On 6/23/2011 1:59 PM, Dan Rosenthal wrote: > The lesson to be learned from this, I guess, is that even if you have a good > process and a good outcome, sometimes the community doesn't necessarily see > it that way, and a greater deal of proactive engagement could be helpful in > those cases. Less abstractly, I remember there being some talk on this list > about the seat and donations at the time Matt's appointment was first > announced, but what I don't remember (please correct me if I'm wrong on this) > is the WMF publicly addressing community concerns about the grant timing > beyond "no, the seat wasn't bought." We didn't address concerns about timing when the appointment and grant were announced because the concerns then being expressed weren't about timing. Nobody in 2009 was saying we should have taken the grant and waited a few months to appoint Matt, or appointed him immediately and accepted the grant later. The concern at the time was clearly about a quid pro quo, and it's only useful so many times to repeat that there isn't one. There was also a Q&A that addressed the actual process and reasons for Matt's appointment, though maybe it didn't explain the context as well as Sue has just done. But the notion that changing the timing would have made the situation less difficult is only coming up in retrospect.
To be frank, I also disagree that changing the timing would have improved things in any practical sense. It doesn't really obscure the connection much, if that's even what we would want to do. And for people who were worrying about the implications, I think setting things up in stages is just as likely to make it look worse as to make it look better. The delay simply adds the possibility of new concerns, like wondering what other unstated "conditions" had to be satisfied in the intervening time for the other part of the "deal" to go through. And it also encourages the idea that there must still be even more shoes to drop. Basically, the timing issue would just become more raw material for people inclined to engage in speculation. That being said, I fully agree that the engagement and communication with the community around this should have been better. Doing it in the middle of Wikimania was way too chaotic in the first place. Then having our internet connection disappear literally right in between two emails I was sending to announce Matt's appointment and the Omidyar grant left everyone to find out about the grant from Omidyar's press release, and made it seem much less aboveboard than it was. And I recall there was understandable displeasure that some of the targets being used to evaluate the grant were considered confidential at Omidyar's request. --Michael Snow _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
