressed in this post are subjective, not representative. Subsequent posts by Board members will help round out the picture, I'm sure.

Today, I wanted to describe my take on one central, but particularly invisible aspect of Board work: liaising. I'll describe what this work looks like first, and will then touch on some inherent problems.

Board appoints members as liaisons to each committee and workgroup. (Here's a short overview of our committees.) The idea is that the committee has an advocate that they can trust in their liaison, someone to back and represent the committee's interests in Board.

The liaison for a committee is selected through a mix of personal affinity, familiarity with the committee, and chair preference. You'd assume that if a Board member is on a committee, they make a natural liaison, but I disagree; and we do try to switch things up in practice in order to prevent lock-in, to help with knowledge transfer and forge fresh alignments.

I’m currently liaison for the following: Volcom (Volunteers & Recruiting), Comms (Communications), Wiki (Fanlore), Survey Workgroup, Translation and I&O (Internationalization & Outreach). Luckily Survey Workgroup and Translation don’t need much Board involvement, and Ira will soon take over liaising I&O.

Here's my approach to liaising in practice: ( Read more... )