Dear Colleagues,
You probably realise that Peter Yim has retired from running the Ontolog Forum, with his various roles being taken over by the Ontolog Board of Trustees. These are: LeoObrst, MatthewWest, AmandaVizedom, JohnSowa, KenBaclawski, MichaelGruninger, MikeBennett,
BarrySmith, EdBarkmeyer, PatHayes, TillMossakowski, and MarkMusen, with Peter Yim as an advisor.
The Board of Trustees meets about once a month. The main purpose is to provide the infrastructure and administration of the Ontolog Forum and for the Ontology Summit. This includes servers and software, conferencing facilities, wikis, and administration of the various email lists. So as well as the meetings the BoT members are committed to providing and managing these things.
Twelve people trying to do part time what one person did full time has drawbacks. The main one is that there are some very large cracks for things to slip into.
The main focus of the latest meeting last Thursday was Transition status and Future sessions planning.
Infrastructure Status Report
§ Since IAOA now pays for the conference bridge, all other session reservations need to be coordinated, with MichaelGruninger (as point-of-contact for IAOA) currently being the coordinator. The IAOA is continuing to fund the current conference bridge, but is also exploring other options.
§ PeterYim raised the issue (that our new host organizations will need to attend to): one needs to worry about infrastructure availability and reliability, the latter includes security and resilience to spam/malware attacks.
Procedures
BoT members should update the procedure page themselves if procedures change or we spot places where the information can be filled in.
Future Sessions planning
§ It was hoped that the Ontology-based Standards mini-series and the Rules,Reasoning, LP mini-series might be further developed, but no one has yet been found willing to organize these.
§ A session on Cognitive Computing has been proposed, but development has stalled.
§ The next meeting for the Organizing Committee of Ontology Summit 2015 will be December 11, 2014.
Board of Trustees Membership
Some members of the Board of Trustees have not been able to fulfil the commitments of the post. These will be approached as to whether they wish to continue as members.
Ontology Summit
§ Nothing has been done to set up a meeting for the Co-Organizer board. The Co-organizer Board essentially authorizes the Organizing Committee and commits support in time and resources to enable it to happen.
§ One outstanding issue is that the the dates and location of the Symposium have not yet been determined.
Communications with Ontolog Forum.
§ JohnSowa noted there was the perception of a lack of communication with the Ontolog Forum about BoT and Ontology Summit business.
§ It was noted that decisions about the ontology Summit were made by the synchronous sessions that discussed those. The opportunity to participate in those sessions was open to all Ontolog Forum members (amongst others). All details of these sessions were made available to the Ontolog Forum. This did not seem to be adequate.
§ The reality is there are significant cracks in taking over organization of the Ontolog Forum and Ontology Summit as we take over much of the work that Peter Yim has done in the past.
Ontolog Board of Trustees Terms of Reference
§ The terms of reference are not entirely clear/robust about how decisions are made. Whilst we will usually make decisions in a relatively informal way by consensus, we need to recognize that difficulties in conducting business could arise. We should therefore include the use of Robert's Rules of Order in our Terms of Reference.
Regards
Matthew West
Information Junction
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