On 2/26/16 9:17 PM, Fæ wrote:
I hope you will be able to address nagging concerns about your personal support for keeping the search project a secret last year,
Sure - I never supported keeping the proposed and approved work on Discovery and Search secret last year at all. I don't know of anyone who did. The failure to sufficiently disclose happened, but it was not a point that was discussed at the board level to my knowledge. I don't know of any board members, past or present, who think or thought that such things should be kept from the community.
It is my longstanding and continued position that the Foundation should be as open as legally possible with only a very limited degree of non-disclosure, mostly around legal matters and around employee matters. There are a few other examples, too, like price negotiations with vendors, and so on like that. With regard to our long term strategy, I continue to strongly support that everything should not only be disclosed to the community, but that it makes no sense for it to be in conflict with the community, and that very often it should be led by the community in consultation with the Foundation.
and your conflict of loyalties during that process, shortly after your visit.
I did not have any conflict of loyalties during that process. Spending a reasonable portion of our IT budget on an ambitious project to improve search and discovery, and to conduct research and community consultation on that, is a great idea for Wikipedia and for the broader Wikimedia movement and I strongly support it.