It seems to me, that the question of whether or not we should consider extending the scope of the whistleblower policy, can be reduced to a question of whether or not we believe that United States law at any given moment is an ideal representation of unacceptable conduct.
Either way, I would be deeply encouraged to see progress in creating a more robust and predictable connection between the board and WMF staff. Whether that connection ends up being a board liaison or something else, I suspect that well-established lines of communication would go a very long way toward eliminating the possibility that large numbers of staff will feel like they have to disassemble the whistleblower policy in the first place.
-Katie
On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 6:10 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 04/05/16 12:02, MZMcBride wrote:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Whistleblower_policy
You mention anonymous complaints and serious concerns, but the current whistleblower policy seems to be pretty clear that it only applies to laws, rules, and regulations. The text of the policy indicates, to me at least, that even alleged violations of other Wikimedia Foundation
policies
would not be covered by the whistleblower policy. Would you extend the Wikimedia Foundation whistleblower policy to cover regular (i.e., non-legal and non-regulatory) grievances?
The third and fourth paragraphs are not so narrow, but otherwise, yes, I think it should be extended.
My understanding is that the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
sought
out and then appointed a tech-minded chief executive, who came from a
tech
organization, in order to "transform" the Wikimedia Foundation from an educational non-profit to be more like a traditional tech company. Many employees of the Wikimedia Foundation disagreed with this decision and
the
chief executive made a series of poor hires who ran amok (looking at you, Damon), but I don't think anything rose to the level of illegal behavior.
You are just regurgitating Lila's email. No transformation was attempted or executed. The first time I heard about this supposed conflict over strategy was when Lila posted her claims about it to this list, shortly before her resignation.
In fact, employees disagreed with Lila's decision to pursue large restricted grants for a stupid pet project, in secret, supported by almost nobody, without Board knowledge let alone approval. This has nothing to do with education versus technology (if such a dichotomy can even be said to exist).
Damon merely suggested the project in question, he did not "run amok".
-- Tim Starling
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe