Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation
lists.wikimedia.org
lists.wikimedia.org
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 it's not just at the management levels. Volunteers and employees tend to have an irrational sense of entitlement, as though the mission of the group and the fact that they are in some way devoted to it earns them a right to a voice in the leadership.
But there are also issues with the personalities that the management roles attract, particularly with boards. There are two types of board members: those who are doing the work because they think they should, so they want to get in, make decisions, and get out. Then there are the ones who are passionately invested in "the cause", and the passionate ones are complete wild cards. You never know what you are going to get. Narcissists, martyrs, and drama queens, most often. But sometimes other.
I haven't been following this situation at all, but if I had to make a guess, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Lila was probably doing her honest and straightforward best to deal with a situation that was way over her head and made some mistakes.
The board and other employees are probably a mixed bag of honest, good-heated people trying to make a difference, some complete nutbags, and a lot of people in between.
In many ways, non-profits are like academia. Important and necessary organizations, but extremely disfunctional in the same ways. They tend to be sanctuaries for people who do not really function all that well in public society or companies. The pay stakes are generally lower, so people fight militantly over issues of status and control that seem trivial to the rest of the outside world.
* 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 like any other company and pay wages for the majority of employees. I would argue that 'the mission' actually makes a non-profit more likely to succeed, as everybody knows what they're working towards and what team they're on.
Wikipedia is a different beast entirely.
Sorry if I'm a little doubtful but that's quite a resume.
But people love them cause they are functional. Lot's of PR.
The op topic (On topic to the parent link) was they are very broken internally. So much so they fail the the cause of good.
They do, and they don't, on topic is how good they are, is 500 million the red cross spent on 6 houses true, and right. What's the real story. Are NPO that bad really?
Do the ones in your example list get paid?
If you run your own restaurant and you're there every day serving food to customers, you have a very rich stream of immediate feedback on how your company is doing. The purpose is pretty clear. If you have a bad idea, people will tell you that your porkchop milkshake is terrible and you'll stop serving it.
As companies grow, the feedback loops get longer and the signals get attenuated. That allows larger companies to get more and more crazy. Especially so for companies selling to the "enterprise" market. There deals happen very rarely, allowing the crazy to metastasize.
Many non-profits have it worse, because they have broad missions. Their goal is to do good, but "good" often ends up being a broad category, so it's easy for them to end up doing a weird variety of things with varying degrees of effectiveness. Worse, even if you can get people to agree on a clear definition of "good", the feedback loops are weird. Since they rarely get money from direct service, they have to engage in a bunch of semi-related activities to fund the mission stuff. Often that's grant money, which means enterprise-like sales cycles and feedback loops that are way too long.
The non-profits I've seen do best have clear missions, specific revenue sources, frequent feedback, and a lot of discipline around picking projects. E.g., I've volunteered for the Long Now Foundation for years; they're smart, small, and scrappy. Or the California Academy of Sciences runs a damned good science museum, and I think it really helps that each and every day things have to work for their thousands of visitors. But the further non-profits get away from that, I think the easier it is for madness to creep in.
"Doing good" as a goal is not just broad, it is subjective. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Unless the goal is something practical, build something, maintain something, offer some kind of specific service, you are looking at a goal that is highly mobile and likely to be hijacked.
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 characterization (not specific to the sentence above) seems rather hyperbolic. People join non-profits with all kinds of motivations, just like they do for-profits. Yes, you do find narcissists -- but you also find a lot of solid, highly principled (and highly skilled) people. It's just that their stories usually aren't the ones that trigger open letters, blogposts, and interactive timeline visualizations.
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.
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).
But to state that one isn't aware of the existence of large, decades-old, indisputably functioning non-profit organizations (like e.g. Médecins Sans Frontières) seems, well... disconnected from reality.
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.
What I think these organizations mostly lack is a clear incentive structure. Money flows in on one end and is spent on... stuff.
