Lila Tretikov (known as “Lila”), executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, just resigned. The cause of her resignation was Doc James‘ request that she directly state the anticipated cost of the Knowledge Engine project and publish and discuss the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation employee satisfaction survey. She and the Wikimedia Foundation Establishment declined to provide this information and a Wikimedia user revolt followed. The community sentiment around her resignation is that it advances Wikimedia community values and that it sets a precedent for defining how Wikimedia community resources should and should not be used. In the end, it seems that she found it preferable to leave rather than acknowledge community demand for these things. There is no public explanation of the WMF leadership seeming wish to hide this information. The information ought not be controversial to discuss except for the fact that Lila refused to discuss it.
I find no fault with Lila at all. She was dropped into a system of accountability to a community of volunteers. There must have been someone giving her poor advice, because it seemed like many actions attributed to her were designed to be confrontational and disparaging of the Wikimedia community of volunteers. I am baffled as to why she never provided information to the end, and wonder when or if she realized that in choices to either raise or lower tensions, she seemed to be making consistent choices to raise tension and declining choices to lower it. For future holders of her office, I recommend that they choose from any of the thousands of community members who watched her resignation approach and take advice. The board should do this. I am not aware of anyone wanting her resignation outside the context of resignation being an ultimatum to choose in place of information disclosure, and I think almost everyone only expected her to meet information demands. The people who wanted her to resign, so I expect, only came to want this because she seemed to mandate that communication not happen. I have no idea how this outcome came to be. It seems like such a waste – why not just talk for a few minutes?
First I want to share something which is both related and an aside to the story – it is unfortunate and inconsiderate that Doc James was dis-invited to the 2016 Wikimedia Conference. He got his invitation to the conference as a WMF board member in early December 2015. He registered at that time. Around this time, I helped about 5 Wikimedia chapters and usergroups plan to register their representatives for this conference before the January deadline. Toward the end of December, James was dismissed from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation. There was a window when I or others were supposed to realize that James’ dismissal silently and without notice revoked his invitation to the Wikimedia Conference. There are various groups that were depending on James to be at that conference to negotiate issues related to institutional partnerships, and I had already been organizing meetings which I expected that James would attend. The registration deadline came, and other people registered anticipating to meet James there. Just recently, in conversation some people were getting notices about the conference and James realized that he had been removed from the email notice list even though he had previously registered for the conference. James was paying his own travel and lodging, and only wanted to be let in the door of the conference. Now he was in a situation where he had no invitation, and who knows, if he showed up maybe someone would direct that security escort him out. If he cancelled his booking then he pays a cancellation fee. If the WMF reimburses him for the cancellation fee then that is a signal that the WMF would rather use donated funds to keep him away rather than have him attend. It would cause a scene to ask anyone if he is invited, but at the same time, he already registered and got a “see you at the conference!” response. It is also a problem for the community who was depending on him to have an invitation, and only a bureaucratic nonsense barrier to prevent him from attending when he has business as a community representative to attend, and which is unrelated to his previous WMF board relationship. In the end, he got quiet confirmation that his invitation was revoked despite no one telling him this. The idea was that he was invited as a member of the board, and when he was no longer on the board he lost the invitation. He could have come if a chapter had invited him, but since he did not register in that way during the registration period, he could not now get a chapter invitation. He canceled his trip, got the sort of refund which the airline offered him, and the people who wanted to speak with him will not meet him at that event. Overall, his being barred from attending seems like a petty punishment to me. The punishment is from social infrastructure which discourages communication, and not from anyone in particular. The most upsetting part about this to me is that it is a symptom of poor Wikimedia Foundation community practices. His invitation was revoked without communication, and there were multiple groups of stakeholders depending on that communication, but the communication was withheld as part of an esoteric shaming ritual against Doc James and anyone who collaborates with him. If the failure to communicate the invitation revocation was merely in error, then James should have been permitted to attend the conference anyway considering that so many volunteers were depending on him being there. It is really unfair that volunteers depend on paid staff labor to make their plans about the conference, but paid staff are willing to disrupt volunteer plans without apology, without communicating with other stakeholder groups, and at financial cost to Doc James. Then also if anyone raises the issue it could only hurt the reputation of Wikimedia projects – or at least it could have, but now Lila is gone so anyone is free to raise concerns as they like now.
Leave that aside, and back to the main story: Before the Wikimedia Foundation board dismissed James as one among them James had been talking to me over the previous months about my opinions on the costs of software development and how I would feel if the Wikimedia Foundation made major investments in this space. I think I am representative of the community in being supportive of software development, while at the same time being critical of previous Wikimedia Foundation software projects because I perceive them to only have been introduced to the community after deep investment and with no community or user feedback early in the development. This sentiment of wanting community notification and an opportunity for feedback on major investments is discussed elsewhere by various people. I think at this point everyone is in agreement that major investments in software ought to be discussed with community stakeholders, and that it is not acceptable to work at great cost for long periods of time without having public updates about how large amounts of money are spent.
