On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 3:44 PM Guettarda <guettarda@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 3:02 PM Yair Rand <yyairrand@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm going to strongly disagree with this.

People are allowed to have outside interests. Being incidentally interested in blockchain tech is not a disqualifying attribute. Having worked in large technology companies is not a disqualifying attribute. Neither of these things should even be counted negatively.

It's not about outside interests. NFTs and crypto are widely viewed as inherently scammy (and, of course, environmentally destructive). And working for a tech start-up trying to disrupt housing - when the activities of tech companies like Zillow are already seen as making housing even more unaffordable for people - is really bad optics. 

Neither of these mean that he's a bad candidate. He might have an amazing background in non-profit governance that he will bring to the Board. He might be someone really dedicated to our mission. The problem is that these details haven't been shared. The diff posting [1] includes some kind platitudes, but that's it.

It may just be a messaging failure. Coming so soon after the kerfuffle with Jimmy's proposed NFT sale, and just after Molly White opened an RFC on crypto, ans coming in the middle of a housing crisis, I find it worrying that the only message seems to be "trust us". 

Ian


No, it isn't a messaging failure. There's no failure at all - the WMF, I'm sure, already recognizes there are pros and cons to a movement where every individual participant feels a sense of ownership. They work around that, sometimes they don't work around it well, but this is an example of where there's no dodging to be done. This "ownership" feeling leads to folks thinking that the WMF should be fully reflective of my values or your values - not just around the WMF's actual mission, but about anything that I happen to feel strongly about right now. 

The result is people constantly jerking the WMF in the direction of unrelated vogues. It leads to lots of friction and debate and drama, but that isn't the WMF's failure -  just how our history and structure interacts with human nature. This is probably familiar to anyone who lives in a jurisdiction that permits laws or regulations to be passed by popular referenda.