There's not a strong incentive for tracking performance or impact. If you spent the money, got something out of it and didn't kill anybody in the process, you're gold. Actually, most non-profits I've worked with are very averse to the idea of measuring the impact of their activities.
There's also the problem of failure; most just don't recognize failure as a necessary step to success. I regularly see complete failures being spun into successes. The very admission of failure is enough to get you fired or shunned.
I'm actually looking at what comes out of YC (e.g. Watsi, Bayes Impact) to see if a new model of non-profits emerges, one that moves fast and embraces result-driven approaches.
I interviewed there for a Systems Administrator position. Part of the interview was a code sample -- solve a specific problem using a scripting language. I submitted a 'mvp' -- a script that worked well, took about an hour of effort, and performed the required task in two environments, one of which was a chrooted jail that the person who graded it was welcome to log in to just in case the code did not work on their workstation.
The feedback from the examiner relayed via the HR recruiter was that it was the "worst code they had ever seen," and they were offended that I did not write it in an object oriented manner and that it completely lacked any testing and validation -- which was wrong, actually, I validated inputs with a regular expression.
Remember, this was for a systems administrator position, not a developer position.
And after that feedback, I didn't want to work for Wikimedia anymore.
It's true that the fights can be so brutal because the stakes are often so small.
There are some exceptions where good leadership and teams exist and deliver worthy value without economic or social forces, but these are outliers.
I have seen both of them have to deal with all kinds of insane bullshit. For the sake of the conversation, I must point out that my individual observations and experiences do not in any way constitute something I could call a general idea.
My thoughts about non-profits and academia are limited to my own personal experiences.
There are probably some great academic or non-profit places to work. Not disputing that.
In fact, I'm working for a very healthy one right now in Brooklyn. But you know what the structure of that org is? Total artistic dictatorship.
Worked non-profits since 1988 and I have found the best place to work and have been with them for 8 years now. Very functional and a great place to work. We provide services for children throughout our area and have around 300 employees. If your actually interested in seeing a functional non-profit we can talk further.
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.
Something caught my eye looking at it "Signpost reveals that the Wikimedia Foundation initially requested $6 million from the Knight Foundation". That's pretty common actually when dealing with private foundations. They don't have the budget for a big request this funding period, but are interested so they drop a smaller amount of funding. This might lead to a bigger funding event or the interest of other foundations (a good thing). This seems like it was characterized as bad, but it actually is normal and often very good. I remember a couple projects that got a regional grant to give seed money which developed into a very large grant from a national foundation. The angel investing pattern is not limited to startups.
Looking at what happened and given the demonizing of the Knight Foundation, I would imagine no private foundation will do a follow-up or even be inclined to give money for other projects.
They also made that grant application so vague that it looked like they wanted to compete with Google. Read the document. Heck, read the article that is now on Wikipedia!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo...
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, and having their name shown in a negative light is a warning to everyone else.
> They also made that grant application so vague that it looked like they wanted to compete with Google. Read the document. Heck, read the article that is now on Wikipedia!
Looking at this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/a7/Knowl...
It looks pretty normal for how you write up a project. You really only put high level stuff in for some of these organizations.
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 earth would an internal search engine help in this regard? And why is this wording so broad?
The kicker is the line in the grant that “Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia will be the Internet’s first transparent search engine, and the first one engineered by the Wikimedia Foundation.”
If I was to read that grant application, I'd be expecting an Internet search engine. Lila and the BoT, including Jimmy Wales, says that it never was.
If that's the case, as I said in a comment on a recent blog post by Lila, then the only conclusions that can be come to are:
A. The Knight Foundation were mislead as to the purpose of the grant application,
B. Someone, or multiple people, within the BoT of the WMF were not telling the truth, or
C. This grant application was put together by someone who was incompetent.
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.
I was commenting on the actual application. Its pretty normal for what you submit and, yes, technical perfection is not a hallmark of granting. Ambiguously worded happens a lot particularly if there is a size limit to the application. I didn't comment if the intent actually matched what they told other people. If they mislead people is not really something I have knowledge of.
