The other shoe drops

As I'm sure you're all well-aware now, Erik Moeller has resigned his board membership in order to take up the role of "deputy director" of the Foundation. (See Erik's smarmy acceptance note here.)

This situation brings up a number of issues, but I think trying to talk about all of them in one blog post is a bad idea. So we'll drag this out over a few days, just so people don't get too confused. Let's start with process.

Deputy director? There was no listing on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki for this position. Apparently nobody, outside of Erik and Sue, knew that the Foundation was looking for a deputy director. My contacts in the Board tell me that the Board (except for Erik, and maybe Jimmy) was not aware that the Foundation was looking for a deputy director, and so far as far as I can find no specific authorization exists to hire for this role or to fund the position. The conclusion is that Sue has elected to staff this role herself and to fund it out of the Office of the Executive Director's budget, without consulting anyone except, presumably, Erik. This is perhaps within her discretion, but it certainly seems like a bad idea to go about this process in such a nontransparent way. Closed hiring processes are not a good way to comply with equal opportunity laws, and there are aspects of her announcement that raise at least yellow flags in the EOE sense. I also can't see how she can show compliance with immigration regulations; before she can hire Erik—who, as a German national, needs a work visa to work in the United States—she has to prove that she searched exhaustively for an American who could perform the role, and was unable to find one. With no public posting for the position, it beggars belief that she can honestly make the required affirmations for the visa application. Especially troubling was Sue's decision (as reportedly indicated in an email to the Foundation's "internal" mailing list) to make "preferably not an American" a qualification for this position; not only does that violate the Foundation's own EOE policy, but several aspects of the law as well. Earth to Mike Godwin? Hello? Are you listening?

There's also the appearance of impropriety issue. There's always inurement concerns when a nonpaid member of the board of a nonprofit organization is hired by that organization into a paid role, because there's the possibility that the board member influenced the decision to hire himself or herself, which would be an disallowed inurement under nonprofit law. In this case, I don't believe that Erik actually used his formal power as a Board member to influence the decision; as I stated above, the Board appears to not have been involved in the decision at all. However, there is still the appearance of impropriety, and given the Foundation's long history of playing hard and loose with such principles of governance, that's exactly not the sort of thing that the Foundation needs.

All in all, I find this entire episode remarkably ironic, given the near-total lack of transparency surrounding Moeller, who has run twice for the Board promising both times to increase transparency. I suspect the only reason the weight of all the irony hasn't crushed Erik outright is that his own ultraexpansive ego exactly counterbalances it.

Erik's departure does mean that the Board needs a new secretary. We can only hope that the new secretary will be more open about the Board's minutes. Perhaps now that our advocate for transparency is gone, we can actually get some transparency in the operation of the Foundation.

Update: I'm advised that the Foundation, as a "small employer", is not subject to EOE regulation, and that some of the immigration rules don't apply to them either. Doesn't change the fact that they have an internal policy that prohibits discriminatory behavior. So they're legal here -- just not terribly ethical.

Transparency in dealing with volunteers

As many of the people who read the blog know, I have in the past been an OTRS responder. And while I have not been terribly active there of late, I do occasionally consult on tickets on request. A couple weeks ago, I was asked to consult on a ticket, only to discover that I wasn't able to log in. I assumed that I had merely forgotten my password (or even username) and told the person asking for advice that I couldn't seem to log in at the moment. The other day, though, I was looking through old mail folders and noticed that the folder I have my mail system sort notices from OTRS into stopped receiving mails on June 25th. That wouldn't have been the result of my inability to remember my password; rather, it meant that my account had been shut out of the system.

I'm not really bothered that my account was shut down. Ive made it clear that I'm not actively volunteering, and I did unsubscribe from the private otrs-en-l mailing list that I suppose is mandatory for OTRS responders (although if it is I don't recall any such policy) when I unsubscribed from all wikimedia.org mailing lists. However, the timing was suspicious: my account was shut down mere hours after I broke the Sue Gardner story (the one that prompted Erik Moeller to chide me for "spreading rumors"). So I did some quiet asking of people who I knew to be OTRS admins: was my account disabled, and if so, by whom and why? The fact that it had been shut down without notice bothered me, and the timing certainly seemed suspicious.

