On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 8:01 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.pl wrote:
Dear all,
As Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee, I am happy to introduce the two newest members of our Board of Trustees: Kelly Battles and Arnnon Geshuri.
Welcome to Kelly and Arnnon, and I wish you every success in this complex organization at this complex moment! I am excited to have your expertise in our movement.
I'm also pleased because financial expertise is one of the crucial qualities that the prior board recruitment committee (which I was on) identified as being needed for these seats, especially with the departure of Stu. We also identified large organization management experience and experience with technology organizations as two potential qualities we wanted in trustees, and both seem to bring this. It is also useful to have a few people experienced in Silicon Valley on the board, as that is the environment, for better or for worse, in which the foundation and its technology development operates.
I do agree with those who have raised the question of diversity in these candidates. The great strength of our board is its diversity in the backgrounds of board members. In general, I would like to see trustees from other places besides the US and western Europe, bringing a new set of experiences to the table, and -- though I am well aware of the challenges in recruiting trustees, having done it myself -- would thus love to see our scope widened for future trustee searches. This is a hard problem because, as I think all of the current trustees know well, we have many needs for our board: we need people with backgrounds in education (large and small); with ICT and mobile; with finance and organizations; with Wikimedia communities specifically and consensus-driven communities generally; with multilingual communities; with knowledge generation; with technology strategy. And we need those people to represent the globe.
That said I would attempt to avoid equating people's strengths as trustees solely with their backgrounds. (And of course when people leave we will never get a 1-1 replacement, so even if we thought past trustees had important experiences this tranche of the board will be different.) Having seen a number of really excellent people join the board over the years, what trustees prove to be good at in board work, or not, is sometimes surprising. At any rate, I look forward to meeting Kelly and Arnnon, and congratulations to the committee in a successful recruitment.
best, Phoebe