Hi,
I read from several posts that the process with the nominating committee did not work out at all. In the mean time the whole nominating committee (and therefore any formal procedure where non-board members, read: the community, have any say on who gets onto the board in the appointed seat). I might have missed it (probably have) but is there some kind of evaluation of the functioning of the NomCom and a good reasoning why it was totally abolished? Is it clear /why/ it did not work?
Birgitte seems to suggest it didnt work because procedures were not followed. Earlier (don't recall where exactly) (a) board member(s) seemed to suggest that it did not work because they were too slow and did not do their job. Both arguments seem to me something that can be solved quite easily - by starting to follow procedures or by getting different people on the committee.
Perhaps someone who was there on the board at the time could clarify?
Thanks a lot,
Lodewijk
2011/6/25 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
On 06/24/2011 07:57 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
I also sat on NomCom during this time period. I cannot agree that Matt's
appointment was more problematic than Stu's or Jan-Bart. Frankly all the appointed board seats are problematic, and I cannot understand how you can focus on Matt's appointment alone as a significant issue, nor how you reach the conclusion that disorganization on the part of the board had any significant role in the problems of appointed board seats.
I am going to be frank and clear about how the issue appears to me: The
bylaws, in regard to appointed board seats, are unredeemably flawed.
I find it offensive that any appointed Board Member should be singled out
and undermined merely because an impossible appointment process failed to offer them greater legitimacy. All the appointments fell so far short of the outlined process that I believe concluding one appointment to be less acceptable than the others is impossible to objectively judge. Yes Bishakha's seat was settled with more active discussion from NomCom than any of the others. However the outlined process for appointed seats is not at all what occurred. I suggest you re-read the by-laws (pay attention to the time-line as well), consult your notes and dates, and honestly tell me how the board might have believed that NomCom had any hope fulfilling the official process at the time of Matt's appointment.
That's other issue and I am not a legal expert.
My logic behind suggesting to keep current members was probability that changing them would bring more instability in already unstable Board at that time. Board is today more stable than it was at that time and it is good that this issue has been opened, so we can go further.
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On 06/25/2011 10:50 AM, Lodewijk wrote:
I read from several posts that the process with the nominating committee did not work out at all. In the mean time the whole nominating committee (and therefore any formal procedure where non-board members, read: the community, have any say on who gets onto the board in the appointed seat). I might have missed it (probably have) but is there some kind of evaluation of the functioning of the NomCom and a good reasoning why it was totally abolished? Is it clear /why/ it did not work?
Birgitte seems to suggest it didnt work because procedures were not followed. Earlier (don't recall where exactly) (a) board member(s) seemed to suggest that it did not work because they were too slow and did not do their job. Both arguments seem to me something that can be solved quite easily - by starting to follow procedures or by getting different people on the committee.
Perhaps someone who was there on the board at the time could clarify?
Ting and Michael Snow were the members of NomCom from the Board at that time. Michael was the chair of NomCom, if I remember well.
To clarify my position, I found the procedure as designed for handling appointed seats to be inherently unworkable. I don't think the procedures could have been followed during my service on the committee given the resources and time available. I imagine idealists will disagree with that assessment, but I feel energy is best directed to revising the by-laws for a more pragmatic process.
BirgitteSB
On Jun 25, 2011, at 3:50 AM, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
Hi,
I read from several posts that the process with the nominating committee did not work out at all. In the mean time the whole nominating committee (and therefore any formal procedure where non-board members, read: the community, have any say on who gets onto the board in the appointed seat). I might have missed it (probably have) but is there some kind of evaluation of the functioning of the NomCom and a good reasoning why it was totally abolished? Is it clear /why/ it did not work?
Birgitte seems to suggest it didnt work because procedures were not followed. Earlier (don't recall where exactly) (a) board member(s) seemed to suggest that it did not work because they were too slow and did not do their-laws job. Both arguments seem to me something that can be solved quite easily - by starting to follow procedures or by getting different people on the committee.
Perhaps someone who was there on the board at the time could clarify?
Thanks a lot,
Lodewijk
2011/6/25 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
On 06/24/2011 07:57 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
I also sat on NomCom during this time period. I cannot agree that Matt's
appointment was more problematic than Stu's or Jan-Bart. Frankly all the appointed board seats are problematic, and I cannot understand how you can focus on Matt's appointment alone as a significant issue, nor how you reach the conclusion that disorganization on the part of the board had any significant role in the problems of appointed board seats.
