Actual things have been going on in WikiLand this year and before it all gets too dated, we have to say something about these items.
María Sefidari Huici quits being WMF Chairperson, becomes a WMF "consultant"
We are going to be brutally honest - before we read about her quitting, we did not know who was Wikimedia Foundation Chair. Sefidari Huici was Chairperson for eight years, which is one year longer than this blog has been running, and I have not heard a peep about her or how she has been operating the Wikimedia Foundation. She resigned on the 3rd of June with the following email:
Dear All,
There is one last bit of news I would like to share following the Board
meeting update.
After ~ 8 years on the Board of Trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation - a
long time! - I have notified the Board that I am stepping down as Chair and
trustee, effective end of day today.
As all of you know, the community-selected seats were due to expire last
year and were extended at the request of the Board to see through these
difficult and unprecedented times. Now, after chairing the last meeting of
the fiscal year and having the call for candidates for the upcoming
elections approved, it is the least disruptive moment for me to step down.
The Foundation has asked me to consider an advisory role to support
Movement Strategy and the onboarding of new trustees and the new CEO/ED, to
help support leadership and this strategic transition. Nataliia Tymkiv,
currently Vice Chair, will act as Chair until a new one is elected by the
Board ensuring continuity.
Hopefully this news will not come as too much of a surprise. I am grateful
to the community members who lent me their trust and support to become a
trustee on two different occasions, to the staff, and to the trustees for
their confidence in me in the different leadership positions I have held
within the Board - first as committee chair, then two terms as Vice Chair,
and two terms as Chair.
Together we have accomplished many things during this time, but if I had to
single out only a few they would be the following: launching the Movement
Strategy process, engaging in the most ambitious governance reform in the
history of the Board, and working to ensure the stability and
sustainability of the Foundation. It has been a time of change, of
discussing strategy and our future, and deciding together what the path
forward should be.
Of course, the work is never finished - it will be the task of the Board to
continue what has been done and face the newer and complex challenges that
will no doubt arise. I hope that we will see many of the women of the
movement and people from the Global South as candidates in the upcoming
community elections - I know there are many qualified people ready to step
into these important roles. I look forward to supporting an increasingly
capable and diverse Board.
Be safe and well everyone.
Tupananchiskama, [This is a Quechua farewell meaning "till we meet again" - S.]
María
--
María Sefidari Huici
Chair of the Board
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Then twenty days later she was hired to "consult with the Foundation on Movement Strategy and the ongoing Board evolution for the upcoming year" and the uproar was something.
Hello, all. :)
I hope and trust that everyone is keeping well during these times!
I’m Maggie Dennis, Vice President of the Community Resilience &
Sustainability group of Wikimedia Foundation, within the Legal department.
I wanted to announce with pleasure that Maria Sefidari has agreed to
consult with the Foundation on Movement Strategy and the ongoing Board
evolution for the upcoming year. Many of us know María from her role as the
chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, from which she
provided invaluable leadership in governance, oversight, and fundraising.
Others may know her from her volunteer work as User:Raystorm
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Raystorm>, in which she has a broad
range of experience.
María, based in Spain, commenced her assignment with the Foundation this
week. We intend to tap into her expertise and knowledge of the Foundation
to support a successful implementation of the Movement’s Strategy and to
tap into new opportunities. (With her Board work, she will be supporting
Quim Gil’s team with the Board election and helping Margo Lee in improving
onboarding, documentation practices, and training.) María will report to me
as part of our Community Resilience & Sustainability group. I’m excited
that she accepted our offer for a more hands-on assignment, particularly
given how important all of the work she’ll be supporting is. :) With more
than 15 years of Wikimedia experience, her contributions in the next phase
will be a tremendous benefit to me and my team as we continue settling into
our own work on Movement Strategy.