I will say once again that I doubt they (or their successors) will have a shot of outside grants given the governance problem and the negative light it cast on Knight Foundation. It is an amazingly small world of grant organizations.
The degree of chaos and dysfunction it illustrates truly is astonishing, it seems they had an utter lack of competent, experienced managers.
Very sad situation. Is Wikipedia itself severely affected by this?
See: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2014-2015_Fundraising_R...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177401
But the original story on HN has some comments from me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11101164
My take at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11101262
For an excellent backgrounder, then Liam awyatt's b;oh sets things put the clearest:
http://wittylama.com/2016/01/08/strategy-and-controversy/
And:
http://wittylama.com/2016/01/30/strategy-controversy-part-2/
As well, the foundation has no current strategic plan at the moment. Once there is a plan (formed with community involvement) and it's decided some search project should be a priority, then I think most people would have no problem with such grant funding.
I think part of the problem here is that she had never edited Wikipedia before joining, which means it would have been very hard for her to understand the vast cultural differences.
Wikipedia comes out of the open-source and open-culture world, which has a very strong transparency bias, and which has had to fight hard to maintain that openness. And my experience is that Wikipedia even stronger than that, in that the editor communities organize many thousands of people all in public. Making that work requires very strong habits of transparency.
It's very different than current American business culture, where executives get a substantial level of deference and assumed control of information.
Truth to be said, I do really like Wikipedia's mobile layout and mobile website in general. I still think they should do something with the discussion system, as I think having wiki-style discussions that nobody ever opens is not really good for anything, but I don't know what to do instead. :)
Lila's stint has had a terrible impact on the staff and community alike.
Here are some emails to the Wikimedia mailing list. The one that started the beginning of the end is when she was very specifically asked for the Knight Foundation grant application, which it now appears was the catalyst for the Board removing James because he asked questions that threatened her:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-Febru...
When it was finally released - which only occurred when someone from outside the Board took the initiative to speak to the Knight Foundation who said the grant was never confidential even though the WMF said it was - there was a mass exodus of staff, with the most notable from Siko Bourtese, whose email to the mailing list [1] read, in part:
I’ve had the amazing privilege of serving this movement in a staff capacity for the past 4 ½ years, but I’ve now decided to move on from my role at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Transparency, integrity, community and free knowledge remain deeply important to me, and I believe I will be better placed to represent those values in a volunteer capacity at this time.
Ido Ivri sent the following email to the same ML [2], in which he states his serious concerns around transparency, the removal of James and the steady flow of people resigning.
Brion Vibber, an exceptional and well respected member of staff sent a direct email asking what was being done stop people leaving. [3]
Then Lila sent out a now infamous "Why we've changed" email, and made things much, much worse. [4] it was summed up well by Brion [5]:
Lila, a few notes.
First, many staff members feel that the accomplishments you claim under "we" are not attributable to you.
Complaints about lack of strategy and confusing management have come from all levels of the staff; the implication that people who failed to be promoted might be behind discontent seems not to hold water.
As to shutting down pet projects to improve focus, it's unclear what projects you refer to.
Fundamentally we agree that we must improve tech. But the tech side of the organization, based on my conversations with other employees including managers, does not seem to have benefited from your tenure -- ops laregely manages itself, while the other sections get occasionally surprised by a reorg. We've still not fully recovered from the 2015 reorg and Damon's appearance and disappearance.
If your contention is that tech supports you as a silent majority, I have strong doubts that this is the case.
James Heilman explained the problems around the Knowledhe Engine, which was pretty damning [6].
The final departure, and IMO the most damning email, was from data scientist Oliver Keyes, who resigned [7] with the following email:
Dear all,
I am leaving the Wikimedia Foundation to take up a job as a Senior Data Scientist at an information security company. My last day will be on 18 March.