I am going to be frank and clear about how the issue appears to me: The
bylaws, in regard to appointed board seats, are unredeemably flawed.
I find it offensive that any appointed Board Member should be singled out
and undermined merely because an impossible appointment process failed to offer them greater legitimacy. All the appointments fell so far short of the outlined process that I believe concluding one appointment to be less acceptable than the others is impossible to objectively judge. Yes Bishakha's seat was settled with more active discussion from NomCom than any of the others. However the outlined process for appointed seats is not at all what occurred. I suggest you re-read the by-laws (pay attention to the time-line as well), consult your notes and dates, and honestly tell me how the board might have believed that NomCom had any hope fulfilling the official process at the time of Matt's appointment.
That's other issue and I am not a legal expert.
My logic behind suggesting to keep current members was probability that changing them would bring more instability in already unstable Board at that time. Board is today more stable than it was at that time and it is good that this issue has been opened, so we can go further.
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On 06/25/2011 07:35 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
To clarify my position, I found the procedure as designed for handling appointed seats to be inherently unworkable. I don't think the procedures could have been followed during my service on the committee given the resources and time available. I imagine idealists will disagree with that assessment, but I feel energy is best directed to revising the by-laws for a more pragmatic process.
My general position is that Wikimedian community is diverse enough to fill expert seats from itself. In two years Language committee has found four linguists inside of the community, one of them at the most relevant job position for our work, one of them top class linguist. And there are not a lot of linguists around Wikimedia projects. (Yes, there are some, but not a lot.)
I am sure that we could find enough lawyers, programmers, lawyers, programmers, sysadmins, programmers, librarians, programmers etc. inside of our community. ... I wanted to continue a serious mail, but I can't anymore :)
on 6/25/11 2:18 PM, Milos Rancic at millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/25/2011 07:35 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
To clarify my position, I found the procedure as designed for handling appointed seats to be inherently unworkable. I don't think the procedures could have been followed during my service on the committee given the resources and time available. I imagine idealists will disagree with that assessment, but I feel energy is best directed to revising the by-laws for a more pragmatic process.
My general position is that Wikimedian community is diverse enough to fill expert seats from itself. In two years Language committee has found four linguists inside of the community, one of them at the most relevant job position for our work, one of them top class linguist. And there are not a lot of linguists around Wikimedia projects. (Yes, there are some, but not a lot.)
I am sure that we could find enough lawyers, programmers, lawyers, programmers, sysadmins, programmers, librarians, programmers etc. inside of our community. ... I wanted to continue a serious mail, but I can't anymore :)
Don't forget the psycholinguists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics) who may be working inside the Community.
Marc
On 25 June 2011 19:18, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
My general position is that Wikimedian community is diverse enough to fill expert seats from itself.
You are probably right, but who would make the better board member: an average lawyer (or whatever) that's a Wikimedian or a top lawyer that isn't?
Obviously, the board needs a decent number of Wikimedians on it, but there is no particular need for the whole board to be Wikimedians. (Well, Wikimedians prior to their appointment - my definition of Wikimedian includes WMF board members, whether they came from the community or not.)
Hi
Having had the honor of being one of the first outside appointed board member to the Wikimedia Board I do want to add that one of the main reasons for having appointed members is to get an outsiders perspective. This is generally considered good practice. Basically the idea behind this is that by having as a diverse a board as possible with regards to knowledge, perspective and background that board will be able to perform its "governance" role better.
Jan-Bart
On Jun 25, 2011, at 8:33 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
On 25 June 2011 19:18, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
My general position is that Wikimedian community is diverse enough to fill expert seats from itself.
You are probably right, but who would make the better board member: an average lawyer (or whatever) that's a Wikimedian or a top lawyer that isn't?
Obviously, the board needs a decent number of Wikimedians on it, but there is no particular need for the whole board to be Wikimedians. (Well, Wikimedians prior to their appointment - my definition of Wikimedian includes WMF board members, whether they came from the community or not.)
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On Jun 25, 2011, at 4:41 PM, Jan-Bart de Vreede wrote:
Hi
Having had the honor of being one of the first outside appointed board member to the Wikimedia Board I do want to add that one of the main reasons for having appointed members is to get an outsiders perspective. This is generally considered good practice. Basically the idea behind this is that by having as a diverse a board as possible with regards to knowledge, perspective and background that board will be able to perform its "governance" role better.
Jan-Bart
I think what Jan-Bart is saying here brings up an interesting point. Something that might have been lost in the other thread (Seats and Donations) was that part of the worry around Matt's appointment was due to him being an outsider -- it is important to remember that without some outside perspective we'll become too insular.
