[Wikimedia-l] Community consultation + Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director selection process

[Jan-Bart de Vreede]

Hey Frederico

I will write an update for the meta page in the coming week or so but just to give you a general sense of where we are at: we are trying to reach potential candidates in a different way, and so far that looks like a good strategy. This means more direct contact between the Foundation and candidates and more pro-actively reaching out to people who initially showed no interest.

There is no scientific way to make the trade-off between characteristics/skills of candidates. We might very well choose to ignore an important characteristic if all the others fall into place. And it is of course easier to make a trade-off on less significant characteristics and skills. The decision to look for more candidates rather than make a choice in December was not an easy one, but we were not willing to go for a candidate who was missing too many of our desired characteristics/skills. This is something that the transition team does, and its not something that translates well to a table on meta.

I am not sure what you are referring to as “avoid another fiasco”, but as far as I am concerned we are simply in a stage of finding new candidates and trying to surface the candidate that is up to the challenge and opportunity that we as a unique movement have to offer. This was always an option, and we would have liked to have found someone in the first round, but it wasn’t to be.

Jan-Bart de Vreede



On 18 Jan 2014, at 11:08, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't know what to think about a final community consultation on a specific name. Personally I suspect that I wouldn't be able to say anything about it, as with <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Executive_Director_Transition_Team/Update_9_December>.
> 	Speaking of which, I wonder how the problems there were addressed: apparently they just expanded the search and reduced the number of people participating, but I see no answers to the question: «Have we been looking for a unicorn -- somebody who doesn't exist in the real world? [...] too insular? [...] unfairly comparing [...]?».
> 	If an answer was found, I'd like to know it. To me that only looked like a rhetorical question, because of course I have no idea what exact criteria/questions/interview practices are being applied or if unfair comparisons were made. To avoid another fiasco, it would probably be useful to publish on Meta an anonymised table of candidates, pointing out strengths and weaknesses in a single line for each. Then one could say «oh, look, "criterion" 175 made 12 otherwise awesome candidates "fail", do we really need it?».
> 
> Nemo
> 
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