Tim Starling wrote:
On 04/05/16 12:02, MZMcBride wrote:
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.
Here's an April 2015 e-mail from Lila announcing a large reorganization of the Wikimedia Foundation's engineering team: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-April/077619.html
I think a transformation was both attempted and executed. I'm citing a specific example, but there are others from Lila's two-year stint. As http://mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/ notes, "The reorganization is later described as poorly handled, and it is criticized for being based on assumptions of an impractically large budget increase." When people were making a case for removing Lila as Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, this departmental reorganization was repeatedly mentioned.
Comments from individual Board members and community members lead me to believe that there continues to be an enormous amount of uncertainty about the direction and strategy of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia movement. How large should the Wikimedia Foundation be, in terms of full-time staff and in terms of annual budget? How much and what work should the Wikimedia Foundation be doing this year and over the next five years? The Wikimedia Foundation's previous strategic plan expired at the end of 2015. In my opinion, there's unquestionably ongoing, unresolved conflict over strategy, among Wikimedia Foundation staff, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees members, and among the Wikimedia community.
In my view, a previous iteration of the Board of Trustees and Wikimedia Foundation leadership, in choosing Lila to head the Wikimedia Foundation, made a decision, perhaps implicitly and obliquely, about at least the short-term future of the Wikimedia Foundation. I don't believe Sue and members of the Board of Trustees were unaware of Lila's background or how she would likely influence the direction of the organization.
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).
In most contexts, that's the nature of having a boss and working for an organization. You won't agree with every decision, in substance, in execution, in visibility and transparency. In the specific case of the Knight Foundation grant, the Board of Trustees both knew about it and specifically approved it. This is noted at https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11. Are there other stupid pet projects or grant applications you're referring to?
The point I was making with the specific whistleblower policy and policies similar to it is that they are explicitly not intended to be used to subvert authority or promote insubordination among staff who disagree with a decision of the head of the organization.
Damon merely suggested the project in question, he did not "run amok".
I used the phrase "run amok" based on comments at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine/FAQ. Specifically, Brion Vibber writes:
"Former VP of Engineering Damon Sicore, who as far as I know conceived the 'knowledge engine', shopped the idea around in secret (to the point of GPG-encrypting emails about it) with the idea that Google/etc form an 'existential threat' to Wikipedia in the long term by co-opting our traffic, potentially reducing the inflow of new contributors via the 'reader -> editor' pipeline. [...]"
Jimmy Wales replies:
"It is important, most likely, that people know that Damon's secrecy was not something that was known to me or the rest of the board. I've only yesterday been sent, by a longtime member of staff who prefers to remain anonymous, the document that Damon was passing around GPG-encrypted with strict orders to keep it top secret. Apparently, he (and he alone, as far as I can tell) really was advocating for taking a run at Google. [...]"
These same individuals posted to this mailing list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082150.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-March/083163.html
This reported secrecy and cloak-and-dagger behavior is what I'm referring to when I say Damon ran amok. I suppose we can leave it as an exercise to the reader whether "run amok" is accurate phrasing given the evidence presented. Upon reading the previous comments that Damon, not Lila, was responsible for the secrecy, I'm perplexed by your recent comment regarding "Lila's decision." What am I missing?
MZMcBride