A couple of responses in-line below.
Jimmy, if you would like me to be able to respond to issues on your Wikipedia talk page, let me know. It's been 4 years now since you censored me from writing there, which seems like a long time to hold a grudge.
On 27 February 2016 at 14:39, Jimmy Wales jimmywales@ymail.com wrote:
On 2/26/16 9:17 PM, Fæ wrote:
I hope you will be able to address nagging concerns about your personal support for keeping the search project a secret last year,
Sure - I never supported keeping the proposed and approved work on Discovery and Search secret last year at all. I don't know of anyone who did. The failure to sufficiently disclose happened, but it was not a point that was discussed at the board level to my knowledge. I don't know of any board members, past or present, who think or thought that such things should be kept from the community.
It is my longstanding and continued position that the Foundation should be as open as legally possible with only a very limited degree of non-disclosure, mostly around legal matters and around employee matters. There are a few other examples, too, like price negotiations with vendors, and so on like that. With regard to our long term strategy, I continue to strongly support that everything should not only be disclosed to the community, but that it makes no sense for it to be in conflict with the community, and that very often it should be led by the community in consultation with the Foundation.
As has been raised by others in this email thread, a key core and legally defined duty of the board is to hold your senior management to account. If the board of trustees is out of touch with the Wikimedia community giving "plausible deniability" for a claim that throughout 2015 you thought your management team was being open about the huge (in terms of relative staff numbers) Knowledge Engine / Search Engine project and original Knight Grant application in 2015, even while faced with many public requests for information about the grant and the "secret project", then the WMF board was not competent or meeting its commitment to transparency or basic governance.
Politically your words look good, but they must be able to be demonstrated by action. The claim that you are personally pushing for "the Foundation should be as open as legally possible with only a very limited degree of non-disclosure" does not withstand comparison against the facts. As a trivial example, you have been avoiding the publication of your email to James about his dismissal, yet apparently both you and he are agreed can and should be published. While you are at it, could you copy to me the email(s) about me that you sent to your fellow board members when I was Chair of the Chapters' Association? You have a history of behind the scenes dealing and politicking, when there are no "legal matters" that can apply to your personal views in correspondence, so I am sure you can understand why some of those Wikimedians that have become disillusioned as targets of your non-public criticism or excruciating public criticism without your engagement in a proper process of evidence or a right to challenge, will continue to be sceptical of your ability to lead on openness and transparency, unless you can honestly address those past cases.
and your conflict of loyalties during that process, shortly after your visit.
I did not have any conflict of loyalties during that process. Spending a reasonable portion of our IT budget on an ambitious project to improve search and discovery, and to conduct research and community consultation on that, is a great idea for Wikipedia and for the broader Wikimedia movement and I strongly support it.
Again I struggle to reconcile your opinions of your conflict of loyalties, with how the general public would perceive a clearly presented history of your role as an unelected WMF trustee, or effective "trustee for life" as many have called it, with a personal role for CEO selection that you have created for yourself, your part in trustee appointments and the opportunities your regularly have on the board to steer WMF strategy to encourage projects that suit your preferences, with your significant financial interest in Wikia, Inc., your past experience with "Wikia Search" and how the WMF Knowledge/Search engine development would fulfil Wikia's strategy for selling more commercial services, selling Wikia user data and making a greater profit from targeted advertising.[1] However I'll nail this down a bit more in a separate thread as assessing the public perception of your potential conflict of loyalties is worth having multiple views on, rather than just your opinions or mine.
Links: 1. "Take advantage of Wikia's custom research solutions to achieve campaign objectives, including brand lift studies, target audience insights, and more!", "Reach the right audience with the right message using Wikia's multitude of targeting opportunities, including demographic, psychographic, geographic, contextual, genre, devices, conquesting, and more!" http://www.wikia.com/mediakit
Thanks, Fae