Re: [Wikimedia-l] Are we too rigid?

I would like to clarify a fairly major premise of this conversation: namely, the comment I made that Yuri quoted in the very first message. When I say that the hierarchical organisation of the Foundation is something that is preventing us from doing better, I was not thinking of how we develop software. Indeed, I suspect that peoples' tendency to bring things constantly back to "does it improve the measurable speed at which we right code" is symptomatic of the problematic dynamics here. What I was thinking about was how we pay attention to organisational hiring, to how we promote, to how we treat people, what empathy we have and how we value empathy. I have consistently found the Foundation to lag in all of these regards. It is not good at making sure that the recognition of employees is fair and treated equitably (be that who gets called out in presentations, who gets given opportunities, or who gets raises). It is not good at making sure that how we hire is fair. It is not good at making sure that concerns of employees are given weight. All too often the people marginalised by our approaches are the people marginalised outside the Foundation, as well; women, people in "non-technical" roles, people in roles that we code as "support work" (and guess what tends to correlate with a role being coded as support work?) All too often the work marginalised by our approaches is the work that Doesn't Product Code (again: guess who tends to do the heavy lifting on things like organisational health and process and structure?) As an organisation I have found the Foundation overly rigid and resistant to the most conservative change around these problems; particularly I think of efforts to improve unintentional bias in our job descriptions. Basically, unless you as an employee go out and do the damn work yourself, for free, with 0 recognition of the emotional and temporal cost of that work, it doesn't get done. The organisation as a whole is not interested. Switching to a flat organisational structure does not, in any way, solve for this problem. In fact, in some way it makes it worse, because it makes us *think* that we have solved for the systemic and hierarchical power dynamics that make it difficult for low-level or marginalised people to get things done, or people doing marginalised work to get things done, when we have only shifted them. To pick on someone, I pick Trevor (sorry Trevor. For reference this is an entirely hypothetical example and Trevor is lovely): Trevor's voice is given a lot more weight in the organisation than mine. Trevor has a lot more influence than I do. Trevor has a lot more influence than most WMFers do! Crucially: this *isn't because he's management*. This was the case even *before* he was management. Because: 1. He's been here a really really long time and so knows everyone. 2. He's an Engineer, and we give engineers more weight and cachet than we do, say, administrative staff or people in "support" roles, even though those people are both as-smart and have an equal interest in the organisation's success; 3. His background matches what we strongly correlate with Authority Voices. If we switch to a flat organisational structure where nobody has a title, or..whatever, all of these things will still be true. We will switch pronounce systemic biases or uneven power dynamics Done, and we will have achieved something that's actually worse than not doing anything at all. Because now, we still *have* all those problems, we just think we're done and don't have to put any work in and can't talk about it, and nobody has the responsibility for continuing to fix things. The Foundation I would return to is not an organisation with a flat structure. In fact, it could be an organisation that looks a lot like this one, because I don't believe reporting lines or titles have as much of an impact on dynamics as we think they do. What *does* have an impact is how we recognise the value of emotional labour, how we recognise our implicit biases and advantages, and how honest we are with each other: not just in terms of what we *say* but in terms of how we *listen*. In other words, the litmus test for me is: what happens when the socially and politically weakest person in the organisation has an idea? Anyway; I don't particularly want to go into a long drawn-out conversation, just correct the initial, fundamental misunderstanding. Hopefully I've provided a bit of food for thought along with that. On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 3:50 AM, Pau Giner &lt;pginer(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: project iterations anyone a consider. wrote: yastrakhan(a)wikimedia.org&gt; example Commons. 3D skunkworks collective they needs, more someone https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/2016-02-16_Discussing_Knowledge_En… https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>