[Foundation-l] thoughts on leakages

Fri Jan 11 20:21:46 UTC 2008

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> There is an important difference between a person who walks away in a huff
> as an employee and then decides to stand for board election and a person
> that changes one role for another. The difference is that in the one
> situation I do not expect positive cooperation and in the other I do not see
> such such a problem. From my perspective Danny was not forthcoming in
> explaining why he left his job. I have asked him repeatedly for this from
> the moment when he announced that he would run for a seat on the board of
> trustees.
>
> I opposed Danny's candidacy from the moment he announced his wish to be a
> candidate. This was before the moment people could make themselves available
> as such. The notion that people would object to accepting someone on the
> board that was voted in is an option that is open to the board. It will
> upset some people but this is to be weighed against the harm that is
> expected of an unwelcome elected board member.
This is why you adopt such policies at a time when there is no apparent 
candidate to go either way.  From the moment that Danny announced, well 
before the election started, that he would be a candidate, any such move 
would have been seen as a get-Danny action.  Once the election was over, 
and he was not that many votes away from winning a seat on the Board, 
those who opposed him could breathe a sigh of relief that they had 
dodged that bullet.  That was the best time to pass such a resolution.

Having such a resolution in place is more important than whether it says 
6 months or 12 months.  If the period is too long or too short it's 
fairly easy to change that detail later.  Other things can be tweaked 
later when the problem can be seen, though never when it can be 
interpreted as an action directed towards one single person.  Thus, if 
we begin with the policy that a staff person cannot become a Board 
member for six months, and need to face the question, "What do we do if 
he's elected by the community?" we can tweak it to say that he cannot be 
nominated as a candidate.

At the other end of things, it might have been difficult to foresee in 
an early policy that a person would resign early from his elected 
position in order to take on a paid staff position.  Only the benefit of 
hindsight and experience would allow us to say that the six months would 
start on the date that his term was expected to end normally.

One final point:  The ED's role is administrative; the Board's role is 
political.  I don't at all question the hiring of Erik from an 
administrative perspective, I trust Sue's determination that he was the 
best person for the job.  When the candidate for the position is 
well-known, and has been a significant participant in controversy the 
matter becomes political.  Very few of an ED's hiring decisions will be 
seen as having political overtones.  Political decisions are not always 
fair to the candidate, but boards need to take them into account, 
preferably before there is a public uproar.

Hiring Carolyn represented an administrative failure, notwithstanding 
the staffing problems at the time.  It would _not_ normally be the 
function of the Board members to do the work needed to check her 
background.  That decision would only have become political if the full 
facts were known to the Board at the time, and the Board had decided to 
hire her despite the baggage in her background.

I don't expect the Board to rewrite history, I do expect it to learn 
from history.

Ec