Thanks for the kind replies.
The thing I really want to surface here, is the harder thing.
It seems to me that what has gone on around James Heilman's dismissal, has some things to do with basic board processes being poor, and poorly executed, for sure, but also.. and this is the hardest part of all - we have the behavior of individuals, within that flawed context. Flawed behavior, that was possible in the context of poor processes poorly carried out. But flawed behavior. I had a boss who liked to say "You can't legislate morality." when we were talking about strategic decisions and policies. A lot comes down to the choices that individuals make about what to do or say.
The really hard thing is that we have on the one hand the board stating very clearly that it was unanimous back in November with regard to Lila, and James writing, "it was not unanimous". We have the board saying that James' dismissal had nothing - nothing - to do with transparency, and James saying that this was absolutely relevant to the conflicts that led to his dismissal.
I don't know about others, but I find these contradictions to be almost unbearable. It is really obvious to me that if the past is going to be laid to rest so that we can move forward with all these people still in the community - so that we can move forward as a community - these contradictions need to be resolved. Which means that individuals have some hard choices, as do we as a community.
How do we work out what actually happened, and how do we resolve the contradictions?
We talk a lot about our values. Is there room for forgiveness, so if it turns out that people have made public misrepresentations, there is room for them to come out and say "Yes that thing I said wasn't true, forgive me?" Or do we hold this kind of behavior unforgiveable and people who have misrepresented things need to go? Part of me hopes that there is some truth in what everybody has said, a la Rashomon. But with such frank contradictions, it is hard to get there.
How do we work this out? That is the question I would love us to tackle.
On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 12:01 AM, Anthony Cole ahcoleecu@gmail.com wrote:
Recordings of board meetings will be of value to future historians.
Anthony Cole
On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
+1
Whether to record meetings is a separate question from whether to release the recordings publicly.
We have seen a lot of disagreement among Trustees recently. That's a massive and *entirely avoidable* distraction for the movement. Please, start recording the meetings -- if only for the benefit of Trustees and their (understandably fallible) memories.
And please revisit the question of whether or not to release some of
those
video recordings publicly -- but not urgently. That part can wait until after some more pressing things have been sorted out.
I have yet to hear a good argument why recording meetings (irrespective
of
whether the recordings are made public) would be a bad thing.
-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]
On Sat, Mar 5, 2016 at 7:15 PM, John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 9:58 AM, jytdog jytdog@gmail.com wrote:
Hi
This is my first posting here. Sorry if I do anything wrong.
I wanted to note here the following post from James Heilman:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082816.html
And I guess this one too
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082763.html
I fully understand what folks have said about the unworkability of videotaping meetings, and I also understand and appreciate what
Risker
wrote about minutes being legal documents that need to reviewed and approved by all.
At the same time, some enduring record seems essential. Recordings
that
are not made public, but that can be used to verify when things like
the
above happen? So not open, but recorded?
What is really hard about those two posts, is the irresolvable
differences
in statements that were made about those events. Really hard.
I agree.
Start recording now, for private use of the board and associated staff to save them time and so at least the internal disputes are about what was meant rather than what was actually said.
And push the "open" part part of this topic until further down the road, when there is a little more bandwidth to evaluate it properly.
-- John Vandenberg
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