[Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow

[David Gerard]

On 21 January 2011 21:11, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:


To try to answer your concern, somewhat, as I understand it, rather
than just tut at your tone (which is of course an annoying thing to
do):

The Advisory Board is basically specialist volunteers who’ve signed up
to be bothered about stuff if the board wants help with something.
It’s not a “board” with actual power, like the Board of Trustees.

So as a staff member, it’s now his job to be bothered about stuff
instead of volunteering to be bothered about stuff, so his staff
duties are pretty much a superset of his volunteer ones :-)

As such, it's not something I can see a conflict of interest in -
there's no power being exercised in the Advisory Board role to
corrupt; no streams to cross.

I speak only as a long-term en:wp, WMF and WMUK volunteer, not
authoritatively as staff of anyone in any way. Others could probably
clarify.

Speaking as an en:wp volunteer: if he can make a start on cracking the
horrible problem of what to do with important oral knowledge in
written encyclopedias, I think that could be one of the hugest
innovations yet seen in the quest to sum human knowledge. This is
REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF, and IMO an excellent and on-mission thing for
WMF to spend money on. Whether he's the ideal person for the job is a
matter for WMF, and although WMF's hiring has not necessarily been
perfect in the past I think it's generally worked out pretty well. We
have a lot of WMF employees who are former volunteers in one capacity
or another, and who got recruited to staff by becoming known for their
volunteer work. The Fellows are pretty much volunteers who are now
being paid to do whatever valuable thing they were doing as
volunteers.

As I said, if my understanding is amiss, I'm sure others will clarify.


- d.