I was amused to read the official announcement, which paints the two new appointed white American trustees who "happen" to live and work within an easy commute to the WMF offices in California, as a win for diversity and internationalism.[1]
No, WMF, these were cosy personal network appointments that make the WMF look like a typical "old boys club" with a focus on money, power, growth and do nothing to gain community confidence that your board is going to turn around its strategy into something meaningful and effective for our open knowledge mission over the next two years.
In line with Anthony Cole's comment, the majority of the board should declare a conflict and opt out of any vote that touches on Google, Wikidata etc. but of course the on-going complacent group think will apply.
1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/05/new-wikimedia-foundation-trustees/
Fae
On 6 January 2016 at 07:52, Anthony Cole ahcoleecu@gmail.com wrote:
This is all fascinating and concerning. Most concerning to me is the presence on the board of someone actually on Google's payroll right now. How can Denny not be fatally conflicted in all - or most - board deliberations that involve broad strategy - especially but not only to do with WikiData?
Anthony Cole I'm on the board of Wiki Project Med Foundation.
Anthony Cole
On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 3:22 PM, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
On 01/05/2016 08:01 PM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
I note we now have on the board:
- Jimmy Wales, who has served as a member of Google's "Advisory Council"
- Denny Vrandecic, who is a Google employee
- Guy Kawasaki, who has served as special advisor to the CEO of the
Motorola business unit of Google
- Kelly Battles of Bracket Computing, which partners with Google Cloud
Platform
- Arnnon Geshuri, who served as Senior Director of HR and Staffing at
Did I miss anyone?
I think you missed all the board members who have Google set as their browser's default search engine instead of using DuckDuckGo[1].
But really, I think you should be paying attention to Facebook. We are reliant upon HHVM to run MediaWiki, which is developed by them, as well as Phabricator for bug tracking, which was originally developed by them. Furthermore, our current hardware officer[2] is a Facebook employee.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/ [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_Officer
-- Legoktm
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