Unfortunately, asking around didn't get me any answer. I spoke to three different OTRS admins, none of whom could do more than tell me that my account was disabled. At this point, I emailed Michael Snow and Florence Devouard, in their respective roles of chair of the Communications Committee, which supposedly oversees OTRS, and chair of the Board. Florence got back to me quickly to tell me that my access was not removed by any Board action, and I have no reason to disbelieve her. Somewhat later, Cary Bass IMed me to explain that he had terminated my access and apologizing for not having told me. The reason he gave was my unsubscription from the mailing list, which I still don't fully accept as I did that two weeks previous (on June 11th). I still have lingering doubts about the timing; the fact that it was around an hour after I broke a major news item certainly raised the spectre of recriminations, or at least of a misbegotten belief that I had obtained my information through abuse of my OTRS access.

That my access wasn't terminated is not the issue. The issue is that I wasn't warned that it would be terminated, asked if I wanted it to be terminated, or even so much as told that it had been terminated. This failure to communicate is symptomatic of the near-total lack of transparency that permeates the Foundation. There simply is not a culture of openness within the Foundation; people are used to doing things "quietly" and simply are not in the habit of letting people know that things have been done. It's a cultural problem within the Foundation, one which has become quite deeply entrenched and is not likely to change easily. Small wonder that Erik has had such a hard time changing the Foundation's transparency practices.

An example of transparency

What with the Wikimedia board elections coming up, I thought it might be nice to provide people a pointer to how a real nonprofit implements transparency. Of course, the NYSSCPA has members, which (as we've been told) are too dangerous for the Wikimedia Foundation to have.

The Foundation has done a perfectly terrible job of transparency, though. It's quite impressive how many things seem to be seeing the light of day now only that we're in an election cycle and the candidates are being peppered with questions. It's one thing to say "Well, we could be more transparent"; it's quite another to actually be more transparent.

Is this transparency?

So, there's apparently some interesting happenings down in St. Pete lately, as evidenced by this edit to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki by Wikimedia staffer Cary Bass. Apparently, Carolyn is no longer the chief operating officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. (The position has also been listed as a "job opening".) However, this is the only public evidence for this change; if there's any announcement or statement regarding her departure, I have not been able to find it.

So, either Carolyn resigned or she was let go; in either case there ought to be some public statement from the Foundation on this issue. There isn't. I doubt that the Foundation even plans to release a statement (although now that I've blogged about it, there will probably be a statement of some sort). The fact that staff changes like this (in the absence of an executive director, the chief operating officer is basically the day-to-day head of the organization, so her role is definitely important) are conducted with not even a minimal public statement is certainly not what I would call transparency.

On leaks

Finally, someone at the Foundation has some sense: Florence recently posted on the topic, ending her post with the implied question, "No one has suggested to actually look at reasons why there are leaks". Finally, someone involved with Wikipedia who actually stops to think about what motivates people!

People leak stuff to me on a regular basis. There's at least five people who are consistently leaking stuff to me, and several more who do so on a less frequent basis. In most cases, it's plainly obvious to me that the reason they do it is because they are upset either with the process or the result, and by leaking to me they're hoping to raise public awareness of, and public outcry against, whatever decision or action the leaked communication relates to. Fundamentally, this is because (as Brianna Laugher notes) the Foundation's ability to communicate about its own activities to its stakeholders, let alone to the public at large, has been grotesquely lacking of late.

Seriously, folks, do you really think that my blog ought to be the source people go to in order to find out what is going on in Wikimedia? There ought to be a better channel available for that. Far from being a culture of transparency (I nearly choked when I read Jimmy's comments regarding Google's lack of transparency in conjunction with the launch of Wikia Search), Wikimedia has, for quite some time, fostered a culture of opacity, with very strong information controls even internally. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide who is to blame for this state of affairs.

