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OER research agenda/Leveraging the experience of others

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Fred Beshears has suggested that the current discussion on designing an OER research agenda is prompting the same sorts of questions as learning technology standards groups posed in the early days, for example:

What should the scope of the research agenda be?
What should the results of any research efforts look like?
How can the group ensure that any eventual product represented the consensus opinion of "all" community members?

It may therefore be sensible to leverage the experience of other groups that have gone through a similar process, for example IMS - which sets learning technology interoperability specifications.

Fred has posted the following notes on the organisation of IMS:

IMS makes their specifications open to the public on their public website.
They also have a members only website, which contains discussion boards, draft specifications etc.
Organizations have to pay to become a member. Smaller ones pay less that bigger ones (see details on the IMS public site).
The revenues from membership dues go towards staff salaries, travel expenses, etc.
Most of the work of developing specs goes on online. However, IMS does organize quarterly face-to-face membership meetings. Project teams also organize F2F meetings as well. IMS members pay to send their representatives to these F2F meetings, so that adds to the cost of participation.
IMS staff facilitate the development of specs (and in some cases they do a good deal of the "heavy lifting"). However, technical experts from member organizations also do a good deal of heavy lifting as well.
As for governance, there's a board of directors that makes high-level policy decisions. They also hire/fire the CEO. Then, there's a "technical board" that does all the heavy lifting of spec development. Also, the technical board votes on charters and draft specs.

The following two documents describe IMS policies and procedures:

IMS Technical Board Policies and Procedures overview (PDF 116KB)
IMS Technical Board Policies and Procedures document (PDF 350KB)

While this is not necessarily an organizational structure that the OER community would wish to (or could) adopt, there are perhaps lessons that can be drawn out of it.