[Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion

[Michael Snow]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/8/27 Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net>:
>   
>> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>>     
>>>> The best examples you can see are Stu West and Jan-Bard de
>>>> Vreede. Stu with his technical and financial expertise is simply there,
>>>> in every meeting, in the board mailing list, we don't have to go out and
>>>> ask someone from the outside, especially because these expertise are
>>>> really direly needed in every meeting and most of our topics.
>>>>         
>>> Brion and Véronique have that expertise and could easily be brought in
>>> to whatever meetings they are needed for.
>>>       
>> This is incomprehensible to me. One of the key responsibilities of the
>> board is to oversee the work of the staff. That requires a combination
>> of the board's own expertise plus outside advisors on occasion to
>> supplement this. Brion and Veronique do great work and we need their
>> expertise in doing it, and occasionally they may be brought into our
>> meetings to provide information. But it would be totally abdicating our
>> responsibilities for us to call on that expertise in order to review the
>> work they themselves did.
>>     
> If you read the entire email I sent you will find that I addressed
> exactly that point. Please don't selectively quote to misrepresent
> people, it is either extremely stupid, extremely immature or extremely
> malicious, and I'm not happy with any of those qualities in the chair
> of the WMF board.
>   
As the portion of your email making that caveat did not appear until 
after quoting another portion of Ting's message, suggesting that it 
would be addressing some other aspect of the discussion, I missed that 
you had hedged what seemed to be a pretty plain statement. Honestly, 
considering the significance of this responsibility, I would have 
expected the sentence to be qualified immediately since the point 
negates so much of the basic assertion.

Meanwhile, there have been a lot of messages to read on this list 
recently, and I've learned as part of list etiquette to trim replies to 
the material you're responding to, as a courtesy to readers. I apologize 
for overlooking the additional context as a result, but I had no 
intention of misrepresenting you and I don't think it was particularly 
stupid, immature, or malicious.

--Michael Snow