1. Restore James Heilman to the board (in Denny's now vacant seat) Yes. Although there should be a process for removing community trustees, there's 0 question that the process used to remove James was inappropriate. Even if this harms somewhat the functioning the board until the next election... Board doesn't seem too functional as it is right now, but at the same time, I've definitely seen more dysfunctional boards manage orgs of similar size.
2. Never remove a community trustee There should be a way to remove a community trustee, but it requires community feedback. In an 'emergency' situation, I'd be happy if even a subset of stewards and functionaries were involved, with the issue later being brought forth before the community for a satisfactory explanation - not the claptrap found in the FAQ about James (some of which is downright wrong.)
3. Eliminate Founder's Seat, with various future possibilities for Jimmy Wales' role.
I'm pretty sure that I was getting counted in the "anti-Jimmy" camp mentioned earlier, but the funny thing is, I'm not anti-Jimmy. I've explicitly reached out to him to ask for his assistance on a number of issues before, including a few issues where he was the only person likely to be willing to help. Ex: with Wiki-PR breaking, WMF legal and comms did not want to issue a strong statement because they realized some of the information I had given them had come from someone violating an NDA (FWIW: NDA's in California are unenforceable without compensation, and the person in question was an unpaid intern; the NDA was invalid.) Jimmy (along with James Hare) issued strong public condemnations of the situation in a move that helped us not look like complete shit in the media. What has concerned me most about Jimmy's involvement in the current situation (ignoring a general feeling that he should be coming less involved, not more involved, in the day to day running of WMF, as well as feeling that we shouldn't have a trustee for life) is that he has consistently made statements that, even in California, constitute defamation per se against James Heilman - and I put a lot of thought in to it before stating that for the first time. 99% of the time my role is to convince people that statements made against them are *not* defamatory in California, let alone constitute defamation per se - but Jimmy's statements have really crossed a line. He has repeatedly, without evidence, and in the direct face of comments made by his own staff, including some of his own most senior staff, made claims about James' behavior that he had not backed up with evidence, including the claim that James is unable to hold a confidence. As James is quite literally a medical doctor, these statements are... well... worse than they otherwise would be. I again really doubt that James' would sue, but it's not okay that we have a trustee *for life* putting himself and likely the Foundation at risk of monetary and reputational harm. I know some people have compiled partial diff lists already, but tomorrow I'm going to start to diff dive for defamatory statements Jimmy has made against James, and explicitly call for some sort of restorative justice process (which requires Jimmy's active involvement and willingness to acknowledge wrongdoing,) and if no progress is made in a week, start an open letter summarizing the issue and asking Jimmy to either step aside or the board to take action. I'm pretty confident that a well-written open letter with a significant number of signatories will come to the attention of the press, and I'd much rather have this resolved before it gets that far.
4. (expressed as optional) Make Community seats truly elected; increase number.
Making them truly elected poses problems revising the governance documents, but I never imagined they would be treated as recommendations carrying at best about as much weight as an average undergrad letter of recommmendation, which seems to be about what they're at now. This can be done with changes in practice, rather than actual revisions to the governing documents. And I strongly support increasing their number.
Adding on:
5. WMF BOT needs to undergo a full governance review, and they need to undergo one starting soon. If needed, I can start recommending firms that specialize in NPO governance reviews. There's just an amazing amount going wrong at the same time, which points to broken underlying processes - and the exact reason nonprofit governance consultants exist is that the same broken practices tend to appear in organization after organization. There is no shame in looking to others before us to better ourselves, and we certainly have the reserves to commission a full review. We made WMUK undergo a similar (though different scoped review) for far more minor problems, there's no way that it's acceptable or a good idea for WMF BOT to avoid public review of their practices when this much has happened this quickly. If we can improve the functioning of the BoT for what is, in terms of our budget and reserves, a minor amount of money, how can we justify NOT doing so?
---- Kevin Gorman
On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 4:18 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10 May 2016 at 15:35, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
One very serious element of this decision-making really should be the
fact
that Google is blatantly violating the CCA-SA by reusing Wikipedia
content
without making their derivative work open.
- *Share Alike*—If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you
may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.
They would argue that they are using the facts not the presentation of those facts and facts are not subject to copyright.
-- geni
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