Dear Gayle,

Thank you for forwarding me the Employee Engagement report slides which I've referred to in my questions for your upcoming office hour. I didn't realize that attribution was preventing you from distributing them, so I made some fair use excerpts at: http://imgur.com/a/XaY2K -- those are for my questions (3) and (4) at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-January/123400.html

I am trying to get Dan Pink to join in the office hour. It was made clear from Sue's office hour yesterday that she as well as Erik rely on an interpretation of Dan's work which is opposed by all of the most recent secondary sources (see http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-January/123422.html) and which Dan himself disclaims at http://www.danpink.com/2010/01/raises-do-matter -- in particular:

"if an organization doesn’t pay someone 'an adequate amount, or if her pay isn’t equitable compared to others doing similar work—that person’s motivation will crater,'" and, "...Providing an employee a high level of base pay does more to boost performance and organizational commitment than an attractive bonus structure."

I also want to share my current results for my informal donor survey at http://tinyurl.com/wikidonors -- currently "The Foundation should meet or exceed Silicon Valley competitive pay to attract and retain the best talent while competing with firms able to offer equity participation" is agreed or strongly agreed to by 32 of 37 respondents. All of the respondents were obtained by asking people on popular Freenode channels to voluntarily take the survey. On one hand, that self-selected group is likely to be more in favor of free software than the typical donor, but they may also be more frugal. So I want to urge the Foundation to perform their own survey on this question. You should be able to get statistically significant results by asking less than 100 randomly selected donors, depending on their response rate.

Finally, I also want to ask that you perform a follow-up truly anonymous survey about Foundation employee satisfaction with pay. I hope you will also ask whether Foundation employees believe there is a culture where austere pay is considered a badge of honor, and whether they feel peer pressure to avoid speaking out on the topic. You can use e.g. surveymonkey.com in a way which is far more anonymous than the detailed demographics in the Ascent Advisor survey allowed. Since it's only 25 minutes to office hours I better send this now and send more information on how to do that later.

Best regards, James Salsman