There are several important issues that people have raised here already - notably the question of confidentiality of information; the question of the membership of this "task force"; and the question of whether the whistleblower process was effective/sufficient.
However, I'd like to refer to this point in particular:
On 2 May 2016 at 19:10, Denny Vrandečić vrandecic@gmail.com wrote:
This task force involved outside legal counsel and conducted professional fact finding. The first request of the task force to the Board members was to ask for all documents and notes pertaining to the case.
I'd like to ask about *who* this "professional fact finding" process talked to? I'm not asking to "name specific names" but more about which groups of people. In particular:
- I assume that the C-level [senior] staff were interviewed, but were any non-executive staff interviewed as well? This question speaks to the level of detail/depth that this investigation was expecting to have... I would think that if the "task force" was serious then it would be interested in hearing from across the organisation at all levels, and directly from the people affected. However, if it only spoke with people in the executive of the organisation then it would only be hearing views that either had already been relayed to [some] members of the board by the executive, or the views of the executive themselves. Obviously the C-Level staff themselves should have been interviewed, but ALSO other staff so that, at the very least, it didn't appear to be just a token-effort at investigating claims.
- Were the Knight Foundation spoken with? Given that the apparent disparity between what was in the grant document and what (some) on the board thought was being build in the "knowledge engine" project, it seems important to know if the Knight Foundation genuinely was of the same understanding as the Board? This disparity also seems to have been a core issue to the concerns raised by by the staff, and in the concerns that were held by James, so it seems particularly pertinent to be checking what the the Knight Foundation's perspective actually was.
-Liam
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