Hi Sarah,
On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 11:59 PM, SarahSV <sarahsv.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You wrote to this list on 12 January that you were investigating with the
Board Governance Committee what happened regarding the appointments process
in this case – whether everyone was fully informed, and so on.
Can you let us know what you've learned or when you'll publish your
findings? I think the community is keen to know what happened.
we've been working on it, discussing, and introducing improvements. I
guess
that replying here quicker, rather than preparing an elaborate
document may be more sensible, since you're asking, and we may be perceived
as entirely inactive ;)
The identified mistakes/shortcomings of the whole process:
1. In the background check performed by the HR and the legal department we
have not had a specific PR check as an immanent part. While it sounds like
common sense (doh! I know, although many organizations don't actually do
that), it seems that each department focused on their own turf mostly- HR
confirmed the highest expertise, and the legal department confirmed no
legal threats.
How are we going to address this in the future? We have already prepared a
modification to the process, including a PR subroutine into the larger
background check process.
2. The BGC has failed individually as well, for a rather silly reason. An
often returning argument has been that we must have known about the case,
since it is high in
google.com results.
The initial screening was conducted by Alice, Frieda, and me. None of us is
a native English speaker and our searches included google.de, google.it and
google.pl - none of them included the information about the controversy in
the top 10 results at the time (btw, the pando article is clearly trending
up and is in the top 10 results in google.pl now, while it was not even a
couple of weeks ago).
How are we going to address this in the future? We are going to assume a
global audience of our movement and conduct searches specifically taking
that in mind.
3. We have not asked the candidates a very simple question: is there
anything in your past that may be perceived as controversial, or require
additional explanations?
How are we going to address this in the future? We will basically start
asking that.
best,
dj