There is nobody in existence whose advice is worth crossing serious bright
lines in ethics of corporate governance and quite possibly legal ones. This
isn't a parking ticket.
Whether the offer and acceptance were made in good faith or bad faith leads
to the same conclusion: a completely unacceptable situation that must be
remedied aggressively, not papered-over with corporate doublespeak. Whether
poor ethics or poor judgment, neither trait ought to be welcome in a
decision-making capacity. I would not want *any* person with input on the
ED position who thought this was actually a good idea, even assuming the
best possible faith. For this kind of skating on the edge of inurement, we
should already be beyond the initial question of dismissal of the hire to
the question of other, internal restructuring. This is several orders of
magnitude worse than anything Dr. Heilman was removed for in 2015. If
significant measures are not taken to remedy this situation, then this
should be basically the only issue in the upcoming board elections, and it
would be a shame to have an election in which the community is trying to
deal with serious lapses of ethics or judgment rather than trying to decide
the WMF's other, mission-connected priorities.
Best,
Dan
On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 8:34 AM Adam Wight <adam.m.wight(a)gmail.com> wrote:
+1 to Paulo's point, personally I would like to
see us ease up on María
and this seemingly temporary paid role. It's not a sinecure, not an
arbitrary nepotistic position—rather, it looks like WMF would benefit.
If the people in this thread truly have the good of the organization and
the movement at heart, there are much bigger structural issues with WMF and
this is just a reminder that we have to fix these. Save your energy for
fighting actual corruption and not just the perception of it. How about we
encourage María in her advisory role to help hire an ED committed to
accountability to the communities, for example?