What’s a company’s board of directors for?

Ultimately it’s to hire or fire the CEO. But that doesn’t happen very often.

What happens more often is board meetings. But what are they for?

They give directors a status update, and are a place to do legal administrivia. But even that is most efficiently done in advance.

What really matters is feedback, input, advice, and guidance on whatever is most important to the company right now. That isn’t just constructed in the meeting, but formulated even as they sleep the night before.

It is with that in mind that as part of our new funding round, I’m pleased that Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical who make the Ubuntu operating system, is joining as chair of our board.

ScraperWiki is open source, and lots of what we do is about getting value from open data.  As Jane said (in our press release the other day):

I believe the impact of open data on Government and the Citizen will be immense. Just as ten years ago only a few recognised how open source would revolutionise IT, so now only a few understand the impact of open data

She fits well with the way ScraperWiki spans worlds – being both a geek and a businesswoman, both British and American.

While I hope that she never has to organise firing me, I’m excited to have her help making ScraperWiki the best data platform for programmers and businesses.