But at the same time, shouldn't we also have the goal of eliminating the concept of "outsiders" to a top-10 website? Ignoring the age-gap with technology for the sake of simplicity, it would seem unusual for a board candidate similar to Matt to be unfamiliar with most non-technical aspects of Facebook, at least on a cursory level. However, tying in with our usability and newbie-friendly concerns, I would be very surprised to find those same candidates being familiar with contributing content on Wikipedia. Realistically speaking, I doubt many of them have over 1000 edits, participated significantly on meta, hold any advanced rights/flags, are familiar with our policies and guidelines in adequate detail, etc. Surely some will acquire that knowledge in the board vetting process, but my point is that for a website of our stature and positioning, the concept of having "outsiders" in the first place is itself a problem.
In other words, the fact that our reader to editor ratio is contributing towards keeping a divide on the board between the "insiders" and the "outsiders". That's not to suggest we shouldn't have subject matter experts in a particular field (technical, operations, community, business/finance, legal, etc.) on the board, but from a cultural standpoint I'd rather that EVERYONE be an "insider" when it comes to "How does Wikimedia work?"
-Dan
On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Dan Rosenthal swatjester@gmail.com wrote:
On Jun 25, 2011, at 4:41 PM, Jan-Bart de Vreede wrote:
Hi
Having had the honor of being one of the first outside appointed board member to the Wikimedia Board I do want to add that one of the main reasons for having appointed members is to get an outsiders perspective. This is generally considered good practice. Basically the idea behind this is that by having as a diverse a board as possible with regards to knowledge, perspective and background that board will be able to perform its "governance" role better.
Jan-Bart
I think what Jan-Bart is saying here brings up an interesting point. Something that might have been lost in the other thread (Seats and Donations) was that part of the worry around Matt's appointment was due to him being an outsider -- it is important to remember that without some outside perspective we'll become too insular.
But at the same time, shouldn't we also have the goal of eliminating the concept of "outsiders" to a top-10 website? Ignoring the age-gap with technology for the sake of simplicity, it would seem unusual for a board candidate similar to Matt to be unfamiliar with most non-technical aspects of Facebook, at least on a cursory level. However, tying in with our usability and newbie-friendly concerns, I would be very surprised to find those same candidates being familiar with contributing content on Wikipedia. Realistically speaking, I doubt many of them have over 1000 edits, participated significantly on meta, hold any advanced rights/flags, are familiar with our policies and guidelines in adequate detail, etc. Surely some will acquire that knowledge in the board vetting process, but my point is that for a website of our stature and positioning, the concept of having "outsiders" in the first place is itself a problem.
In other words, the fact that our reader to editor ratio is contributing towards keeping a divide on the board between the "insiders" and the "outsiders". That's not to suggest we shouldn't have subject matter experts in a particular field (technical, operations, community, business/finance, legal, etc.) on the board, but from a cultural standpoint I'd rather that EVERYONE be an "insider" when it comes to "How does Wikimedia work?"
There are degrees of insiderness.
"What is Wikipedia?" - everyone who's net-aware should be able to answer this, as well as anyone who we'd consider putting on the board, outsider or not.
"How do I manage the political factions on ANI or an Arbcom case on english language Wikipedia to deal with this policy / behavior problem" is something that very few *insiders* can do well...
The general observation that we should be easier for everyone to edit is reasonable, and that doing that and more outreach would help the rest of the world contribute more effectively.
Domain experts in law, privacy, information theory, internet business, free culture, etc. (and others) all can bring value to the board via their different expertise and viewpoints.
On Jun 25, 2011, at 6:46 PM, George Herbert wrote:
"How do I manage the political factions on ANI or an Arbcom case on english language Wikipedia to deal with this policy / behavior problem" is something that very few *insiders* can do well...
That's not the board's job though, and misses the point of my email. I'm saying that we should be aspiring to be in the position where the subject matter experts we look to on the board in fields of law, finance, privacy, etc. are ALREADY "insiders" simply by reason of using Wikimedia projects before we ever start recruiting for them -- and not just at the very low standard of "What is Wikipedia" but somewhere more in-depth than that.
-Dan
The general observation that we should be easier for everyone to edit is reasonable, and that doing that and more outreach would help the rest of the world contribute more effectively.
(I did in fact see this in my previous email, but forgot to erase the line about you missing my point, as you obviously did respond to it. Sorry.)
