On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:27 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoeks...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Did the fundraising department regard it as "their" programme No, on the contrary, fundraising actively looped in other staff. Folks like Siko and Asaf were involved early on. That's how the advice to not turn this into a paid editing role and to re-craft the JD came into play in the first place (in turn Lori, Pete, Liam got looped in, who all articulated this very clearly). In fact for some time, it was considered to run this as equivalent to a fellowship. From my read of the situation, as the hiring process dragged on and Belfer turned down candidates with strong Wikipedia experience, the programmatic experts ultimately disengaged (seeing that Wikipedia expertise was not a required part of the job from Belfer's perspective, so the fellowship model didn't apply). Because the project had been "held" by fundraising in the first place, it ultimately ended up solely being managed by the fundraising staff. > or did they maybe fear deteriorating relations with the donor If you're a professional fundraiser, it's your job to build and maintain good relationships with donors - there's nothing wrong with that. We've taken on restricted grants in the past, and while these are never a slam dunk and always a bit challenging, on all of these projects, there has always been a healthy tension between "what the funder wants" vs. "what WMF thinks we should do", with programmatic experts providing direct pushback if needed. The issue here isn't that fundraising tried to maintain good relationships with a funder - the issue is that the project oversight and execution wasn't firewalled off to programs as it ordinarily should be. > Were boundries between fundraising and programmatic activities too vague Yes. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
