A valid question would be what has the Board Governance Committee been working on in the last year?[1]
For all we know the sub-committee has already been actively addressing COI reporting and the potential for kickbacks. The BGC is /required/ to have meetings at least twice a year, but appears to not publish any reports or minutes for the wider community to see what progress has been made. It makes sense if anyone joining the board agrees that kickbacks (including later sinecures) or non-financial rewards which could lead to a conflict of loyalty, should be seen to be avoided for at least 12 or 24 months after being associated with the WMF Board, that this should be in writing, and have legal weight so that the WMF could claim damages against anyone acting so foolishly. Perhaps this is a question one of the four BCG members, or one of their four advisors, could respond to? Along with helping locate where any non-confidential minutes or reports are published, such as process improvement recommendations which by definition cannot contain anything confidential? Links 1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_Governance_Committee Fae On Wed, 20 May 2020 at 20:22, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Awhile back I saw a joke that when reading a newspaper someone had > difficulty distinguishing between the business section and the crime > section. These days, the politics section could cause similar > confusion. Recently I have wondered about the extent to which WMF and > the affiliates take steps to prevent conflicts of interest in > financial decisions. > > I am not aware of any evidence of recent financial conflicts of > interest, but I think that taking steps to prevent and detect any > problems would be prudent. > > For example, is there any monitoring of the bank accounts of board > members and executives to ensure that they are not receiving kickbacks > from companies that have contracts with the organizations? Also, are > there "cooling off periods" which contractually require that > executives and board members of WMF and Wikimedia affiliates not > become employees of companies that have had financial relationships > with their organizations until at least a few years after their > employment or board membership with the Wikimedia organization? > > Pine > ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > 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> -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l 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>