Those of you who are involved with Movement Strategy are used to seeing her
at related meetings and still will. :) I anticipate María will be joining
one or more of the Movement Strategy global conversations
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Updates/June_15,_2021>
this weekend. Advertisement alert: maybe you can, too? Here’s more detail
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Updates/June_15,_2021>!
I myself will be attending at least one of those sessions and look forward
to seeing some of you there.
Warm regards,
Maggie
--
Maggie Dennis
She/her/hers
Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Hi Maggie,
I am flabbergasted.
It is verging on inappropriate for the WMF to immediately hire a trustee
the moment they step down from the Board.
I could just about understand if the focus was solely on the executive
transition. But this seems much wider.
As a former affiliate Chair I would never have dreamed of taking a job
right away at the affiliate I worked for. That would have created the
impression that volunteer trustees spent their time on the Board creating
remunerated roles for thenselves.
And it would have broken rules that we introduced, under direct threat by
the WMF of being de-recognised as an affiliate.
I am genuinely baffled why anyone thought this was a good idea, and while I
have the greatest respect for all involved, I urge Maria, the board, and
you to reconsider.
Regards,
Chris
Hi Maggie,
to be honest this is really difficult to understand. While the WMF, through
it's various committees, pushed affiliates to clearly draw the lines
between board and staff by introducing stringent governance measures (and
rightly so), which also include paragraphs about introducing a cooldown
period before switching between board and being employed by the same
organisation, the WMF is ignoring all of that governance advice it has
given over the last few years.
I feel quite silly now having been on the simpleAPG committee for three
years and having advised affiliates who wanted to hire staff for the first
time to draw clear lines between staff and board members, to now have to
see this exact scenario I warned against play out at the WMF. Maria's
departure from the BoT, even before her tenure was over and subsequent
hiring really calls into question what the WMF thinks good governance
should look like, notwithstanding the fact that the BoT now has one
community elected seat less at a critical time in the strategy
implementation process.
All in all I can only call for a governance overhaul at the WMF so that
murky situations like this don't happen again.
Quite frustrated regards,
Philip
Greetings,
This is an unfortunate situation. In general circumstances I would have
been happy to see the addition.
"to draw clear lines between staff and board members " — I think this has
been a practice in different organisation. In a different organisation I
have seen a director was disallowed to join as a consultant immediately
after his disassociation.
But do we have any documented Wikimedia policy that allows or prohibits
such an appointment? It would be good to know about such guidelines.
ইতি,
টিটো দত্ত/User:Titodutta
Hello, all.
I’m sorry for my lack of clarity! María is *not* Foundation staff. She is
an independent consultant. She did not discuss this role with me while she
was on the Board. She quite rightly would not. We talked about it after her
departure.
Best regards,
Maggie
She/her/hers
Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Maggie,
Please be clear. How many hours a week, what remuneration, if any.
Andreas
And it went on like that from there with Kolbe keeping up the pressure.
Maggie,
You say, María "did not discuss this role with me while she was on the
Board. She *quite rightly would not. We talked about it after her departure*
."
It seems to me you are paying lip service here to the idea that it's
inappropriate for a sitting board member to negotiate transitioning to a
lucrative consultant's job, for all the reasons others in this thread have
mentioned.
But three weeks ago, when María announced she would be stepping down[1],
she already said:
"The Foundation has asked me to consider an advisory role to support *Movement
Strategy and the onboarding of new trustees* and the new CEO/ED, to help
support leadership and this strategic transition."
This is surely the same job you just announced:
"Maria Sefidari has agreed to consult with the Foundation on *Movement
Strategy and the ongoing Board evolution* for the upcoming year".
So in fact María did discuss this while still on the board. Perhaps not
with you personally, but how is it ethically "quite right" in your mind
that she shouldn't have discussed it with you beforehand, but ethically
fine for her to have discussed it at length with others?
I guess we are supposed to believe that María expressed no interest
whatsoever in such a role, and was entirely surprised and flattered when
everybody else came up to her and suggested it. Right? Did she maybe have
to be talked into accepting money for the role?