I believe the leak that prompted this most recent discussion was the leak of what appears to be a PDF-wrapped powerpoint presentation presumably prepared by Sue in order to woo a partnership with Sun. On first glance, there is nothing particularly remarkable in the PDF or the email. What is remarkable to me, however, is apparently that the Board had never seen these documents. Florence told Wikinews that she had not seen the financial projections or staffing plans in the PDF prior to being shown them by Wikinews. Jimmy told me that he had not seen the document before and could not authenticate it, although he did say that nothing in it appeared "alarming or controversial". This is very interesting in light of the fact that the Board has been demanding financial projections from Sue for some time now, but Sue has refused to provide them claiming that she hasn't had time to produce them due to "the audit" and other demands on her time. Obviously, she had time to prepare them for Sun. So the real question raised by this seemingly innocuous leak is, "Why is Sue lying to the Board?" Don't expect an answer on that any time soon. (Just where is the audit, Sue?) I suppose there is a cold irony in the way that the Board's own past failures to be transparent are now biting them back, as the staff they've hired has apparently decided to cut them out of the loop, merely taking the culture of opacity to the next level, as it were.

(David Gerard, by the way, has descended even further in my estimation, by suggesting that the reason for such leaks is to make one "sound cool". It surprises me slightly to see someone who has put so much effort into fighting one cult descend so far into another.)

Open Letter to SlimVirgin

Dear SlimVirgin (no, I won't use your real name; we all know what it is anyway):

I've sent you a couple of private emails previously, but your really quite lunatic rantings on Wikipedia deserve a public reply as well. So, here we go:

1. I have never tried to out another arbitrator on my blog. In fact, I have never tried to out anyone. This is defamatory, but as you are not a credible person it's not actionable.
2. As far as I can recall I've never published on my blog any information that came to me directly from someone on the ArbCom that I didn't confirm by another source first. Any information in my blog that you think I got from the ArbCom I actually got from some other source. Wikipedia leaks like a sponge; I sometimes hear the same rumor from three or four sources. (No, I will not identify my sources.) The closest I've come to revealing information from ArbCom was to discuss my own reactions upon rereading an email from a former arbitrator on the ArbCom's lists. I don't believe that discussing my own reactions to an email is the same as revealing the email.
   
3. I still haven't seen Durova's screed against !! (nor do I particularly care to; I've seen summaries of it from people who I have no reason to distrust that are more than sufficient to satisfy my curiosity), but I do have a very good idea who leaked it outside your circle of security. That person is not on the Arbitration Committee. There are people close to you who you evidently cannot trust, and those people are not on the Arbitration Committee.
   

Krimpet is correct: it is time for you to resign. Your paranoia is, here, being brought to bear on the collegial attitude of the Arbitration Committee. I speak from experience: being an Arbitrator is not easy. Your attempt to drive wedges between the Arbitrators by heinously accusing James of being untrustworthy is disgusting. Wikipedia relies on a collegial attitude founded in trust to meet its purpose. Wikipedia relies on having processes that are as transparent as possible. Your nonstop efforts to destroy that fundamental trust, and to build barriers to transparency, are vile and inexcuseable. If you cannot trust your fellow Wikipedians, then you should leave. If you refuse to leave, and persist in this toxic and destructive behavior, then the only reasonable option left to Wikipedia is to expel you for the toxic snake that you are. Enough is enough. Be gone with you. And kindly take what few minions (they are not friends, for those such as you are not capable of having friends) you have left with you.

