I should narrow the scope of my statement a bit. I understand a need for, and support, carefully crafted NDAs that protect information like credit card numbers and personally identifiable information. I am skeptical of overly broad or vague NDAs, as well as non-disparagement clauses. I am particularly skeptical of the appropriateness of offering payoffs to an employee of WMF (or affiliates) in exchange for the employee's agreement to a non-disparagement clause.
Pine On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 11:27 AM, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm looking at this issue from a few angles. > > 1. If an initial employment contract has a provision that employees who > voluntarily resign and provide X amount of notice will be paid out > something like their accrued vacation time (I believe that some > jurisdictions require this) and a certain amount of medical coverage > (ranging from the remainder of a month to 6 months), and no restrictions on > free speech are involved, I think this would be fine. > > 2. If there is a payoff of WMF funds to employees in exchange for them > agreeing to speech restrictions, I would question whether that's an > appropriate use of donor funds and also whether placing conditions on > employee speech is appropriate for an organization that is supposed to be > strongly aligned with values of freedom of expression. > > 3. I think that there should be more transparency about how WMF funds are > used in general, and this includes employment matters for both WMF and > affiliates. Government agencies in the US disclose a lot of information > about their employees, almost always including compensation, and in many > jurisdictions disciplinary records are also public records. It seems to me > that WMF should strive to have at least the same standard for transparency > of government agencies. Among other problems that arise when compensation > levels are opaque, it's very difficult to do a thorough job of evaluating > WMF and affiliate budgets without knowing how employees are compensated so > that the appropriateness of that compensation can be evaluated. IEG > grantees already have our compensation published, and it seems to me that > this practice should be extended to the other grants programs and to WMF. > > Pine > _______________________________________________ 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>