-Dan
On 06/25/2011 08:33 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
On 25 June 2011 19:18, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
My general position is that Wikimedian community is diverse enough to fill expert seats from itself.
You are probably right, but who would make the better board member: an average lawyer (or whatever) that's a Wikimedian or a top lawyer that isn't?
Obviously, the board needs a decent number of Wikimedians on it, but there is no particular need for the whole board to be Wikimedians. (Well, Wikimedians prior to their appointment - my definition of Wikimedian includes WMF board members, whether they came from the community or not.)
About the last point: I agree. Any board member with some time spent in work with community is a Wikimedian. Bottom line is that all of us were outsiders at some point.
I also agree with the point that incorporating outsiders at all levels is substantial for the movement.
But, before I went to laugh while writing previous email, I had something different in my mind.
Let's start with the most obvious thing. Our community has the most relevant MediaWiki developers. Some of them are extraordinary coders, but some of them have ability to articulate strategic development of MediaWiki and to communicate it with the rest of the community and available resources.
A group which would strategically think about MediaWiki development is needed. MediaWiki is a standard wiki implementation, but its code is not so bright. And it is not because our developers are bad coders, but because of systemic lack of strategic vision. And, again, lack of strategic vision is not a staff problem. There is no such small organization which staff is developing office in India to spread knowledge and developing very serious piece of software.
So, having a group which would exclusively think about strategic development of MediaWiki would be very useful. Such group shouldn't be just consultative body, but it should have means to implement their vision. Having one of them in WMF Board to represent developers in the top movement's body would be also useful.
(In relation to the means, I've checked what's going on with Drupal. Two of their organizations spent ~$400k in 2009 and ~$1.5M in 2010. [1] That's small fraction of WMF's budget.)
Then, our community has probably the most relevant contemporary encyclopedists. English Wikipedia ArbCom is dealing with encyclopedic issues regularly and I don't know for the group which has more core encyclopedic experience than it is.
And we need a global body which would care about core principles of our work. And I think that the core expertise in our business is needed inside of the board.
We have good lawyers in our community. Michael Godwin, Michael Snow and Ray are on my mind. I am sure that they are able to create analogue body which would take care about legal issues in more general way than General Council does. And I think that one of them should be in the board.
The concept above would bring stability, too. At this point, if board members decide that they want to have, let's say, a lawyer among them and if it is not Michael Snow, that person would need some time to be involved in all relevant issues. If we have a body which regularly deals with relevant issues, there wouldn't be big deal which person from such group is in the board.
There are other fields in which we have enough relevant experts. There are, indeed, fields in which we don't (or didn't) have relevant community members. Bishakha's expertise is among them. In the past our community was thinner in other areas as well (financial expertise covered by Stu and connections with educational institutions covered by Jan-Bart).
But, I don't think that we should reach for outsiders at the first occasion. We are not any community. Our community is of unprecedented diversity and people from the community are best motivated for such job.
Besides that, who would replace any of the current expert seats inside of the board when they decide to do something else? Who is doing legal overseeing since Michael Snow left board?
[1] https://association.drupal.org/system/files/Annual%20Report%202011%20-%20web...
On 6/25/2011 1:50 AM, Lodewijk wrote:
Hi,
I read from several posts that the process with the nominating committee did not work out at all. In the mean time the whole nominating committee (and therefore any formal procedure where non-board members, read: the community, have any say on who gets onto the board in the appointed seat). I might have missed it (probably have) but is there some kind of evaluation of the functioning of the NomCom and a good reasoning why it was totally abolished? Is it clear /why/ it did not work?
Birgitte seems to suggest it didnt work because procedures were not followed. Earlier (don't recall where exactly) (a) board member(s) seemed to suggest that it did not work because they were too slow and did not do their job. Both arguments seem to me something that can be solved quite easily - by starting to follow procedures or by getting different people on the committee.
Perhaps someone who was there on the board at the time could clarify?
It was certainly too slow of a process, but as Birgitte points out, the system itself lacked the capacity to produce the desired result. I wouldn't fault the committee members for "not doing their job" at all, they contributed to the extent that they could.
What the nominating committee was reasonably successful at was formulating criteria and scoring candidates according to those criteria, in the manner Milos alluded to earlier. It was moderately successful at brainstorming names to consider in developing a list of people we might be interested in, but I don't think it should be relied on as the only or primary tool to surface potential candidates. This work would be enough for a basic screening function, in the same way as reviewing a bunch of CVs to see how well they satisfy essential qualifications, in order to make up the initial hiring pool for a job. It would need to be supplemented by recruiting to make sure the pool is deep enough, and indeed bringing in a recruiter did help the process move forward (the recruiter was brought on during the same time as Matt's appointment was being considered, so wasn't important to that except in that we knew parts of the process weren't meeting our needs).
