User:Peter Damian/WW podcast 119

My transcription below. Comments and corrections welcome. All emphases are mine. Peter Damian (talk) 22:37, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia Weekly podcast #119 – The Foundation and the Departure of Lila Tretikov, March 18, 2016.

Andrew Lih (AL), Liam Wyatt (LW)

48:33 LW: Just before he [Heilman] was removed, the board, it is now known, had an internal straw poll, do we actually remove Lila, and the result was no … there were increasing levels of employee unrest, to the point that the staff morale survey, internal document, was leaked to the Wikipedia signpost, which indicated appallingly low levels of trust and support in senior management and by senior management they meant Lila. And this is not just the entire staff but also other senior managers had no support for Lila.

AL: Right and we should note that, given all this – a lot of what James Heilman was in conflict with the rest of the board over, was two things. One was knowledge about the Knowledge engine, right, or information about the Knowledge engine. And two, how to interact with the employees who came to the board. They went to the board and said we are having real problems with Lila as our executive director, we have no confidence in her, please help us out. And this is not known to the general community, but there was a meeting ..

LW because they are professionals ..

AL: I mean that's the thing, I think, you know, I am really impressed by how much these folks at the Foundation, the employees, tried to solve things outside of whistleblowing and getting community publicity for it, they tried to solve it internally as best as I can see, because I'm pretty plugged in and I saw them trying this from afar and only after they were exasperated did they go to the board and say 'we are really at wits end, it's traumatic to work at this organisation'. There are people taking mental health breaks. Leave of absences. There are people who quite outright, the pattern we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, of 5, 10 15 20 people leaving, who couldn't say why they were leaving, all built up to November.

LW Yeah it takes a lot of time for the wider community to start pulling these threads together and say they are all leaving quietly for the same reason.

AL: right

LW: So, when you have, when you have one person leaving because they don't like the boss, that's one thing. When you have the entire senior management cohort approaching the board of directors saying 'we don't like the boss', that's a quite different thing.

AL: right, and now in retrospect, when you look at what James tried to make a stand on, James Heilman, on the Knowledge Engine in terms of getting the board to r—more about it, saying the fact this was done in secret, let's go and tell the community more about it, I'm willing to write a Signpost piece, to explain it, can I do it, and the board did not want to do that. When the employees came to James Heilman, you know, outside of the … not just going to the board chair but to James, and James was .. he was seen as not being trustworthy by the board. We can now see in retrospect James was very much justified in taking on these issues. And in the end he's thrown off the board. And there has been another person appointed to fill his seat. But I think you have to look back and say, you know, that James was acting out of conscience? And was doing it for the best interests of the movement. And I don't know if there's been any apology or any kind of regret that he had been tossed like that.

LW Not publicly at least. So we should point out that he was replaced by someone who was previously elected to the board and came in net fourth spot in the last election when the top three were elected. Maria […] from Spain, who in my opinion, is an extremely legitimate and relevant and good person to bring into that position. If you have removed a community appointed elected person, putting into place Maria was an excellent decision. She has got very much the best interest of the community at heart, and has the legitimacy of coming next. In the quite recent, six months ago election. And so I would, some people are saying that now all this has come to light you should swap back to James, and get rid of Maria because she's not legitimate. I disagree. James was removed under a legal, if very sad, process and Maria is a quite legitimate board member. The fact that she was also previously a board member of the WMF means that during this period of extreme conflict she could get up to speed much faster than a newly appointed person, an external person. And so her appointment I'm entirely supportive of, and so I want to put that on record that we are not suggesting she is not entirely legitimate.

AL: Right, that's true. Now something that most of the community does not know much about and there has only been a little bit in the Signpost, because this was not a public meeting, was November 9, all-staff meeting, not public, only video-cast to employees, at the WMF HQ, and this is after the board of the WMF had met in person, I think it was that weekend, and they had been approached by many employees saying this is untenable, we cannot work with Lila. And November 9 was an all-hands meeting, with Lila at the front of the room, with Jimmy Wales on one side and Patricio Lorente, as the chair of the WMF, to listen to the staff and to address the staff on this issue. The main takeaway from that was that Jimmy and Patricio stated that they were standing by Lila ...

