Dariusz, can you give me your reasons for ruling out an independent review into WMF board practice, along the lines of the review the WMF commissioned into WMUK three years ago? I would have thought this was an option to embrace.
On Sunday, January 10, 2016, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Well spotted. Expressing the amount of ownership that rises to a conflict of interest in terms of a percentage of all shares in the company strikes me as startlingly inappropriate.
Owning 1% of a company worth $400 billion would be a very, very significant conflict of interest for a board member. Owning 11% of a tiny company worth $5,000, not so much. Surely, what matters is not the percentage of ownership, but its monetary value.
As you say, for simplicity and transparency it is clearly best if board members recuse from any decisions involving a company they hold shares in.
That change to the Conflict of Interest policy should be made as soon as possible.
Andreas
On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 12:11 PM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com javascript:;> wrote:
Recent threads query whether it is or should be a conflict of interest
for
a board member to support the appointment of someone who used to work at the same company, and whether multiple board members have shares or stock options with a particular company. So I have read the Conflict of
interest
policy <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest_policy , which from my lay person's reading does not appear to have been breached.
I have taken the opportunity to propose a couple of changes <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_transparency_gap#Confli...
to that policy. Note I have not first tried to find out how long it is since a certain new trustee left the same company that an existing
trustee
works for, nor have I asked any board member how many Google shares that they own. But I am making the assumption that no individual member of the WMF board currently owns 10% or more of Google, so I would be very surprised if any of them have managed to break the current conflict of interest policy as I understand it.
To be clear I am not proposing any sort of retrospective change that
would
mean a past decision was void because a trustee voted despite having an interest according to these new rules. Any change to the rules could only apply to decisions made after the rules were updated.
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