Hi everyone!
I wanted to thank everyone for the rich conversation last month around how to evolve our community’s governance and organizational structure. While we started off focusing specifically on the “leadership team”, we quickly all realized that the conversation is more difficult to have unless we take a broader step back and look at our growing community needs as a whole.
So, I share with you a straw man, based upon a lot of the feedback received from you all. We can talk further about this over the months to come, and hopefully put some of this into effect before next year’s annual meeting.
Steering Committee:
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Purpose(s): Provide fundamental guidance around community priorities, and areas of emphasis. The “strategic” leadership of the community.
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Membership: Chaired by MOH representative, and constituted of over 50% MOH/MOH-delegated participants. Other participants are direct beneficiaries of community proceeds.
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Responsibilities: Approve yearly community operating plan, review/guide quarterly community progress reports
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Authority: More strategic than operational authority… also responsible for it’s own membership and group process
Advisory Committee:
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Purpose(s): Provide routine recommendations to both the Steering Committee and the Leadership Team, bring organizational and resource-raising SME to the OpenHIE community.
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Membership: Varied, but typical membership might consist of philanthropy/aid representatives, SDO representatives, academics, and other SMEs as the time necessitates.
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Responsibilities: Convene regularly to provide advice and counsel to OpenHIE community strategic and operational leadership
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Authority: Mostly advisory, can influence but not direct.
Leadership Team:
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Purpose(s): Oversee the overall daily operations and direction of the OpenHIE community. The “operational leadership” of the community.
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Membership: Community members, and representatives of partnering organizations that have made substantive contributions to the community. Fixed representation by: Project Lead, Chief Architect, Community Manager, and other key community roles.
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Responsibilities: create and refine yearly operational plans, create/modify community structure, determine leadership roles, oversee community financial resources
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Authority: makes most all routine structural, resourcing, and financial decisions (ie, approve new workflows, meeting locations, partner organization approval, etc)
Architectural Review Board:
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Purpose(s): Oversees all technical and standards-based products of the community. The “technical leadership” of the community.
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Membership: Chaired by Chief Architect. Fixed membership consists of representatives from each of the component sub-communities. Also consists of SME membership per the needs of the fixed membership.
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Responsibilities: produce/manage OpenHIE Architecture Specification, Workflow Specification Releases, Functional Requirement Specifications, and guides overall technical endorsement activities.
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Authority: makes most technical decisions on behalf of the community
Sub-community Leadership Team:
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Purpose(s): Provide direction, oversight, project management for component sub-communities
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Membership: At least two leaders with historical domain expertise around subcomponent, and ideally formally related to partner organizations.
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Responsibilities: Respond to implementer and ARB needs.
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Authority: Group process, meeting timing, functional requirements for corresponding component.
Interest Group Leadership Team:
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Purpose(s): Drive community process around HIE use cases and/or other areas of emerging interest to the community.
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Membership: Members self-select based on their level of interest in defining, quantifying or qualifying new subjects of interest for OHIE to consider as part of the platform-based approach.
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Responsibilities: Identify subjects of interest, qualify the value of the subject area and the relevance to existing or new OHIE initiatives, and refine understanding of the subject area to a point where OHIE can incorporate that understanding in an actionable way.
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Authority: Group process, meeting timing, work-plan for subjects of interest and actionable deliverables.