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

[Everton Zanella Alvarenga]

Hi,

sure I didn't mean every external consultancy is evil. Sorry if I
sounded like that. Firstly, the world is not divided between good and
evil, like if we had an axis of evil. :P

Just as an example, the same company I just criticized had a better
performance in another country. Things can vary a lot and I am sure
people in charge of the particular process are aware of that. I just
wanted to remind a particular case that I believe is worth studying.

And I do think sometimes to have an external consultancy can help us
to diminish our own bias.  ;)

Tom

On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 9:52 AM, Jan-Bart de Vreede
<jdevreede at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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



-- 
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more
useful than a life spent doing nothing."