Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.pl wrote:
Thanks for talking about it Dariusz.
Could you please make a serious declaration of interests as is being discussed at [1]. This will help set a ethical model for the rest of the WMF board to follow without needing a year to think about it. If you want to check some best practice examples of meaningful and frank declarations, take a look at WMUK's.[2]
I have no problem with that. You've provided links from WMUK, so until there is something similar for WMF, I don't think we can expect all Board members to make declarations (but I also think it would be a good practice to develop a similar model for WMF board, just observing that I don't know of one yet; I will ask).
I terms of shares, I am a major shareholder in Druid Multimedia sp. z o. o. (Polish abbreviation for LLC), which developed the largest online dictionary in Poland. If there are any discussions related to Wiktionary or other dictionary services (e.g. within Wikidata) and the dictionary is still published by the company, I am going to recuse myself. I also own a significant number of shares in Insta.Ling sp. z o. o., which is a startup oriented at online flashcard language acquisition (currently with about 50,000 users in Poland and Germany). If there is ever a language acquisition project discussed, and I'm still in, I'm going to recuse myself.
I've also had a number of academic affiliations, but these can hardly be considered a potential COI, I think.
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This illustrates the common (mis-)interpretation of con- flicts of interests quite nicely: When it concerns Wikime- dia, "interest" is something non-material, "duty"/"honour"/ etc., the conflicting interests however can always be mea- sured in dollars.
WMUK's practice recognizes to a degree that there are non- financial interests; that they have found nine people who can name their interests for the most part in one paragraph and none has friends or family shows the limits of such a system.
To me this insistence on declaring (blatant) conflicts of interests or labelling them with price tags is a red her- ring. The "quality" of a trustee or staffer should be mea- sured only by how far they advanced the organization. Noone should be able to excuse damaging it with the argument that they did not profit from the downfall.
Tim