Re: [Wikimedia-l] How WMF contracts are won

Dear Jaime Villagomez, I have a question about a small example of procurement governance that I hope you can help with as the WMF CFO, QUESTION Can you please publish the specification of work used to support contract review by WMF Finance and WMF Legal for the work placed with Valerie Aurora and Ashe Snyder, and confirm how many other suppliers were given the opportunity to bid for the work? Though it is healthy that the WMF support their management team to make local decisions on resourcing, I am concerned that an informal and undocumented way of potentially selecting friends or old colleagues as suppliers has become a tacitly accepted default for placing WMF project contracts, rather than ensuring open bid processes with independently verifiable good governance. This appears to contradict the WMF Finance commitment to "core values of transparency and accountability". BACKGROUND During discussion of the proposed Code of Conduct for Wikimedia Technical spaces[1], it was stated that Valerie Aurora and Ashe Snyder

had been given contracts for "expert advice". I asked to see the invitation to tender.

The question has since been hidden from view, without a confirmation that a specification for the work was written before the contracts were offered, nor has any statement been made about how much money will be paid for the (unspecified) review work. As far as I can tell, no expert advice by Aurora or Snyder has yet been made public, even though the Code of Conduct was intended to be created using open community processes. Quim Gil wrote "Feel free to continue via email or elsewhere", so I am posing the question as an open letter by email, asking again on-wiki appears now impossible. The WMF policy for procurement states that "Purchases that involve contracts need to go through contract review", and Quim Gil has confirmed that "I followed the normal WMF procedures for contracting vendor services, going through WMF Finance and Legal review as well as approval by my manager". Without a specification for the work, a meaningful contract review is impossible. It should be a mandatory requirement in professional procurement policies for all contracts to have a signed off statement of work, before contract are agreed, and only in exceptional pre-defined circumstances (such as contract extensions or applying formal preferred supplier lists) should the management team be allowed to place contracts with people they may happen to know, without an opportunity for anyone else to fairly bid for the work. I have asked for the specification of work to be published, ideally the budget should be published so there is better awareness of how much is normal for "expert advice". As the advice must be published to be useful, as the Code of Conduct is a public consultation, there can be no reason of privacy or confidentiality that applies. Links 1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Code_of_Conduct/Draft P.S. as Jaime Villagomez, WMF Chief Financial Officer has no published email address that I can track down, I have copied this email to Lila, CEO. Thanks, Fae -- faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae