Thank you @Theodore for this post, and great to see your energy and the concrete actions that you already took to make the OFN Belgium happen 
For the rest of the community, @Theodore did an intership with OFN UK, and is now starting to facilitate the development of a local community / instance in Belgium. We had 2 calls aready.
This is a beautiful opportunity to create some links between OFN Belgium and Oxfam! They definitely are value aligned and it would be great if they would be willing to “kickstart” the deployment of OFN Belgium, and use the platform to serve their beautiful projects
I would be careful though about two things, related to the “independance” and “inclusion” values that we ask all OFN associates to share (cf community pledge).
- If OXFAM is the “host” of OFN Belgium, would the governance of the project be open enough so that any other community can participe in the governance? As we said we don’t want more than one “OFN associate” on a give territory so it needs to be an entity that is open and democratic enough so that any new actor who want to deploy OFN there can join it.
- Also I’m afraid about the image confusion / If OFN appears as a project of OXFAM, I would be worried about the independance of the OFN Belgium and the image impact on the rest of the community.
I think I feel a bit worried about having an official OFN associate hosted by such a big machine as OXFAM. What about Oxfam being one of the co-founder of an independant non-profit cooperative, around wich you could gather other community networks like CSA networks, producer networks, etc.?
Does Oxfam want their platform (in that cas that would be more a white label platform for me) or do they want to kickstart the deployment of the OFN so that they can use it, but also others, and co-govern it with the others?
Also we discussed a bit about the deployment of the OFN Belgium instance. It’s great when you start a local instance to have a local platform asap, so that some groups can strat using it, and you have local stories to tell. Do you have some local expertise that could help you on that? Or some budget to get support from the community? Could OXFAM for instance support the project with that “small investment” as a first step? @Kirsten / @tschumilas can you remind us what was the budget to setup and support OFN Canada in deployment an upgrade? That would help @Theodore organize operations I guess…
@tschumilas @Kirsten @NickWeir @enricostn @CynthiaReynolds would be great to have your views on that 