In autumn 2015 James seemed to be worried about the cost of the Knowledge Engine. I know he was already interested in the idea. Before he was even on the board, he and I regularly discussed Wikidata applications, so when he talked to me at this time, I thought nothing of it and least of all about him being on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation. In retrospect, I could have recognized that some of what he discussed with me had to do with some of the budget options he had to approve or deny as a board member, but it was beyond my expectation that anyone at the Wikimedia Foundation would have considered making a major investment in a long-term software development project without community support considering so many previous unhappy precedents with software projects in that way. As things stand now at the time of Lila’s resignation, to the extent of my understanding and as a person who has read everything anyone has published on the matter, I think that the WMF public position is that the Knowledge Engine is a project mostly funded by a $250,000 Knight Foundation grant. Lila has more quietly said that $2,500,000 is committed to the project, but that is not entirely clear, as Risker (who in reviewing the budget) was able to get clarity that this amount was for a team but not necessarily just for that one project. The odd claim is from Doc James, who said that the Knowledge Engine was supposed to be a $35,000,000 project over more than 5 years. From my perspective, what would have calmed the community and answered almost all concerns was a statement from Lila about how much the WMF was budgeting for this software project and over what period of time. The only official statements given seemed to suggest that not much money was only being spent for a short amount of time. There were wild rumors that large amounts of money were being committed long term. It would have been useful to refute those rumors, but as they circulated since December through now, and when pressed no one at the WMF would deny them, and as supporting evidence of a big investment kept leaking, it started to seem like there was a plan to spend lots of community money without community support and for reasons other than community benefit. The especially strange part about this to me is that the Knowledge Engine as described seems like something that I think the Wikimedia community would support, if asked. Among other consequences, I imagine that it would make better connections between Wikidata and various language Wikipedias, and so many times in so many ways many people have supported such things. Why the secrecy? It is hard to say but troublesome that someone would choose it.
The other issue was the WMF employee satisfaction survey. Doc James wanted this discussed publicly. Seemingly other people on the WMF board thought it was best to suppress the existence of the thing. Since Doc James was dismissed and until now, so far as I know, there has been no official statement from the WMF about the existence of this survey. Its results have been leaked, and roughly, 180 of 220 employees did the survey and 90% of those said that they had no confidence in WMF leadership meaning Lila. To me, this is a signal, but I see the Wikimedia community as a supportive network and one that would have trained Lila. One of the things expected of Lila to get respect is transparency. It must be the case that one cause of low employee faith in leadership is lack of transparency, including how the scarce community resources are distributed. Employees of the WMF know that they will interact with the community in all things, and the community loves documentation and little notes, and when they are compelled to do secret work of the kind that ought to be proudly shared, they are doing something contrary to the values of the movement. It creates stress and cognitive dissonance to feel the moral need to do one thing but to work for an organization which directs staff to do another. People work in the nonprofit sector to feel good. I expect that anyone employed by the Wikimedia Foundation could get a 25% pay increase by working in the commercial sector, so when people do work there, they want to be proud of what they are doing and live by the nonprofit values. I expect that Lila’s seeming interest in institutional privacy contributed to low employee satisfaction.
One unsolved mystery of this affair is Jimbo’s criticism of Doc James’ concerns. Doc James said that he was forced to resign for wanting public discussion of the Knowledge Engine budget and the employee satisfaction survey. Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, publicly said, “James has made a lot of noise about why he was dismissed which is utter and complete bullshit.” Right now, it does seem very true that Lila and Jimbo and the establishment side of the board wanted to avoid public discussion of the Knowledge Engine and the employee satisfaction survey. It seems true that Doc James was the first person to publicly call for community discussion of these two things, and this after months of private board discussions that if these issues were not discussed the community would come to know eventually and be upset about the secrecy. Had Doc James not raised these issues, they would have been raised anyway, because in the past few months more than 10 WMF staff who were public figures resigned. I get the idea that those people resigned because they felt their concerns were not being acknowledged, and they would not have resigned had their concerns been addressed, and that they perceived Doc James’ public shaming by Jimbo one among other signs that the WMF establishment would not address their concerns. The strange part of this is that I do not know what Jimbo was thinking here. On the face of things, he seems to be saying that James was dismissed for something other than wanting to talk about the Knowledge Engine and satisfaction, but the strange thing is that it is difficult for me to imagine any bigger problem or controversy than these two things. Jimbo must be referring to a personality conflict. I can only imagine that James wanted to discuss these things, Jimbo+Lila+the establishment thought that any discussion would only be a minor inconvenience and confusion, and that the community mostly would not care one way or the other about such matters. I think that James so lived Wikipedia community values that he could predict what would happen. If it had been possible to be transparent, then I think Lila would be well supported by the community to continue to lead the organization. Since for whatever reasons Lila’s plans to the end were to avoid transparency then I think this is the reason that community feelings could not reconcile with her budget plans.
The community cares a lot about maintaining partnership and it has repeatedly shown this. I suppose that the employee satisfaction survey is moot now. Still there is no statement of how much investment is committed to the Knowledge Engine. I think it would be a good idea for the next director to report the WMF budget in a way that is granular to something like 1-2% of total funds. I know this is a large amount of transparency, and I feel like most organizations are transparent to publicly describe their operations on the order of 15% budget sections, but I think the Wikimedia community needs a little more in some creative way. If there is a USD $100,000,000 budget, then for every $1,000,000 spent, then one time a year someone should spend one hour writing 3-5 sentences about how that one million was spent. This would be a crazy innovation from one perspective, but in line with Wikimedia community values from another. I think this kind of transparency would prevent a lot of grief and raise spirits.