[Wikimedia-l] Message just sent to the BoT

The following is the text of a letter I just sent to the Board of Trustees. -------------------------- A tale from the trenches I wake up every day short on sleep, check staff mail, check wikimedia-l, check the facebook discussion group, check signpost comments, check irc, check officewiki recent changes, check wikimediafoundation recent changes... I gear myself up to learn who may have left today, what they will have said, to digest the outpouring of support and sadness from others, and the deafening silence from those who are in a position to put an end to all of this. I go over the reasons again in my mind that we're in this crisis: bad hirings, decisions in secret, dissembling and coverups about the processes that led to those decisions; refusal or inability to state a clear vision, let alone get buy-in or the involvement of staff/community in shaping that vision; restructuring the organization following these same broken processes. And so much more. Make no mistake, this is not just about an ED. It's also about failure of oversight, powerlessness of staff, and a culture of exclusion, among other things. If, as I hope, the Board acts decisively to remove the current ED, that will only be the first step in a mountain of work ahead of us. Hard, painful, exhausting work. But we can't begin to get started on it until that first step is taken. In November at The Meeting (you all know which one I mean), Jimmy Wales called on all of us to give Lila Tretikov a second chance, a chance to rebuild the trust that had been lost. We're well beyond that point now. That trust is irrevocably broken. It's possible that she would be able to play a part in the healing and regrouping that must happen within the WMF going forwards, but only as a private individual. I would have to have some distance from things in order to figure that out, and none of us has that right now. What I do know is that the current situation is toxic, and getting increasingly more so. We're bleeding out. Slowly at first, but it's a just matter of time--and probably not much of it--before that trickle turns into a flood. I plead with the one organization that has the ability to stop it, to step in and do so. SOS... Sincerely, Ariel Glenn tech gnome, WMF staff