Where the nominating committee really was not able to help much, and probably the major frustration for all of us, was in actually vetting candidates once an initial pool was developed. And I think that realistically, it doesn't make sense to try to do this as a distributed group, as the level of interaction just isn't substantial enough. In the same way that face-to-face meetings are still an essential part of board business, the personal investment required to identify new board members who meet specific expertise needs was more than we could accomplish by our usual community processes. I also believe the nominating committee may not have felt like it could fully step into the shoes of the board in evaluating candidates for what the board wanted. So I think there are unresolved issues in terms of how much of the process can be delegated, and how to more effectively delegate the parts that can be.
--Michael Snow
On 25.06.2011 10:50, wrote Lodewijk:
Hi,
I read from several posts that the process with the nominating committee did not work out at all. In the mean time the whole nominating committee (and therefore any formal procedure where non-board members, read: the community, have any say on who gets onto the board in the appointed seat). I might have missed it (probably have) but is there some kind of evaluation of the functioning of the NomCom and a good reasoning why it was totally abolished? Is it clear /why/ it did not work?
Hello Lodewijk,
this is my personal analysis of the result of the NomCom. I didn't talk it with the other members of the NomCom or the board, it's my private oppinion only.
I would like to break the process of the NomCom in three parts: collect candidates, analyse and evaluation, interview with candidates and recommendation to the board.
I believe in the first phase the NomCom was great. And actually later the search company we hired also adapted the same method and Bishakha was named by a community member, and not from the pool of the company. So I think that this is something that really worked good, which we also should keep in the future. I agree with Milos here as that our community is now broad enough to surface good candidates.
By the second point evaluation there were definitively skill defecit on the NomCom. The NomCom had worked like almost all our committees like LangCom or ChapCom: We have a list of criterias which was given by the board and worked through those criterias very mechanically. But the thing is that for a board candidate this is not enough. There are some unnamed criterias that the LangCom didn't counted in, for example the candidate must be available, should be basically interested in serve on the board of WMF, etc. As I said these criterias are not named, they are sort of inherent. A professional search company has such experiences to know that a certain person basically comes in question or not. The NomCom didn't count these criterias because they were not on the list. So at the end we came up to a handful of names that are all high-scored according to the board criteria but not available for the WMF. On the one side I don't think that the NomCom had not worked orderly here, it is simply so that no one of us had ever such professional experience. It is basically possible that after let's say three or four such experiences that the NomCom can build up the experience, all of the NomCom members are very intelligent people and all of them learn very fast. But first of all we don't have so often the need to search for a board member and secondly as like the ElectionsCommittee, after a nomination it is probable that the members would disperse, until the next time we will call for volunteers again, and the new NomCom may be totally different as the old one so that the lesson learned and experiences gained may be lost. There is a big difference between such committees like Elections Committee and NomCom which is called for need and committees like LangCom or ChapCom where people can really gain experience and professionalism through a period of years. I must also confess that reflecting about this experience I also clearly see my own failure in the whole process. As the board member on the committee I had to report back to the board and correct the criteria so that the unnamed criterias got emphasized when it was apparent that the old set of criterias don't work properly. That was the first time I worked on such a committee and I just came into the board and started to learn the board work. Today I may have worked differently. But yes, we all learn from our failure. Unfortunately there are things like NomCom where one can only make the failure once.
Now come to the execution part. The NomCom had mostly worked via mailing-list and wiki. In total (if I recall correctly) we had only two IRC meeting. This was way too ineffective. As we saw in the past how personal meetups or even telefon conference was able to push works forward, like the recent LangCom meeting in Berlin, the way we worked was far too ineffective. In that sense the Foundation and the board should have give the NomCom more resources, for example for telefon conference or even personal interview with potential candidates. The search company also did things like preinterview potential candidates to see if the first evaluation was right. What the NomCom was not able to do, due to resource problems and due to lack of experience. Since we didn't really came to this stage, I cannot tell how good the NomCom could have worked out on this point.
So, this is my personal reflection. There were failures made also especially from my side, a lot of things learnd for me personally. A lot of things I learned after I had the chance to observe how the search company had worked, and maybe would not have learned or would have took far longer without that experience. A few of things was not so clear to me until I started to formulate this mail and to write them down.
Greetings Ting
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