After 12 months of continual stress, losses and workplace fear, I no longer wish to work for the Wikimedia Foundation.
While I appreciate that the Board of Trustees may take steps to rectify the situation, I have no confidence in their ability to effectively do so given their failure to solve for the problem until it became a publicity issue as well as a staff complaint.
I wish the movement and community the best of luck in building a fairer, more transparent and more representative governing structure.
All the best,
Oliver Keyes
Of these last 5 years, Wikimedia Foundation
It is the minutes of the Discovery Team meeting [8] that really showed me the level of Lila's dissembling, she kept trying deflect awkward questions to others and kept asking why staff didn't feel "empowered'. I'm glad she has gone. She has caused untold damage to the WMF, it is literally going to kts years to resolve the fall out of all of this and regain trust with EMF staff and community by the BoT. Many of the Board should just resign. Those who were open and engaged the community, such as Dariusz, should definitely stay!
1. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-Febru...
2. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-Febru...
3. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-Febru...
4. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-Febru...
5. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-Febru...
6. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-Febru...
7. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-Febru...
8. https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/2016-02-16_Discussing...
https://www.quora.com/What-has-caused-so-many-people-to-leav...
That's my impression anyway.
I have nothing but good will and the utmost respect for those who work at the WMF as employees.
It's a little hard to talk about, in that most Americans don't even realize there's an alternative to the "CEO is the biggest boss" model. But both Servant Leadership and the Toyota Production System are alternatives that invert the normal hierarchy, putting those served (e.g., customers, readers) on top, the people doing the direct work second, and everybody supporting them (managers, executives) them beneath that. I think the latter would be a much better fit for the WMF style.
Apart from that, excellent summary of events.
According to my browser's spell-checker, Mr. Vibber is misspelling his name.
Who are you going to trust, some guy who apparently can't spell his own name right, or a multibillion dollar corporation that spends tons of money on developing state-of-the-art software tools like spell-checkers?
You know, instead of this playing startup thing.
You cannot go into an organization with such an extreme ethos around transparency and openness as the WMF and get away with secretly coming up with a plan to compete against Google. That's what was done, and I don't care who on the Board say it wasn't ever a plan to compete against Google with a search engine made by the WMF: that was the plan cooked up by Damon, and I'm certain Lila kept going with it, even when Damon left.
It was discussed for a long time when I was active in the community. People who were active in the community championed it.
The execution seems to have been less than successful. The way that some things were introduced were also less than stirling. Rolling do,etching like the VE on a shoestring budget is also quite difficult, on such a massive project.
Sue didn't always get things right, and during her tenure mistakes were made. She was, IMO, amazing though. When she left, she had bedded down an amazing amount of important processes, including governance and other important organizational matters. Her technical skills weren't perhaps as good as her other skills (but actually, they weren't that bad really). There were issues that needed addressing by the next ED, but there always will be matters that need addressing! Nobody leaves an organization in 100% perfect running order.
Lila has not only left the WMF with issues, she has destroyed a good deal of trust, and left the WMF's governance, openness and transparency in tatters.
Though, as you say, Wikipedia's culture also requires openness as well.
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 unless the env was far more toxic than is being presented, SOME of these people certainly extracted personal value from being there a short period.
The fucked up bit though is none of that; it is that wikipedia is now a foundation of who we are digitally as a species, and to see that there is SIGNIFICANT apparent risk to it falling apart is extraordinarily alarming to me.
One of the emails sent said that the risk to domain/innate/tech memory leaving with the exodus impending from eng is super scary prospect.
If I were someone well monied at Google, I'd step in and buy the whole ordeal as it is a major part of who we now are, both digitally and organically.
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 accountability.
"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.
I just cant believe how tumultuous this was.
I really found the Jobs/Apple/Google salary debacle part fascinating.
"Narcissistic personality disorder"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
ps: I don't like you so I am going to vote you down regardless as to the quality of your postings ;)