Yesterday I presented on OOOG at the 2nd Public Sphere event and I had some really good discussions about how it could be fine tuned and how the proposed OOOG Survey could operate.

Based on those discussions I'm looking at the following very tentative format for an OOOG Rating.

A Survey In Two Halves

Any OOOG Rating needs to be done from both an internal and external viewpoint. Part of being Open is letting the right people know that you are being open. As we've seen, lack of proper notifications can kill an Open Project quicker than any budget committee.

The idea is that you conduct both surveys and compare the results. If there is a noticable discrepency between the two, you need to find out why that discrepency is occuring. For instance, if your processes are designed to encourage client participation, but your clients believe they are actually working against participation then that's something you need to work on.

The Questionairre

I'm still working on the questions to be included in the questionairre. Pia Waugh pointed me at her "Foundations Of Open" work in which she's put together a similar questionairre to determine the Openness of various Software packages. So I'm going to go through that and see what I can grab and use.

I hope to have a first draft of the questionairre up sometime in the next couple of weeks. I would love to hear your thoughts on the whole OOOG concept and how you think it should be done.