LW: And the board, the board had prior to this meeting, during a board meeting, had declared a renewed or continued confidence in Lila, full stop. And that's a fair enough thing for them to have decided, but it was declared to have been a unanimous decision – which is not true, we know in retrospect – and it was also, then this all-staff meeting happened after that declaration, so all staff were invited basically to vent their frustrations, and open up this new chapter in peace and love and harmony, after the board had said no actually we reject the criticisms that have been brought to us. (a) We know that that decision was not unanimous, but you have to feel for the board trying to simultaneously provide a public face of unanimity and support for their director. The board is not going to say, you know we had a long conversation and actually we really disagree between ourselves and it's very hard but on balance we're going to stick with her. That's not supporting your executive director, is it? They have to stand there and say we support her and your concerns and this is a second chance. Of course, they are not going to publicly or even amongst the staff, denigrate her ability to be the leader, at that point. But I understand they also tried to put in place some degree of 'you have six months to improve these levels of .. different metrics presumably staff morale was a metric, and they hired a management coach to support her to make those kind of changes. That management coach was a good friend of Guy Kawasaki, who we mentioned before on the board, who it turns out, seems to have been asked to be fired or was no longer needed by Lila at some point. And the staff started to work out between themselves that he had this management coach had cancelled various meetings that he had planned with individual staff members. The staff were asking Lila why has this person, who the board hired for you, cancelled meetings with us, has he been fired. She said, no, he's still working for us, and they then shared amongst themselves the emails that the management coach had been sending to them, saying I am no longer working for the foundation. So it was a direct conflict between the statements of Lila and the statements of her management coach who had been hired for her by the board. This was like literally a couple of days before the eventual demise of Lila, that had a direct .. someone is lying.

AL: Yah, and to wind back a little bit, to that November 9 meeting, Lila was contrite in that meeting. I think she was as shocked as anyone else to see that there was an uprising in the staff. It kind of worries me that she didn't sense that there was consternation in the staff, given how much folks outside the Foundation had heard these rumblings, but ..

LW: the number of times she was saying no one told me, I didn't know there was a problem, it's a cry wolf story, yes, maybe you can get away with that for the first couple of months, first year, but it is simply not true that 'no one told me', 'no one told her' this would be a problem, that would be a problem, or 'if only I had known'. Er, for example the annual plan the previous year, last year's annual plan came out with two days public consultation, which is an appalling low level of transparency, and she said, ‘oh no that was my first annual plan, if only I had known that would be a problem that process – I knew the organisation .. first annual plan, I did not know that was a big deal for the community, and that would be such a problematic concern’. That’s not true. That’s just not true. So many people amongst the staff said this would be a problem.

AL: Right. And that November 9th meeting, where Lila – she did seem contrite, she basically said ‘Im deeply sorry, I apologise, I want to listen to you folks now’ – it was an amazing meeting, it was an amazing meeting, because so many staffers during the interactive phase, at all levels, not just low level, but head of fundraising, they came to the microphone and directly said ‘Lila when I said this and you didn’t pay any attention to me and you are not listening to us – if you look at the timeline I definitely want to refer you back to Molly White’s timeline because these are very much detailed there for giving you the highlights, but she challenged Lila on the KE document and said ‘that was a lie’, and said this in front of the entire staff. Very hard to come back from something like that. Staff also talked to her saying, you know you are on a trip to Africa and you didn’t even talk to me or the other folks who offered to brief you on our efforts in these countries, and it was pretty amazing to see this interaction there. So you kind of saw the writing on the wall there.

LW: Er [Skype freezes]

AL: Let me come back. Asov Bartov was there, you know, like the Wikimedia travelling salesman, like he’s really good at the global outreach person for a lot of the things and he asked Lila, you are going on a trip to Africa, how come you didn’t ask us for briefings and even offered multiple times to talk to Lila about what wikimedia has done there, and she never got back to him and that was a major disappointment for him, and I think anyone who saw that statement said, wow this is not good.

LW: The amazing thing for me about that staff meeting seems to have been that anyone, any human being to have 200 people sit there in front of you and criticise you to a microphone in front of your face has got to be a horrible experience. Can you imagine the level – I wouldn’t go home crying – the emotional toll on your emotional psychological welfare of having 200 people for two hours and criticise you must be the thing only members of scientology would be familiar with.

[…] Turns to the Arnon Geshuri affair.