On 21 January 2011 21:11, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
To try to answer your concern, somewhat, as I understand it, rather than just tut at your tone (which is of course an annoying thing to do):
The Advisory Board is basically specialist volunteers who’ve signed up to be bothered about stuff if the board wants help with something. It’s not a “board” with actual power, like the Board of Trustees.
So as a staff member, it’s now his job to be bothered about stuff instead of volunteering to be bothered about stuff, so his staff duties are pretty much a superset of his volunteer ones :-)
As such, it's not something I can see a conflict of interest in - there's no power being exercised in the Advisory Board role to corrupt; no streams to cross.
I speak only as a long-term en:wp, WMF and WMUK volunteer, not authoritatively as staff of anyone in any way. Others could probably clarify.
Speaking as an en:wp volunteer: if he can make a start on cracking the horrible problem of what to do with important oral knowledge in written encyclopedias, I think that could be one of the hugest innovations yet seen in the quest to sum human knowledge. This is REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF, and IMO an excellent and on-mission thing for WMF to spend money on. Whether he's the ideal person for the job is a matter for WMF, and although WMF's hiring has not necessarily been perfect in the past I think it's generally worked out pretty well. We have a lot of WMF employees who are former volunteers in one capacity or another, and who got recruited to staff by becoming known for their volunteer work. The Fellows are pretty much volunteers who are now being paid to do whatever valuable thing they were doing as volunteers.
As I said, if my understanding is amiss, I'm sure others will clarify.
- d.