I now understand Dariusz' comment in the same thread three weeks ago, when
he said to María[2]:
"This is not a farewell, as I'm confident you will stay in the movement
indifferent roles, be they *formal (like the one you're transitioning to)*
or informal, like always".
With the benefit of hindsight, this did sound like a paid role even then.
And in fact, Amanda's email just now[3] confirms that this was discussed
long before María stepped down.
María, with her wealth of experience, is surely aware that affiliates have
been advised to strenuously avoid such conflicts of interest over the
years. This is very much a case of "Don't do as I do, do as I say".
Why should anyone stand for that? If María wants to give advice, serve the
mission, she can do so as a volunteer, like everyone else.
Amanda, your various explanations as to why a paid role for María is
necessary now that she has left the board, and why it's the best use of
donors' money, fail to dispel the sense of plain *weirdness* attached to
this.
Andreas
I'm not sure reversing such a decision, with the consequent indemnisation
that most probably WMF will have to pay to Maria Sefidari, is the best
solution out of this conundrum.
If the evil is already done, it should be solved in a way that best serves
the Movement, and throwing such indemnization costs out of the window
probably is not the best.
Thanks,
Paulo
+1 to Paulo's point, personally I would like to see us ease up on María and
this seemingly temporary paid role. It's not a sinecure, not an arbitrary
nepotistic position—rather, it looks like WMF would benefit.
If the people in this thread truly have the good of the organization and
the movement at heart, there are much bigger structural issues with WMF and
this is just a reminder that we have to fix these. Save your energy for
fighting actual corruption and not just the perception of it. How about we
encourage María in her advisory role to help hire an ED committed to
accountability to the communities, for example?
-Adam W.
Adam,
I understand that you would like to see María provide advice, but this is a
volunteer organisation – everybody, WMF paid staff excepted, works, and
contributes their expertise, for free. That includes board members. And I
fail to see why a board member who – according to Form 990 data at least[1]
– has in most years worked an average of 2 hours per week for the WMF can
not be expected to provide her advice on the same basis.
Even if the Form 990 information were for some reason a gross
underestimate, I am absolutely certain that there are many Wikipedians who
have spent as many and more volunteer hours on their contributions – be it
writing outstanding articles, like SlimVirgin did for many years, or
volunteer work on various committees – than the average board member. Who
pays them?
Think about it. You can have some volunteers be more equal than others,
make them the recipients of financial favours, but it is not a recipe for
harmony, and for good reason. And if you head an organisation that relies
on volunteer labour for almost its entire process of value generation, you
should be prepared to work for it as a volunteer.
Andreas
[1]
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200049703/20203134…
We could go on, but the link is out there to see all the 67 or so responses. Other people of note in the list: Fae, Risker, Erik "flee children, he's coming!" Moeller, Dan "I predict baseball games with math" Szymborski, Amanda Keaton (the WMF legal person), Pavel Richter, and Andy Mabbett. The GenderDesk blog thinks she will be paid, but we assume the drama will continue somehow because that is The Wikipedia Way™.
Sefidari Huici at WikiWomen Camp in 2017. Image stolen from Wikipedia (natch.)
The April WMF mailing list switchover
For those on the WMF email list (not us), the entire system vanished in mid-April then returned on April 28th (a date with historical undertones) because updates time! I suppose. Amir Sarabadani sent out the message that the "Mailman 3" software was open for general use and that the archives were being converted over. No response from the users. We heard rumors that people were unhappy.
Freenode gets sold off
Freenode ran the Internet Relay Chat servers favored by Wikipedia insiders, this thread at the Wikipedia Sucks! forum goes into some details while this old Wikipediocracy thread from 2013 runs through more of it. Eric Barbour "spilled the beans" then:
That's all for this month.....
We are out of time for this month. When the next tranche of Wikipedia news comes along we will discuss it.
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