In a charity, the role of trustees does not have to be identical, and indeed diversity is an excellent thing. A board doesn't have to have everyone intensely familiar, or in fact interested, in the culture. A good board has a mixture of people to combine expertise, external insight and internal cultural insight.

Treasurer is a highly technical role, and one that benefits from specific experience.

Given the current makeup of the board, I am sure that it will be able to establish an effective working practice where Greyham is able to contribute his expertise and "community" members will be able to provide the necessary prompting r.e. openness.

The standing example of this is Saad, who to my knowledge is not a community member, but has contributed a lot of expertise and guidance in board activities/decisions.


Tom


On 20 February 2013 11:17, Andrew Turvey <andrewrturvey@googlemail.com> wrote:
Thanks Chris & Jon for providing the context.

Clearly Grayham will bring some valuable experience to the board and it's great to have him involved. However, it's less clear how he will meet the other requirements of being a trustee, in particular understanding the Wikimedia culture of openness and volunteer leadership.  Has the board arranged anything for his trustee induction to fill these gaps?

In particular, the Treasurer plays a key role in ensuring that certain standards of openness and accountability set out in the Finance Policy, such as: [1]

"The key principles underlying this policy are ... financial reporting is clearly expressed and highly transparent"
"Individual expense claims are normally published on the office wiki (Administrator) with a summary of the claims posted on the public wiki"
"Office expenses and the Chief Executive's expenses are published on the public wiki in summary form" **
"Monthly financial reports to be published on the public wiki"

** Interesting to see this was watered down at the last board meeting, although it's unclear if even the watered-down version has ever been implemented.

Is Grayham planning to introduce himself to the community or engage on this list or on the wiki? It's notable that he responded to the advert but then didn't come to the board interest day and didn't put himself up for election. I would be interested to hear his explanation for why this was the case.

I presume this decision was taken at the last board meeting on 9-10 February. It's very disappointing that the draft minutes of the last board meeting still haven't been published, a week and a half after the meeting. I asked when this would be published over a week ago and was told that a   reasonably final draft was available on Sunday. Chapter policy says that "Volunteers are encouraged to ... hold the Trustees and staff to account, through public and private discussion". [2] It's impossible to do this if we're not even allowed to see on a timely basis the decisions that are being made by the board.

Regards,

Andrew

[1] http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Finance_Policy
[2] http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Policy


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Jon Davies <jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
We received 13 final applications. From this six were shorlisted to attend our board interest day. Two stood for election, one was elected and one subsequently co-opted. Greyham, as Chris explained, emerged over the last couple of months as we had a vacancy.

Are your chapter thinking of a similar exercise? If so would be happy to liaise.

Jon


On 17 February 2013 09:28, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com> wrote:


On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 10:38 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Chris for the context, some of which appears to have been
omitted from the governance review.  I am a bit surprised by that.

I'm guessing that Greyham didn't respond to the call to the community ;-)

How many responses did you receive from the advert in the Third Sector?

I think the review notes we engaged in a proactive trustee search exercise, though it doesn't go into any more detail.

Jon D would know the answer, but I think answer was somewhere in the dozens.

Chris

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