Durova takes the dramatic low road

Not quite two weeks ago, I commented on what Durova would do now that she's no longer an admin. I left open the possibility that she would go troll, but thought it was unlikely. Well, it seems I was wrong. In the two weeks since her desysop, Durova has done her damndest to create maximal drama. She has, to date:

• Nominated Angela Beesley's article for deletion (claiming a "personal communication with Angela")
• Made a very public display of asking for the deleted content of Daniel Brandt's article for a "Harvard PhD candidate" that she's supposedly helping
• Continually argued with Giano, in many cases gratuitously
• Commented broadly on various Arbitration matters
• Vigorously defended Mercury as "not her meatpuppet"

In the case of Angela's article (which has been proposed for deletion several times before), Angela is capable of asking plenty of people besides Durova to nominate it for deletion, or even doing it herself. The same can be said for this anonymous Harvard student, who could have turned to any of several hundred other admins for the same service.

It is plainly obvious to me that Durova is seeking attention -- that is, trolling. It does seem that she is attempting to make herself seem important ("I receive communications from Angela Beesley as well as important Harvard students"). Her choice to go public on the request for Brandt's article was clearly drama-seeking; she could have easily gone to any of a number of people (say, Guy Chapman, who is still an admin last I checked) to obtain the deleted revisions for this anonymous individual privately, which would have served the needs of this "friend" without any of the drama. I suppose she could argue that her choice to make the request publicly is respecting "transparency", but I believe the real reason is to create drama.

Add to this her very dramatic publication of a satirical sockpuppet report, and it's all very clear that she's going for maximum drama. Good show, dear; I didn't think you had it in you.

An unanswered question (and one that I don't expect will be answered) is what Angela's role in the deletion request really was. Did Angela really ask Durova? Was the deletion request Angela's idea, or Durova's? Does Angela really think that this was a good idea? Is Angela trying to help rehabilitate Durova's image? If so, why?

Wikimedia seems to have a new Executive Director

I'm going to take a moment out of the election series for this semi-breaking news item. It seems that the WMF has a new Executive Director, but of course there has been no announcement of this, at least not that I've heard of. Apparently, based on the anonymous comment at the bottom of this blog post, it's Susan Gardner, a former director at the CBC. Read the comments on that page to find out how the CBC people think about Ms. Gardner.... it'll be interesting to see how she gets along at the Foundation. Not to mention how long it takes the Foundation to get around to announcing it.

I've known about this for a few days now, and was going to wait until after I'd finish the election series, but my sources are telling me that she's actually started working in the office (the commute from Toronto to St. Pete must be quite the killer) and so decided not to wait any longer.

Update: Gerard claims in a comment that he announced her appointment on his blog, but I can't find the post; believe what you want. Still, how very typical of the Foundation to only announce a major change like this to its close friends only. It continues to amaze me that people donate to this organization at all.

Second update: Wikimedia Board Member Erik Moeller, also in comments below, refuses to either confirm or deny the rumor, stating that the "situation is more complex than [my] post suggests". Frankly, I don't see how it could be "more complex"; either they have hired her, or they have not. I don't understand why he can't make a definite statement on the issue, but obviously I am nowhere near as smart as Erik and, of course, could never understand the complexities of the possible answers to the question "Is Sue Gardner the new Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation?"

I must admit that I look forward to hearing more about the obviously complex relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and Sue Gardner. This must be an example of the improved transparency in communication Erik promised to bring to the board when he ran the last time.

Third update: Reports are now in that Erik has announced that Sue Gardner has been officially hired -- on an IRC channel. Public, but not exactly the most effective of communication methods. I can only hope that there will be a more formal statement somewhere, since it's sorta hard to link to an IRC channel in a blog post. Still no word on the complexities that Erik hinted at, except for this tidbit: her apparent title is "special consultant and advisor", not the expected "interim executive director". Nice and vague, gives nobody any meaningful expectations as to what her role will be. Well, we can only hope that she and the Board both know what it means.

Fourth update: Fearless Leaderette announced it on the mailing list; here's the link. I'll save further comment for a subsequent post.

