Data Commons Cooperative Mission & Vision Statement

The Visioning & Development Team of the Data Commons Cooperative is seeking to refine our mission and vision statements in advance of the June, 2014 AGM.

The FIRST DRAFTS are below. We ask folks to offer edits and feedback between today and June 8th. Many thanks! Contact Daphne if you have questions.

=BACKGROUND======

JUST A BIT OF BACKGROUND BEFORE WE GET STARTED:

• Mission and visions statements are critical to strategic planning, because everything we choose to do will come FROM these statements. We will measure our goals and objectives against our mission, vision, and principles.

• Ora Grodsky and Jeremy Phillips describe Mission and Vision in the following way:

--> MISSION: Why you exist and what you do. Short, simple, and pithy is best.

--> VISION: A picture of your desired impact and successful future. Your vision can be long term, medium term and/or short-term. We encourage our clients to develop visions that fit the time frame of their plan, along with long-term visions if that is meaningful to them.

FYI: They offer a useful guide to strategic planning here: http://www.just-works.com/img/Strategic_and_Successful_Planning4.pdf

(NOTE! At this point we are doing a majorly pared down version of strategic planning!!!!)

DRAFT MISSION & VISION STATEMENTS=========

DRAFT DCC VISION: To be a critical catalyst for collaborative, generative, distributed flows of data in service of a collaborative, generative, distributed economy

DRAFT MISSION: We build free and open infrastructure for members to collaboratively gather, share, maintain, display and deploy information about a generative economy.

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Your turn! We welcome your edits and feedback! Have fun!

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Notes from Team Email thread: E Lippold Cheney

On 14-06-03 04:59 PM, E Lippold Cheney wrote: EMLC: One quick piece of feedback - "information about a generative economy." is awkward to me... does "generative economy information" say the same thing?

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 11:27 PM, jamie campbell <jamie@parit.ca> wrote:JC: generative economy information might get into adjectival ambiguity territory .. reading #1 : "generative economy ... information" , reading #2 : "generative... economy information". Although technically the second would more properly be generative economic information, some people may still misinterpret it in that way...

The vision already ties us to generative and various other adjectives... relying on this, could we shorten it even further to "economic information"? -Jamie

Jun 8 EMLC: thanks, jamie! i like this shortening thing and could go farther with it. while i enjoy the repetition and think it is kind of fun, i think we can get more meaning out of just saying "information." more meaning because we have been talking about collecting and organizing information that isnt really our members' information and isnt explicitly economic information, but *is* information that could be useful to our members (e.g. allied elected officials directory). its a subtle point, to be sure.