[Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow

[Florence Devouard]

>
>
> 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?


Hello

I really fail to see how being an advisory board member could in any 
sense create a conflict of interest. As the term very well describes it, 
advisory board members are merely advisors.... not decision makers.
Just as *any* community member is also an advisor to the Wikimedia 
Foundation staff.

Incidently, the advisory board has been originally created so that we 
could create links with people who were NOT editors, but had things we 
(the board at that time) thought they could share with us, and help us 
on the difficult path of bringing the Foundation to a professional, 
efficient, helpful model. It is a side effect that now past board 
members who happened to be involved in the community are also part of 
the advisory board. Originally, none of the members were community members.
We (and "we" actually included the community; the community was involved 
in building the advisory board, on this very list, on meta and through a 
special committee) looked together for people with various expertise 
BEYOND our own wiki world. People with expertise in legal issues, 
financial issues, business, education, politics and so on. That was 
*exactly* the goal of this advisory board. Making sure that we would not 
be merely relying on our own community, but would actually learn from 
others and welcome comments, suggestions, help. Look beyond our own wiki 
world. Expand !

Within the original advisory board, Achal has probably been the most 
active in the past years. He definitly joined the conversation. I find 
it really odd to read now that being on the advisory board might 
actually be a disadvantage and that "being a community member" would be 
considered more important than being bright, involved, funny, good 
looking (yeahhhh), entrepreneur and so on.



>> 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


On 1/20/11 9:46 AM, whothis wrote:
 > 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?


LOL
Long time since I saw such a perfect example of fallacious argument. 
Thank you for the laugh :)


Anthere