On 2 January 2016 at 09:24, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
So far the best description I can think of is that we have a bunch of people who were there struggling to describe the situation without breaching duty to the organization or resorting to attacks, the information release results of which so far are unsatisfying to concerned external parties such as most of us.
Eh I'd argue at this point we have a fairly good idea of what went on.
We know from the high employee turnover in some areas and the odd slip (well that and pretty direct complaints https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=WMF_Transparency_Gap&diff=1... ) that, oh lets call it moral, isn't exactly rock solid at the WMF. The long term failure to fill the chief technology officer position probably doesn't help but there are reasons to suspect there are other issues.
For whatever reason James ended being ground zero for complaints by WMF employees. Not clear why they would go for one of the community elected people although perhaps it has something to do with only them being the only post Lila Tretikov board members. (BTW either https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_of_Trustees needs updating or we've just lost another two board members).
James handled these complaints in a way that the WMF management felt was undermining their authority/ability to lead and complained to the board. The board sided with management and removed James.
The community can't actually do much about this other than perhaps recommending board level representation for WMF employees with the counter that we revive that old proposal of them not voting in the elections for the community representatives.