[Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow

[whothis]

I agree with what he said.

After looking him up, the only qualification I can find of this person is
that he's on the advisory board, No idea, how he got there and for how long
is his "term", makes me think that maybe there is a Cabal. Most places
mirror his description on the Advisory Board page. I am tired of seeing the
same names, doing the rounds over and over again, from groups to committees
to fellowships to whatever that comes next.

Will anyone else from the Advisory board or maybe even the board, past or
present members included, going to receive a "fellowship" now? Does it
matter that they are mostly unknown by the community, obviously not.


E. Forrester


On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 12:23 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Hi.
>
> As Daniel noted in his earlier e-mail to the list, Achal Prabhala is now a
> Wikimedia Fellow.[1] I actually missed this announcement as it didn't hit
> wikimediaannounce-l or this list (foundation-l), it apparently only got
> posted to the blog, but that's not really here nor there.
>
> There have been rumblings about some of the surrounding circumstances that
> I
> think warrant consideration and discussion. Achal is a member of the
> Advisory Board[2] but isn't very active in wikis/open source. A few
> questions pop up in my head. Is there a concern about such an individual
> being a Wikimedia Fellow? That is, someone who's not particularly attached
> to wikis/open source? All of the other Wikimedia Fellows have fairly strong
> editing backgrounds. The edits by Achal seem to be rather sparse:
> http://toolserver.org/~vvv/sulutil.php?user=Aprabhala
>
> More importantly, is there a concern about an Advisory Board member being
> chosen as a Wikimedia Fellow? Is there a conflict of interest there? Is
> there a concern about the appearance of impropriety?
>
> Achal has a growing influence on Wikimedia, particularly its new operations
> in India. This has included being part of the hiring decisions, etc. This
> is
> more of a consultant role, making his selection as a Wikimedia Fellow even
> stranger. And his growing influence and power in such a big part of
> Wikimedia's five-year strategy is making people wary. I think conversation
> and engagement (on this list and elsewhere) would be very good in a number
> of ways.
>
> MZMcBride
>
> [1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=2748
> [2] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board
>
>
>
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