A non-profit with a teeny, tiny staff kept on a temp from an agency several years ago. Today, we learn she is a felon. So a bad mistake was made.
Where this seems to have caused bad blood in the community (at least to my thinking), is where people have taken the Register's rumor-mongering too seriously. They take a honest hiring mistake on the part of the Foundation and turn it in to an engine pushing the idea that this has somehow had a continued effect on the charity's finances or the regular functioning of the project.
I say we perhaps try and show a united front to this unfounded claim and act like adults: showing an assumption of good faith for the Foundation and getting on with the work at hand.
On 12/15/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/12/2007, Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk wrote:
Someone there must have known - the COO can't just vanish to jail and no one on the staff/Board knows anything - and they neglected to tell you. That's the other story of incompetence here ...
Wait, wait, wait.
You seem to be assuming the Foundation *had* to know about her extracurricular activities, but this seems to be a misplaced assumption.
Let's look at the story again, shall we?
First off, her past history. This is the stuff that a background check would have picked up - one doesn't seem to have been done. Fair dos, criticise them for that, you can consider it unfortunate or unforgivable according to taste. But if you don't do it, you don't pick up anything, however odd it may be...
(I am assuming she didn't tell them. I would be quite bemused if she had and they employed her regardless)
Secondly, her time at Wikimedia.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/page2....
- "Four months after Doran's hiring, on May 20th, she was arrested ...
paid a $5,250 bond and was released that same day."
So here's our first incident. Looking at the calendar, May 20th was a Sunday; it all happened on that one day; if she didn't tell anyone, how would the Foundation have known? I know this is all a matter of public record, but that doesn't equate to "people get told about it" - I'm sure *my* HR department doesn't scan the local paper every week to find out if I've been caught doing something.
- An incident where she was stopped by immigration sometime in June
Details entirely unclear; maybe they knew about it, maybe they didn't. Even if they did, there's no reason they would know the *content* of the interview.
- "On July 4 ... the Wikimedia Foundation passed a private resolution
concerning Carolyn Doran, and she was soon removed from the official Foundation staff list"
['soon' = on the 10th]
- "A month later, she was arrested and jailed by the Pinellas Park,
Florida police after a warrant was issued by the sheriff in Loudoun County, Virginia. ... This November ... she was extradited to Virginia"
It seems that the 'carted off to jail' happened a good month after she *stopped* being WMF's COO. It doesn't strike me as desperately surprising that they didn't know about it - keeping tabs on the whereabouts of your ex-employees a month after they've left is very nice, and all, but not really required!
The rest of it seems to boil down to "when we knew about it we could google and find confirmation!" Well, bully for you. How many of your current colleagues do you regularly google to check on their criminal pasts? If the answer is more than zero, um, this strikes me as a little worrying...
We can legitimately criticise the hiring practices here, and I certainly won't argue with you doing so. But to think that Wikimedia somehow failed to notice an employee being sent to jail is just mad - it's something even the original article isn't claiming!
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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