On 25.06.2011 10:50, wrote Lodewijk: > Hi, > > I read from several posts that the process with the nominating committee did > not work out at all. In the mean time the whole nominating committee (and > therefore any formal procedure where non-board members, read: the community, > have any say on who gets onto the board in the appointed seat). I might have > missed it (probably have) but is there some kind of evaluation of the > functioning of the NomCom and a good reasoning why it was totally abolished? > Is it clear /why/ it did not work?
Hello Lodewijk, this is my personal analysis of the result of the NomCom. I didn't talk it with the other members of the NomCom or the board, it's my private oppinion only. I would like to break the process of the NomCom in three parts: collect candidates, analyse and evaluation, interview with candidates and recommendation to the board. I believe in the first phase the NomCom was great. And actually later the search company we hired also adapted the same method and Bishakha was named by a community member, and not from the pool of the company. So I think that this is something that really worked good, which we also should keep in the future. I agree with Milos here as that our community is now broad enough to surface good candidates. By the second point evaluation there were definitively skill defecit on the NomCom. The NomCom had worked like almost all our committees like LangCom or ChapCom: We have a list of criterias which was given by the board and worked through those criterias very mechanically. But the thing is that for a board candidate this is not enough. There are some unnamed criterias that the LangCom didn't counted in, for example the candidate must be available, should be basically interested in serve on the board of WMF, etc. As I said these criterias are not named, they are sort of inherent. A professional search company has such experiences to know that a certain person basically comes in question or not. The NomCom didn't count these criterias because they were not on the list. So at the end we came up to a handful of names that are all high-scored according to the board criteria but not available for the WMF. On the one side I don't think that the NomCom had not worked orderly here, it is simply so that no one of us had ever such professional experience. It is basically possible that after let's say three or four such experiences that the NomCom can build up the experience, all of the NomCom members are very intelligent people and all of them learn very fast. But first of all we don't have so often the need to search for a board member and secondly as like the ElectionsCommittee, after a nomination it is probable that the members would disperse, until the next time we will call for volunteers again, and the new NomCom may be totally different as the old one so that the lesson learned and experiences gained may be lost. There is a big difference between such committees like Elections Committee and NomCom which is called for need and committees like LangCom or ChapCom where people can really gain experience and professionalism through a period of years. I must also confess that reflecting about this experience I also clearly see my own failure in the whole process. As the board member on the committee I had to report back to the board and correct the criteria so that the unnamed criterias got emphasized when it was apparent that the old set of criterias don't work properly. That was the first time I worked on such a committee and I just came into the board and started to learn the board work. Today I may have worked differently. But yes, we all learn from our failure. Unfortunately there are things like NomCom where one can only make the failure once. Now come to the execution part. The NomCom had mostly worked via mailing-list and wiki. In total (if I recall correctly) we had only two IRC meeting. This was way too ineffective. As we saw in the past how personal meetups or even telefon conference was able to push works forward, like the recent LangCom meeting in Berlin, the way we worked was far too ineffective. In that sense the Foundation and the board should have give the NomCom more resources, for example for telefon conference or even personal interview with potential candidates. The search company also did things like preinterview potential candidates to see if the first evaluation was right. What the NomCom was not able to do, due to resource problems and due to lack of experience. Since we didn't really came to this stage, I cannot tell how good the NomCom could have worked out on this point. So, this is my personal reflection. There were failures made also especially from my side, a lot of things learnd for me personally. A lot of things I learned after I had the chance to observe how the search company had worked, and maybe would not have learned or would have took far longer without that experience. A few of things was not so clear to me until I started to formulate this mail and to write them down. Greetings Ting _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
