On Monday, 22 February 2016, Faidon Liambotis <fai...@wikimedia.org <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','fai...@wikimedia.org');>> wrote: > > What you did instead was to sent a community-wide email making it sound > like this was a carefully executed plan and the only reason people are > revolting is because they're either change-averse or bitter for not > getting a promotion. This is downright insulting.
It also slides over the fact that the people who have been leaving recently are people who had been hired or promoted during Lila's tenure. This is quite different from people leaving within the first months of a new director's arrival. The tricky thing is that the staff have been trying their best - because they are professionals - to keep internal "office problems" hidden from public view. They have not been advertising their frustrations on-wiki but trying to express their concerns through private and official procedures. This means that now we are at a stage where staff are OPENLY criticising the leadership that can appear to the wider wikiverse like the first sign of a problem and that they are being petty. But it is actually the end of a long road, not the beginning. Suffice to say - in an organisation where the staff are well know for their commitment to the values of the movement, to be complaining publicly (and not just one or two new people, all the senior people too - see the report of the staff survey in The Signpost) means that this is not an insignificant problem or concern only held by some troublemakers. > Finally, with all of your references to "community", it also sounds to > me like like you're trying to gain some support from our community and > effectively stategically place the (almost unanimously) revolting staff > at odds with our community, in the hopes that you can get supporters and > salvage your position. This would be a pretty desperate and selfish > move. I hope I'm wrong. > I too get the sense that this email as trying to claim a sense of martyrdom. Of pointing to the staff and and saying that "they" are unwilling to embrace change - particularly with regards to being a "high tech organisation". This might be a more believable argument if it was not for the tech department have been the most vocal in criticism. I don't think anyone was implacably opposed to improvements in the way tech should be managed - the smoothness of new rollouts and speed of development of new products was famously poor. But that's quite different from the silicon-valley mindset of paranoia about marketshare and product-secrecy. As several people have said to me in the last week (referencing an American-political aphorism) "it's not the crime, it's the coverup". -- wittylama.com Peace, love & metadata _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