Kicked out of the Wikicult

I suggested a while back that Wikipedia is turning into a cult. At least one other site has decided to run with this idea, although they seem mainly to be collecting links instead of actually putting up an argument for how Wikipedia is a cult. I got first-hand exposure to the cultic side of Wikipedia—or at least Wikimedia—yesterday. Apparently, my comments yesterday, specifically about the contents of Sue's email to the Wikimedia "internal" mailing list, triggered a very cultic response from Jimbo. Not only did Jimbo go around telling people that I'm a "liar" (without actually identifying what content in my post was a lie—behavior which induced at least one person I talked to be convinced that in fact what I was saying was completely true), but he also went to the members of that list and demanded that the person who leaked to me "voluntarily" come forward. (I asked Jimbo to explain why he called me a liar, but he did not reply to that email. He is, however, reading emails from me, as we will see below.)

Not long after Jimbo made his demand, I was notified of it—by at least three people. Jimbo's "plea" for the "leaker" to come forward is laced in moral condemnation for the malfeasor. He promised to keep the confessions confidential. Why he would make such a promise eludes me; clearly anyone who does come forward will be immediately struck from Jimbo's "trustworthy" list, which means that he or she will not be invited to join the "really internal" list that Sue has already proposed creating; this list would contain only "really trustworthy" people and formally require nondisclosure of its participants. Failure to come forward is painted as a grave moral offense: "Anything less is a moral offense against people who have trusted you." The whole approach and language used reminds me terribly much of the inner workings of some of the cults I studied back in the 90s, especially the use of the threat of withdrawal of the good will of the founder as an incentive to act against personal interest.

Upon hearing this, I decided to send Jimbo another email:

You're not going to get anywhere with your witchhunt. Multiple people leaked that email to me, including at least one person who, as far as I know, is not actually on the internal-l list. Even if you find one of the leaks, you'll have missed two or three more.

Internal-l leaks like a sieve. There's over 100 people on that list and lots of them feel free to share all sorts of information from it with others not on the list. This is nothing new.

All you will accomplish with this witchhunt is increase hostility, decrease trust, and hurt even more feelings than you have already. And people will still leak to me.

Jimbo's response was to forward my entire email, without comment, to the internal mailing list. In a normal environment, this would make no sense. In a cultic environment, however, it's perfectly reasonable: it serves to reinforce the need for immediate action and for the person who has sinned against the founder to come forth and confess his sin. Until the guilty party comes forward, all parties present are considered to share in that person's guilt, so the others would be strongly incented to identify the malfeasor and push him or her forward. Evidence that the leak is ongoing just amplifies the need for immediate compliance. Fortunately for Wikimedia (and for my plentitude of sources, as well as all the others in the community that rely on this unofficial channel to find out what is really going on in the Foundation), there are enough people on the internal list who haven't bought into Jimmy's cult, too many for Jimbo to credibly declare all of them untrustworthy. In a followup demand, Jimbo said, "I just want to understand who thinks that sending internal stuff to this person is a good idea... and why". The way he used "this person" just reeks of "disgusting slimeball that nobody in their right mind would talk to". It's quite obvious that Jimbo has declared me a "suppressive person" and is expecting others to act accordingly.

There's over 100 people on the Wikimedia "internal" mailing list. I've never been a subscriber, but I've been privy to a significant portion of its content, simply because people on it have felt that I had a need or right to know, for whatever purpose. I don't go asking for people to tell me what's going on there; people come to me unbidden and tell me. I'm not the only one, either; I often hear about internal goings on from people who, as far as I know, aren't on the internal list themselves. Wikimedia has a very powerful gossip engine, it would seem; small surprise, that. Ironically, the reason why there is so much unofficial communication like this going on is the gross lack of transparency in official communications from the Foundation. At this point, it should be glaringly obvious who is to blame for that, so I won't go to the trouble to actually say the name. The answer is left as an exercise to the reader.

Jimbo, just one parting request: can I please have a copy of my SP declare? I think it would go down in nice irony next to my Wikimania 2006 Speaker's badge. Too bad Wikimedia never issued membership cards.