[Wikimedia-l] Your support is wanted: The WMF Board of Trustees is looking for a new Board member

Mon Feb 18 12:52:17 UTC 2013

Hi

Sounded like good intervention, thanks for reminding me :)

Truth is of course that board Governance Committee is driving this process together with Gayle. That means that multiple community (s)elected board members are involved in the initial screening and that the whole board will be included in the final selection. 

This would also be a good opportunity to make a small point: not all external consultancy is evil :) As a community we tend to be naturally suspicious of people that get paid "a lot" of money for tasks that theoretically "could also be done my the community"… There is a good reason why we sometimes rely on paid external advisors, some of which were given by Gayle. 

m|Oppenheim in particular has been a great partner in WMF hiring with great results, and I hope that they can be as effective in this search (which we hope you can help out with by suggesting good candidates to them)

Regards

Jan-Bart 

On Feb 18, 2013, at 1:23 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga <tom at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hi all.
> 
> I would like to recommend to see the Brazil case where the recruitment
> of the coordinator of the Catalyst Project was done in partnership
> with the community
> 
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/01/11/brazil-recruiting-and-partnership-with-the-community-moves-forward/
> 
> After the community noticed the mistake being done in hiring and
> expensive and useless headhunter, this was critized
> <http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.brazil/161> and,
> fortunately, promptly listened by Wikimedia Foundation people in
> charge of the process. The community even had the idea of a more open
> and transparent process, where the candidates would engage in a wiki
> task - four finalists for the whole process engaged in such task. Also
> in the interview with two wikimedians, the 10 candidates could have a
> taste of what they would expect. :)
> 
> We all saw the dozens of mistakes of this headhunters, that luckly
> were solved on time by the community, improving a lot the final
> results. Not saying the model shouldn't be adapted and improved, it
> must. And after all, no one better than locals to tell about their own
> community.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Tom
> 
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 9:11 AM, Jan-Bart de Vreede
> <jdevreede at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> Hey
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>> I am sure that Alice is grateful for the input. I must confess though that I think that most of these questions require a deep knowledge of the movement and the community and as such disqualify a lot of potential candidates… (I would hazard a guess that none of the past appointed candidates (including myself) were not able to answer 80% of these questions until about 6 months "on the job". So are you proposing these questions to select new candidates or are you simply trying to get attention for these issues (as you have been doing over the past months… which is fair enough to some degree?)
>> 
>> (and to be fair: at this point, with all the experience I have within the movement I would want to see most of these decisions researched before committing to a point of view)
>> 
>> Jan-Bart
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Feb 18, 2013, at 9:19 AM, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Jan-Bart de Vreede wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>> if you have questions that you think we should ask: feel free to suggest them here :)
>>> 
>>> I have these ten questions:
>>> 
>>> 1. What do you think a reasonable goal for the growth of the Wikimedia
>>> Education Program over the next five years is?
>>> 
>>> 2. Do you believe that the Foundation should establish an endowment?
>>> If so, how large do you think such an endowment should be; in
>>> particular, should the Foundation establish an endowment large enough
>>> to subsist at present staffing levels and growth rates from current
>>> investment grade bond interest rates without accepting additional
>>> donations? If so, over how many years do you think it would be most
>>> appropriate to establish such an endowment?
>>> 
>>> 3. How often do you think the Foundation should propose advocacy
>>> actions to the community? Do you believe the Foundation should survey
>>> the opinion of the community and donors on this question?
>>> 
>>> 4. Should the Foundation meet or exceed Silicon Valley competitive pay
>>> to attract and retain the best talent while competing with firms able
>>> to offer equity participation? Do you believe the Foundation should
>>> survey the opinion of the community and donors on this question? Why
>>> or why not?
>>> 
>>> 5. Should the Foundation establish a system of awarding employee
>>> bonuses in amounts determined by anonymous peer evaluations? Why or
>>> why not?
>>> 
>>> 6. Some proportion of long term project editors are impoverished,
>>> probably within a few percentage points of the impoverished proportion
>>> of the population as a whole. How do you think the Foundation could
>>> best assist impoverished long term volunteers? Do you think it should?
>>> Why or why not?
>>> 
>>> 7. To what extent do you believe the Foundation should reimburse
>>> travel and content development expenses for Wikinews contributors? In
>>> particular, if you were to propose a pilot grant program to grant
>>> travel and expense funds directly to individual Wikinews reporters,
>>> how many such awards would you begin with and how would you measure
>>> their effectiveness?
>>> 
>>> 8. PeerWise is a popular closed-source assessment question and answer
>>> database (http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/) used in hundreds of
>>> higher education institutions. Unlike textbooks, traditional courses,
>>> MOOCs, and Moodle-style courses, PeerWise question databases can and
>>> often are populated entirely by learners, with answers reviewed in a
>>> style very similar to wiki content. Do you believe it would be
>>> appropriate for the Foundation to develop an open source version of
>>> PeerWise? Why or why not?
>>> 
>>> 9. Do you believe the Foundation should employ professional fact
>>> checkers who would not edit reader-facing content on the projects, but
>>> who would be available to research questions pertaining to content
>>> disputes at the request of projects' dispute resolution volunteers
>>> (e.g. Wikipedia mediators) to prepare reports to help volunteers
>>> resolve content disputes? Why or why not? Do you believe the
>>> Foundation should survey the opinion of the community and donors on
>>> this question?
>>> 
>>> 10. What is your experience with editing or otherwise supporting
>>> Foundation projects?
>>> 
>>> Sincerely,
>>> James Salsman
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
> "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more
> useful than a life spent doing nothing."
> 
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