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Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#61

Post by ianamartin »

chris_wot wrote: post #52
ianamartin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm calling it as I've seen it from my experience. I think I made that pretty clear. I'm not trying to make a general case that there is some specific quality of non-profits that makes it impossible for them to be functional. As I said pretty clearly above, the wikimedia story sounds typical, based on my interactions with non-profits.

Your experience, though, does not meet the reality that there are many fine non-profit success stories. There are a lot of non-functional ones, but I think all folks are pointing out is that it isn't as dire as you have seen.

Success is not the same as functional. One could argue that wikimedia has been very successful in its mission and it is at the same time also disfunctional.

I wouldn't call any of the non-profits I've worked at failures.

Hell, many people have described companies like Microsoft as badly disfunctional, but it would be hard to argue that they are not successful.

If I stepped on anyone's toes with my post, I apologize. I was not trying to take a swipe at any one or any type of organization. I'm still involved with a number of organizations and admire and respect the work that they do.

Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#62

Post by officialchicken »

chris_wot wrote: post #49
samstave wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - thats really odd to me. The whole timeline reads really weird to me as well - with people entering and exiting the WMF so fast - I am of the external subjective opinion that at least some of them were simply extracting money from the WMF. It reads as if they may have negotiated some exit packages and literally just took them. That is a LONG list of "directors" which I could be completely off-base here, but u…

You can't buy Wikipedia :-) but you are right, it's fucked up. Lila and the a majority of the Board of Trustees have taken something amazing and pissed it away. The entire BoT should be disbanded, new members appointed and Jimmy Wales should take a break for 6-12 months and have no direct say in anything or participate in any way, then come back. His "Founder" status should be modified to allow for greater accountabi…

I would definitely donate if they ran a campaign for firing the BoT and removing (or severely limiting) Jimbo's status.

"We've fired the entire board due to mismanagement! Now our editors and engineers need a better leadership ... please donate to help us though this difficult transition as we end this madness once and for all."

The publicity of that campaign would probably be enormous.

Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#63

Post by chris_wot »

ianamartin wrote: post #61
chris_wot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience, though, does not meet the reality that there are many fine non-profit success stories. There are a lot of non-functional ones, but I think all folks are pointing out is that it isn't as dire as you have seen.

Success is not the same as functional. One could argue that wikimedia has been very successful in its mission and it is at the same time also disfunctional. I wouldn't call any of the non-profits I've worked at failures. Hell, many people have described companies like Microsoft as badly disfunctional, but it would be hard to argue that they are not successful. If I stepped on anyone's toes with my post, I apologize.…

No, I didn't mean to imply your experiences aren't valuable. I am the one who should apologise.

Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#64

Post by ianamartin »

chris_wot wrote: post #39
protomyth wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not what issue with that was Ok, the lower funding number might not be the issue, but it certainly seems like the timeline and article regarded it as a bad thing. > The issue is that it wasn't discussed within the BoT Ok, well, I would expect that will probably end the likelihood of further grants from Knight Foundation or many other reputable grant givers. Poor procedure inside an grantee is frowned upon, a…

No, it's not normal. Thst grant application was ambiguously worded. It repeatedly said it was for “the Internet”. It reads that “today, commercial search engines dominate search engine use of the Internet, and they’re employing proprietary technologies to consolidate access to the Internet’s knowledge and information. Their algorithms obscure the way the Internet’s information is collected and displayed”. How on eart…

Those are awfully hard lines to draw. The reality of grant-writing is that it's always a bit vague and a bit dreamy. If you get too specific about things, you might get held uncomfortably tightly to them.

Grant writers know this, and the foundations who give the money also know it. If you weren't on the committee that worked on the grant application, I don't think you can draw any of A, B, or C with certainty. They are not exhaustive of all possibilities, so there's no logical imperative to accept one.

I've written and received grants from the Knight Foundation. Everyone involved understands that there is flexibility in scope from the planning to execution of a project.

For example, I was on the board of an orchestra that won several grants to put on "a performance of the Verdi Requiem." Surprisingly, that can mean different things to different people. What we ended up doing was an interactive multi-media presentation that focused on the history of the piece and its performance by captive Jews at the concentration camp at Terezin. During the course of which, we did also perform the requiem itself.

It was not anything like what you would see if you bought tickets to the NY Phil to go hear the requiem. I can see a reasonable point of view where a person at that event could say, "That was not the Verdi Requiem." And to that person, I would say that it was never our intent to do what the NY Phil would do. We always intended to do something very different. But in my opinion it still counts as "a performance of the Verdi Requiem" and was totally in line with what we requested the grants for in the first place.

I'm not saying this is the situation with the Wikimedia grant. I'm saying that it could be. And you should be careful about trying to draw bright lines around a topic that's pretty hazy by nature and about which we have very incomplete knowledge.

Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#65

Post by RyanSingley »

chris_wot wrote: post #63
ianamartin wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Success is not the same as functional. One could argue that wikimedia has been very successful in its mission and it is at the same time also disfunctional. I wouldn't call any of the non-profits I've worked at failures. Hell, many people have described companies like Microsoft as badly disfunctional, but it would be hard to argue that they are not successful. If I stepped on anyone's toes with my post, I apologize.…

No, I didn't mean to imply your experiences aren't valuable. I am the one who should apologise.

This kind of civil and thoughtful disagreement on the internet is rare, bravo.

Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#66

Post by nyuriks »

Mark222 wrote: post #26
ptest1 wrote: post #2

Some background here: http://mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/ The above conflates a lot of highly unrelated events, but it's a cool visualization. But the reality is that she lost the support of senior staff, and wasn't able to regain it. It's impossible to recover from something like that, so it's a good sign she stepped down.

Reading this, I can't help but notice that none of the people they are hiring comes from a non-profit background, doesn't it surprise anybody?

Depends how you count - significant number of the staff (myself included) were first volunteers in the movement.

Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#67

Post by twobuy »

wantreprenr007 wrote: post #60
ianamartin wrote: post #35

Honestly, this all sounds pretty typical of non-profit organizations. I've been working with various different ones since I was 7. Sometimes as a volunteer, sometimes as an employee, sometimes as an executive, and sometimes as a board member. I have never seen a functional non-profit. For whatever reason, non-profits seem to attract all kinds of people who are motivated by things I can only describe as "weird." And i…

I've worked in startups and large ivy league universities... the latter has more focus on social capital than necessarily delivering value or customer service because there is less survival risk, so the emphasis is on social organizational capital (family-like, countryclub departments) than monetary profit (except for university profit-centers). I've also seen massive corruption, empire building, laughable leadership…

That is really interesting to me, what sort of roles did you work in and what was your path? I'm getting into start-ups now as a coder, and while I went to Penn for undergrad, it was liberal arts. I'd love to loop back into academia if possible, and I'm wondering what sort of path you took? Thanks :)

Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#68

Post by badsock »

ianamartin wrote: post #50
kafkaesq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen a functional non-profit. I've seen quite a few. For whatever reason, non-profits seem to attract all kinds of people who are motivated by things I can only describe as "weird." Not sure how to put my finger on it, but your overall depiction does seem a bit, how to put this, "drama queen"-ish. As in, yes, we've all known of certain horror stories, meltdowns, etc, among non-profits. But overall your c…

I'm calling it as I've seen it from my experience. I think I made that pretty clear. I'm not trying to make a general case that there is some specific quality of non-profits that makes it impossible for them to be functional. As I said pretty clearly above, the wikimedia story sounds typical, based on my interactions with non-profits.

My experience agrees with yours.

I've worked at two companies whose clients have all been non-profits - this has put me in a position to witness the state of dozens of them. I've also spent just as much time in the private sector, which has lent some contrast.

While there are definitely some very well-run non-profits, they are (in my experience) more the exception than the rule. Having said that, I wouldn't say the majority of private sector companies are well-run either.

But in general, the level of flakiness, obsessive behaviour, and eccentricness bordering on insanity was much, much higher at the non-profits. I don't necessarily think that it translated into poor performance as a rule, but at the very least it isn't pretty.

The office parties are a hell of a lot more fun, however, and for my part I'd prefer the company of someone at a non-profit. I have a theory that there's just as much crazy behaviour at for-profits, it's just less tolerated and therefore better hidden (rather than absent).

Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#69

Post by codezero »

chris_wot wrote: post #11
ptest1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crux of it is that she just lost the faith of senior staff. The cause of that probably can't be known by outsiders. But the issue blew up in the wider community when the grant was posted.

Actually, it is known by outsiders. In the end the staff were very open about their concerns. It was the secrecy, dissembling and frankly bastardry that caused good people like James Heilman to be removed from the BoT over the fiasco that was the Knowledge Engine.

Do you think she was written off from the start on account of her low edit count?

Re: Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation

#70

Post by ars »

flashman wrote: post #44
ianamartin wrote: post #35

Honestly, this all sounds pretty typical of non-profit organizations. I've been working with various different ones since I was 7. Sometimes as a volunteer, sometimes as an employee, sometimes as an executive, and sometimes as a board member. I have never seen a functional non-profit. For whatever reason, non-profits seem to attract all kinds of people who are motivated by things I can only describe as "weird." And i…

You're painting with a broad brush and your characterisation is greatly at odds with many of the functional non-profit organisations I know here in Australia: * the St Vincent de Paul Society * the National Heart Foundation * Cancer Council of Australia * Opera Australia * Unicef * National Disability Services I could go on. My point is, non-profit organisations encompass a huge spectrum of activity. Many operate lik…

I think he means non-profits where the board members don't get paid.

Do the ones in your example list get paid?

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