Christophe,
Thanks for the comments.
I think of WMF Board membership as being similar to ENWP Arbcom or some
event committee memberships in the sense that doing the roles well often
seems to require a near-martyrdom level of commitment. I'd like to see some
ceilings on workloads for volunteers, and that includes the WMF Board if
Board members aren't going to be compensated for their time. One way to
enable those ceilings to be realistic, as we've discussed in this thread,
is to provide support from paid staff for routine work, organizing
communications, preparing reports, writing grant requests, etc. I guess my
priorities in no particular order are that (1) work gets done in a timely
and reasonably high-quality manner, (2) people don't get burnt out. I'm in
favor of using funds to support the community in achieving those goals.
By the way, I'm also aware that taking on roles like WMF Board membership,
ENWP Arbcom, etc. means dealing with a seemingly endless string of
complaints and requests, and I appreciate your making efforts to do a good
job.
Pine
On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 12:36 AM, Christophe Henner <chenner(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hey,
Many topics covered here :)
1. Paid vs. unpaid: I don't know of the legal situation, but I always felt
that for a NGO it is better to have a volunteer board. Especially for us as
our movement is built thanks to volunteers. I fear it would slightly hinder
our message if trustees were paid. But, when we need a specific expertise,
then we can pay for it. But not as a trustee, as an expert helping us on a
specific matter;
2. Time comitment. So on that, we are actively working on trying to reduce
the mandatory time board members have to allocate to WMF. Goal is between
this year and next year to lower it down to what we benchmarked as average
(and I can't find the number again, I'll dig into that). That work started
after a discussion with Guy on the fact that the time comitment was so high
we migh scare away high profiles. So working to get mandatory board time
down.
But there's also "non-mandatory" time comitment. I can only speak for me,
but right now, it takes me from 2h in the day up to 6h, almost everyday. I
try to have Sundays when I don't work (either for my job or wikimedia). In
that I do include reading (scanning for some mailing lists) emails.
Right now, I think that the most complicated thing to handle is travel
times as you need to take almost a week off every time we travel abroad.
But until we invent teleportation (that would be super cool), I can't see a
way to change that.
3. Staff support to the board : We already have some. First, as the
treasurer and secretary roles are filled by staff members, it unburden
board members a lot. On top of that, we also benefit from support from each
department on a needs basis. Travels are taken care of by staff, I'm
working on slides now, I could ask the communication department to help me
on that. Anna and Michelle work a lot with Natalia on board recruitement.
To be fair, staff does a lot of heavy lifting for us already.
What is true however is that we don't have one personn fully assigned to
support the board. But I'm not sure it is needed right now. That might be a
discussion worth having.
4. Appointed seats "quality": yes we are looking for great board members.
And that is also why we need more time than one could expect.
Christophe HENNER
Chair of the board of trustees
chenner(a)wikimedia.org
+33650664739
twitter *@schiste* skype *christophe_henner*
On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 3:52 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi James,
Two points:
1. Intrinsic motivation, at this point, appears to be inadequate for
increasing the population of the Wikimedia volunteer community. I am
skeptical that we should rely on the same mechanism which isn't working
in
the volunteer community to fill slots on the WMF
Board, which also seems
to
be struggling to fill its ranks.
2. I think that there's some grey between fully intrinsic and fully
extrinsic motivation. For example, there are a number WMF employees to
which WMF pays $100,000+ compensation packages. Yet we don't complain
that
their motivations are extrinsic and incompatible
with the Wikimedia
mission. WMF pays them that level of compensation to encourage them to
stay
with WMF instead of working for another
organization (probably a
for-profit
one) which would likely pay them similar levels
of compensation. It seems
to me that if WMF is struggling to attract the quantity and quality of
Board members that it needs, then compensation is a reasonable option to
consider.
Responding to Pete: although it's unusual for nonprofit board members to
be
paid, as far as I can see the practice isn't
forbidden. I imagine that
WMF
Legal could provide guidance about what is and
isn't allowed. Whether
whether it's allowed and whether it should actually happen are, of
course,
two different questions. A resource that I find
instructive is
https://www.asaecenter.org/resources/articles/an_plus/
2015/december/should-board-members-of-nonprofit-
organizations-be-compensated,
which provides a list of pros and cons for providing compensation to
Board
members. One of the points that they make is
along similar lines as
Lane's:
that providing compensation could increase the
diversity of candidates. A
point that I think is also worth making is that if Board members are
compensated then expectations should be proportionately greater for their
performance and attendance to Board matters; I don't want anything like a
repeat of the situation that happened with Lila in which the WMF Board
seems to have been asleep at the wheel. Given that current Board members
seem to be struggling with their workloads, I think that exploring the
pros
and cons of compensating WMF Board members is
worth serious
consideration.
I like the idea of the Board having its own staff separate from the ED.
This would be similar to how legislative bodies are supported by their
own
staff which is separate from the executive
branch. If this kind of
support
would be adequate to address the problems of
Board recruitment (which I
doubt) then I'd say to go for it. It might be worthwhile exploring this
option in tandem with exploring the option of compensating Board members.
Pine
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