Hoi,
Thank you for writing in your personal capacity so the other things need
not have any consideration. Thank you for a profile that reads American.
Thank you for continuing with the sniping at the WMF. What is your point or
is that personal? How do you help things move in the right direction? In my
opinion you show a lack of good faith, personally speaking, and why would
that not be seen as impacting your professional/other capacity?
But that is me personally.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 11 February 2016 at 09:05, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've been stewing for awhile to sort out my
thoughts about the search for a
new department lead for CE. Since I might be busy on Friday, and the choice
of the new department is likely a topic of broad public interest, I'll
share some thoughts here:
1. This is a highly public community facing role. Whoever gets the job
should be comfortable with transparency by default, and with the need to
maintain privacy about some situations.
2. The department lead needs to be someone who can get up to speed with our
incredibly complex community *quickly*. For this reason, I would strongly
suggest considering an internal hire.
3. This can be is a highly political and emotional role.
4. Whoever gets the job should have demonstrated good management skills in
a public-facing role and with development and supervision of a comparable
budget, including supervision of grants budgets and staff, and preferably
staff with comparable roles to Technical Collaboration and Support &
Safety.
5. Familiarity with the many legal aspects of the department would be
helpful, such as with contracts, online safe environments, and employment
law.
6. The leader should be comfortable with processes and software tools of
similar kind and complexity to the tools that are used by WMF CE, such as
OTRS, Phabricator, and the various kinds of financial and performance
analysis software and tools that are used by the department.
7. Familiarity with hiring and supervision of international and remote
staff would be valuable.
8. Language proficiency is of great value in this role. I would suggest
that the leader should have EN-5 or native proficiency in English, and at
least basic conversational proficiency in one additional language that is
commonly used in the Wikimedia movement.
9. Experience with managing community-facing technology projects would be
valuable.
10. Experience with conducting business in environments outside of the US
and Canada world would be valuable, including management of international
contracts and maintenance of relationships with international business
partners.
I feel the need to mention an additional issue which I think should be
addressed and could negatively impact recruiting for this position, which
is the current situation with the governance of the WMF. The amount of
staff turnover and the results of the staff survey are likely to have
negative impacts on recruiting among candidates who are well qualified for
this position and are looking for a job in which they can be successful.
Also, I feel that the opacity, decisions, and errors of the WMF Board in
the past few months cast a long shadow over the senior director of
community. Finally, the continued reports that I am hearing about the
relationship between the WMF ED and the WMF staff are also significant
causes of concern. I would suggest that before looking for external
candidates who are likely to do due diligence on WMF before accepting this
position, that WMF should remedy some of these matters of concern. I have
faith in Maggie to be a good temporary lead for the department while the
governance situation is addressed.
Writing in my personal capacity only,
Pine
On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 7:15 PM, Maggie Dennis <mdennis(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hello, all.
As some of you know, Community Engagement had a small realignment last
quarter. Now that it’s further along, we thought it was a good time to
formally share. :)
So, welcome to the reformed Community Engagement!
What’s the major change?
We've restructured Community Engagement, to four primary groups:
-
Program Capacity and Learning (integrating Learning & Evaluation,
Education, and Library), under Rosemary Rein, tasked with supporting
community partnerships, programs and learning.
-
Resources, under Siko Bouterse, tasked with supporting community-led
impact through grants and other resources.
-
Support & Safety (formerly known as Community Advocacy), under me
(Maggie Dennis), tasked with helping improve trust, safety and
collegiality
within our projects as well as facilitating communication and
understanding
broadly between the WMF and contributors,
-
Technical Collaboration (grouping Community Liaisons and Developer
Relations), under Quim Gil, tasked with improving collaboration
between
software development teams, Wikimedia
contributors, readers, and
volunteer
developers.
Four people within Community Engagement have changed which teams they
report to: Floor and Jake (to Program, Capacity, and Learning), Haitham
(to
Support and Safety), and Sati (to Resources).
This will more closely
align
their leadership and reporting structure with the
work they’re doing.
Rachel will also be stepping back from leadership of the Liaisons team
and
supporting Quim in annual plan and strategic
work.
Why did we do this?
For most people outside of the department, this will have very little
impact on your day-to-day relationships with Community Engagement, but
we’re hoping for major impact within our department! The main goal of the
reorganization was more responsive leadership, decision making and
improved
lines of communication within, into and out of
the department, with a
strong secondary goal of giving the affected teams more flexibility and
clarity around their missions, so that they can adapt better to our
evolving work. When we began this transformation last quarter, we
expected
that it would mean most teams (and especially the
affected leaders) would
be more engaged, receive more day-to-day mentorship, and that they'd be
able to work more constructively with peers to better craft shared goals
and projects. At the same time we hoped that the team executive would be
able to put more into handling upcoming planning efforts like the
strategic
and annual plans. While we are still fine-tuning,
this seems to be
bearing
out, and we hope that it will continue.
Our ultimate goal, of course, is to figure out the best ways to serve our
communities and our movement through better internal and external
collaboration and through well-defined roles, responsibilities and
processes that are clear and work well for everyone. While this is one
step
towards that goal, we are working on others
through the strategic process
and the upcoming Annual Plan and through other conversations with you.
We are hosting an office hour on IRC on Friday February 12th at 1900 UTC
to
talk over the reorganization and also to discuss
the qualities we should
be
looking for in a new department lead.[1] (As
announced earlier today, I
will be filling in during the search.) I hope you will be able to join
us.
If not, we will of course publish the logs and
will also be putting
together a brief FAQ to publish on Meta of emerging questions we may
receive about the department. If you have questions you’d like addressed
there, please feel free to ask. :)
Best,
Maggie
[1] For more on office hours and for local time conversions, please see
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
--
Maggie Dennis
Director, Support and Safety
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
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