Part of me still thinks we'd be better off and it would be easier to try
clone Sue rather than trying to find a suitable replacement for her...
On 29/01/2014 7:03 PM, "Ting Chen" <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de> wrote:
Hello dear all, hello Transition Team, hello dear
board,
I am still willing to take the challenge.
Looking into the description of the search criteria:
<cite>Key to the success of the Executive Director will be a commitment to
understand and advance Wikimedia's core values.</cite>
- In many occasions in the past years I have demonstrated that the core
values of our movement are part of my life. They are the values that I use
to guide my behavior and my decisions, not only inside of the movement, but
also in my professional work and in my personal life.
<cite>The Executive Director will need to have the technology management
and product development skills to effectively lead a high traffic website,
and experience designing and implementing planning processes with a high
built-in assumption of fast and iterative change.</cite>
- In the past 16 years I worked in a company which like no other IT
companies had decisively contributed into the establishment of standards
and processes of the industry. I started in that company as a programmer on
the OS (Assembler and C++) level and moved with the time into the position
of technical lead of projects that are set into highly complicated
political contexts. Being a subject matter expert, I am the anchor with
facts and expertise between the different political interests and streams,
build trust with my open and direct communication style to all groups and
parties and move things forward by understand the background of the
different interests and so build bridges and provide solutions that address
those backgrounds directly. These are the skills and personal marks that
brought me there where I am now: Into the core of those troubled projects.
<cite>He or she will need to have exceptional communication skills, and to
possess both a drive to achieve transformative results and a deep respect
for collaborative processes. The ED's ability to effect change in
partnership with Wikimedia's community will be decisive not just to their
success, but to Wikimedia's lasting impact in the 21st century.</cite>
- As I have stated in my resign letter from the board, I believe this is
indeed the most intriguing, most urgent and most difficult part of the work
that lay directly before us in the next decade. And for this we need, more
than anyone else inside of the movement, an ED who is really trusted by the
community (to which I count the readers, the editors, the affiliated
organizations, their board and staff, the staff of the Foundation, and the
board). Gain trust is hard work, build trust needs time. It took me long
time, two or three years, to build that mutual trust with many of the
people within our movement. And trust is the thing that thwart the belief
that the process has the luxury of time. Because with the lasting of
indecisive time the trust sinks and the anxiouty raises.
As it is remarked at one point, there is no obvious career path that leads
to this position. After seeing the result of last year's search I am
strengthend in my belief, that I am the best fit for this position.
Greetings
Ting
Am 1/21/2014 12:09 PM, schrieb Jan-Bart de Vreede:
Hey Frederico
I will write an update for the meta page in the coming week or so but
just to give you a general sense of where we are at: we are trying to reach
potential candidates in a different way, and so far that looks like a good
strategy. This means more direct contact between the Foundation and
candidates and more pro-actively reaching out to people who initially
showed no interest.
There is no scientific way to make the trade-off between
characteristics/skills of candidates. We might very well choose to ignore
an important characteristic if all the others fall into place. And it is of
course easier to make a trade-off on less significant characteristics and
skills. The decision to look for more candidates rather than make a choice
in December was not an easy one, but we were not willing to go for a
candidate who was missing too many of our desired characteristics/skills.
This is something that the transition team does, and its not something that
translates well to a table on meta.
I am not sure what you are referring to as "avoid another fiasco", but as
far as I am concerned we are simply in a stage of finding new candidates
and trying to surface the candidate that is up to the challenge and
opportunity that we as a unique movement have to offer. This was always an
option, and we would have liked to have found someone in the first round,
but it wasn't to be.
Jan-Bart de Vreede
On 18 Jan 2014, at 11:08, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I don't know what to think about a final community consultation on a
specific name. Personally I suspect that I
wouldn't be able to say anything
about it, as with <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Executive_Director_
Transition_Team/Update_9_December>.
Speaking of which, I wonder how the problems there were
addressed: apparently they just expanded the search and reduced the number
of people participating, but I see no answers to the question: <<Have we
been looking for a unicorn -- somebody who doesn't exist in the real world?
[...] too insular? [...] unfairly comparing [...]?>>.
If an answer was found, I'd like to know it. To me that only
looked like a rhetorical question, because of course I have no idea what
exact criteria/questions/interview practices are being applied or if unfair
comparisons were made. To avoid another fiasco, it would probably be useful
to publish on Meta an anonymised table of candidates, pointing out
strengths and weaknesses in a single line for each. Then one could say <<oh,
look, "criterion" 175 made 12 otherwise awesome candidates "fail", do
we
really need it?>>.
Nemo
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