On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 6:20 AM, Stuart West <stuwest(a)gmail.com> wrote: The problem you have, there, is thinking "president" is a title in some historical inalienable sense. It isn't. Grammatically it can still be used in the plain sense as denoting "he who presides". -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

On 1 February 2012 11:59, Ilario Valdelli <valdelli(a)gmail.com> wrote: The title "President" is sometimes used by the chair of the board, but "Vice President" is usually an executive, non-board, position. Large banks, for instance, often have hundreds of VPs - it's a middle-manager rank.

Not surprisingly, the executive and board positions of the WMF follow U.S. convention. It's not super typical to mix the "executive director" nomenclature with president / vice president, but its common to have vice presidents reporting to a chief executive (who will often take the title of "President & CEO."). As for conflicting names with Board titles... In the U.S., its far more common for boards to have a Chairman (or Chairwoman) and a Vice-Chair, than president or vice-president (which connote operating roles). Personally, it would be easier for me to understand the org chart of the WMF if they picked a particular nomenclature and stuck with it. For years they've been mixing systems - CTO and executive director, vice president and a proliferation of "Heads of" this and that (a highly uncommon executive title in the U.S., as far as I can tell), directors of some things and chiefs of other things... It's a bit strange. On a side-note, it's interesting to see that Erik has been moved out of the "executive" section of the staff list and into engineering.[1] [1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Staff_and_contrac…

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Heh. I've certainly been in the VP of Odds and Ends role before. :) A little bit of context. As Stu and Kaldari mentioned, the VP title is fairly common in the US, where it's actually often situated below the "C-level" in the org. The reason Sue and I agreed on the title VP of Engineering/Product for the engineering department has more to do with the organizational vocabulary in this part of the world, where that title does carry a very specific meaning relative to the CTO title. You can read more about the differences in these posts: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/want-to-know-difference-between-a-cto-an… http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engineering.html http://falseprecision.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engin.html Right now, we don't have a CTO, but we do have three Lead Architects in the engineering department (Mark, Brion, and Tim). We may choose to ultimately create a CTO role again, but it would probably be different from the way we've treated that role in the past (as architectural lead/visionary and process/delivery manager combined into one person). We may also need to split the product/engineering responsibilities if scale requires it. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate