[Foundation-l] Recent firing?

[Ray Saintonge]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Practically every state and municipal government in the US is subject
> to public disclosure laws, sometimes part of 'Government in the
> sunshine' legislation, which require most relevant information about
> the daily operations to be made available.  This usually includes
> information on employee performance, reasons for departure/dismissal,
> etc. about everyone from top management through the junior
> dog-catcher. Though the law usually does exclude highly
> private/personal information (for example, medical information).
>
> [I'm coming from a US centric angle here because that is what I know.
> Feel free to mentally replace US locations with any other place with
> robust records laws]
>
> Accordingly, I find the supposition that being very open about the
> operations of the foundation is somehow incompatible with
> professionalism or ethical behaviour to be simply unsustainable.
>   

I have to agree with the general philosophy of this approach.  The 
problem is not confined to the US, and that Nathan should later raise a 
contrast between California and North Carolina law only tells me that 
the problems at a government level is far from being settled.  When we 
are dealing with competing virtues (openness and privacy) the debate 
always  becomes more intense.

Wikimedians are a naturally suspicious lot, for many of whom "Assuming 
good faith" is little more than sloganeering. Does it come as any 
surprise that the same people who question the integrity of 
pharmaceutical company public relations will also put the same 
suspiciousness to work in regards to their own corporate overlords? Many 
of us are suspicious of corporatism, and WMF is a corporation. The 
excuse that a corporation is still too small also soon wears thin. 

This thread includes the word "firing" in its title. Whether or not the 
word accurately reflects the facts, the cat is out of the bag. It is all 
over the internet where the audience tends to see little difference 
between "He was fired," and "Was he fired?" That audience can easily 
include potential former employers, who will look for easy ways to trim 
a long list of applicants into a short list.  We can no more control 
such low-level rumour mills than we can control large scale conspiracy 
theories about the Kennedy assassination or why the towers fell on 9/11.

> Wikimedia is not a business. It is a publicly supported charity. The
> WMF depends on the public both for the funding used to cut everyone's
> paychecks and for the creation of the material which makes its sites
> worth visiting. In terms of man-hours-input the community of
> contributors dwarfs the foundation's full time staff considerably.
>   

Absolutely.

> The inescapable reality of this is that the employees and officers
> serve at the pleasure of the public. Although the chain is not a
> direct chain of command, it is no less real.  So I don't think it's
> surprising to see people making noises expressing a desire for the
> kind of openness which is technically available from state and local
> governance almost universally thought the US.
>   

In a lot of other places too.  The internet has made hiding high-level 
misdeeds more difficult.  It is far more difficult for lobbyists to come 
and go unnoticed than ever before.  Governments are still far from 
perfect in their handling of these matters.

> I believe Wikimedia Foundation already has a stated goal of being on
> the leading edge of organizational openness and has done well /by
> commercial standards/.    Perhaps it's time to take that a step
> further and voluntarily subject the organization to the public record
> laws of some state or some composition or subset thereof.
>
> Not only would this advance openness but it may help avoid arguments
> over the form and level of openness by delegating those decisions to
> others who have thought harder about them than we have. It may also
> make cooperating with other organizations simpler because rather than
> trying to explain Wikimedia's bizarre one-off openness requirements
> and the inevitable debate about the wisdom of every aspect, it could
> be simply pointed out that the WMF operates under some particular
> rule-set used elsewhere.
>
> Pre-existing government openness rulesets also have the advantage of
> the existence of training materials for staff and layman guides for
> the public.


Those who say that the current severance was at too low a level to merit 
such heated controversy are probably right, but it is up to WMF to be 
sufficiently pro-active to avoid this kind of discussion about any 
single individual.  The broader policy question remains an important 
one.  If the result is that a public release needs to be made whenever 
*anyone* quits or is dismissed, so be it.  An open and honest release 
may be less damaging than the alternative.

Ec