On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 9:48 AM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Your email fits perfectly with my description of the WMF board: "have not apologized or even changed a single part of their governance processes, despite vague unmeasurable offers to look into it."
I'm not sure if it is typical for the bodies such as Board to issue official apologies - but for my part, I definitely apologize for all shortcomings of the procedure I've been involved in, mistakes in oversight, etc.
After many months there is no *commitment* to a date for any change to governance,
Again, you seem not to have noticed that we nearly immediately amended the recruitment procedure in a way that will make repeating a mistake unlikely.
nor is there any specific or measurable commitment to what the goal is for an "open conversation" or how that works.
How governance works? In fact, it would be nice to have this conversation as well, sure. The problem is that there are multiple demands from the community, and there are also external needs for the Board to address. We're out of bandwidth. Is the governance talk top priority now? Maybe. But I'm not convinced that it is more important than the ED search, or the expert seat fulfilment, or comments on strategy/plan, better enculturation and on-boarding of external Board members, and so on.
Knowing the history of the WMF board, there will no doubt be a pre-prepared policy or process and it will be implemented with barely any regard for community views which will be "canvassed" after the fact as a sop to "consensus".
Well, not engaging with a person who clearly assumes extremely bad faith is a privilege I'm going to exercise. Feel free to keep on writing of course, just excuse me for not getting involved in replies to you in this thread for a while.
Am I right that you were the chair of the governance committee
responsible for recommending Arnnon to the board and that you are
still in that position? Why are you still involved in the governance process if you were responsible for this huge mistake and the resulting PR disaster for the WMF and Arnnon?
You are correct - the BGC recommended Arnnon, and I personally had not found about the controversy when I was reviewing his files. I stated this on the list, admitted the mistake, as well as tried to understand and explain how it happened. I also proposed the changes to the future recruitment process, which have been introduced.
My understanding is that I'm still in this position, as the Board has assumed that this mistake was systematic, not personal. However, I am not tied to my seat, or to my presence on the Board. If the community recalls me, I will step down from either the BGC or the Board in general.
cheers,
dj