Movement Charter Drafting Committee elections are now open! - Wikimedia-l

Todd Allen

12 Oct 12 Oct

9:47 p.m.

So, you linked to this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recomme… What does any of that mean? Right now, it is a document full of buzzwords and fury, signifying nothing. Is there a buzzword-to-English translation of it available? Regards, Todd Allen On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 4:02 AM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Hello everyone, Voting for the election for the members for the Movement Charter drafting committee is now open. In total, 70 Wikimedians from around the world are running for seven seats in these elections. As recommended by the Movement Strategy recommendations, the goal is to assemble a Drafting Committee that will draft a Movement Charter to ensure a common framework for decision making in the Wikimedia movement <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Ensure_Equity_in_Decision-making#Establish_a_common_framework_for_decision-making>. The committee will consist of 15 members in total: The online communities vote for 7 members, 6 members will be selected by the Wikimedia affiliates through a parallel process, and 2 members will be appointed by the Wikimedia Foundation. The plan is to assemble the committee by November 1, 2021. Voting is open from October 12 10:00 UTC to October 24, 2021 23:59 (Anywhere on Earth <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth>). Learn more about the candidates Candidates from across the movement have submitted their candidatures. Learn about each candidate to inform your vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates>. The statements are translated to a number of languages, so you can have access to the information in many of your preferred languages. Additionally, we are piloting a so-called “Election Compass <https://mcdc-election-compass.toolforge.org/>” for this election. Click yourself through the tool and respond to the 19 statements, and you will see which candidate is closest to you! The tool is available in ~9 languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Indonesian, Hausa). Voting Similar to the previous Board elections, we have chosen Single Transferable Vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Single_Transferable_Vote> for the voting system. The benefit of this is voters can rank their choices in order of preference. Learn more about voting requirements <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting#Voting_eligibility>, how to vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting>, and frequently asked questions about voting <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting#Voting_FAQ> . To cast your vote, please go to SecurePoll <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Elections> . We also offer two question and answer times, if you have any questions regarding the Movement Charter and the voting process:w - Wednesday, 19:00 UTC, on Google Meet - Thursday, 13:00 UTC, on Zoom (that’s the Conversation Time with Maggie Dennis) Please write a short message to answers(a)wikimedia.org if you want to participate in one of these. Please help select people who best fit the needs of the movement at this time. Vote and spread the word so more people can vote for candidates. Our aim is to have a committee with Wikimedians that combine the diversity of the Wikimedia Movement as well as a great mix of competencies. Best, Kaarel Vaidla, on behalf of the Movement Strategy & Governance team, Wikimedia Foundation -- Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

Reply

Kaarel Vaidla

8:34 p.m.

Dear Todd, Thank you for the feedback! While working on the consolidation of the recommendations coming from the working groups, the writers put a lot of effort into ensuring conciseness of expression for the final recommendations. In some cases it meant that the text became so condensed that It can indeed be somewhat difficult to follow. Regarding the passage related to the Movement Charter, as a non-native English speaker, I do not feel that this is really the case. We do not have a different presentation of the recommendation, but have been using the same text. Perhaps you can point to what exactly is unclear for you in the respective passage, so it could be clarified: - Create a Movement Charter to: - Lay the values, principles <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Glossary#Principle> and policy basis for Movement structures, including the roles and responsibilities of the Global Council, regional and thematic hubs <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Glossary#Hubs>, as well as other existing and new entities and decision-making bodies, - Set requirements and criteria for decisions and processes that are Movement-wide to be legitimate and trusted by all stakeholders, e.g. for - Maintaining safe collaborative environments, - Ensuring Movement-wide revenue generation and distribution, - Giving a common direction on how resources should be allocated with appropriate accountability mechanisms. - Defining how communities work together and are accountable to each other. - Setting expectations for participation and the rights of participants. Wishing you a great continuation to your week! Kaarel On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 8:50 AM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hoi, Dear Todd, thank you for the invite to read up on this document full of "buzzwords and fury, signifying nothing". I did just that and not find what you suggested, what I found is a determined effort to bring more equity and diversity (you can look up the words in Wiktionary or any other dictionary of your choice). That is a boon for all of us and a necessary departure from the predominantly text based, English dominated culture we have. At this stage children of nine will not use Commons to find pictures for their schooling because whatever structure is English and search does not translate for "hond", "kat"of "eenhoorn". It is an example of how a more diverse and equitable movement leads to different priorities and effectively leads to more inclusion. Something we need to firmly support. Thanks, GerardM On Tue, 12 Oct 2021 at 23:48, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

So, you linked to this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recomme… What does any of that mean? Right now, it is a document full of buzzwords and fury, signifying nothing. Is there a buzzword-to-English translation of it available? Regards, Todd Allen On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 4:02 AM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hello everyone, Voting for the election for the members for the Movement Charter drafting committee is now open. In total, 70 Wikimedians from around the world are running for seven seats in these elections. As recommended by the Movement Strategy recommendations, the goal is to assemble a Drafting Committee that will draft a Movement Charter to ensure a common framework for decision making in the Wikimedia movement <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Ensure_Equity_in_Decision-making#Establish_a_common_framework_for_decision-making>. The committee will consist of 15 members in total: The online communities vote for 7 members, 6 members will be selected by the Wikimedia affiliates through a parallel process, and 2 members will be appointed by the Wikimedia Foundation. The plan is to assemble the committee by November 1, 2021. Voting is open from October 12 10:00 UTC to October 24, 2021 23:59 (Anywhere on Earth <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth>). Learn more about the candidates Candidates from across the movement have submitted their candidatures. Learn about each candidate to inform your vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates>. The statements are translated to a number of languages, so you can have access to the information in many of your preferred languages. Additionally, we are piloting a so-called “Election Compass <https://mcdc-election-compass.toolforge.org/>” for this election. Click yourself through the tool and respond to the 19 statements, and you will see which candidate is closest to you! The tool is available in ~9 languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Indonesian, Hausa). Voting Similar to the previous Board elections, we have chosen Single Transferable Vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Single_Transferable_Vote> for the voting system. The benefit of this is voters can rank their choices in order of preference. Learn more about voting requirements <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting#Voting_eligibility>, how to vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting>, and frequently asked questions about voting <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting#Voting_FAQ> . To cast your vote, please go to SecurePoll <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Elections> . We also offer two question and answer times, if you have any questions regarding the Movement Charter and the voting process:w - Wednesday, 19:00 UTC, on Google Meet - Thursday, 13:00 UTC, on Zoom (that’s the Conversation Time with Maggie Dennis) Please write a short message to answers(a)wikimedia.org if you want to participate in one of these. Please help select people who best fit the needs of the movement at this time. Vote and spread the word so more people can vote for candidates. Our aim is to have a committee with Wikimedians that combine the diversity of the Wikimedia Movement as well as a great mix of competencies. Best, Kaarel Vaidla, on behalf of the Movement Strategy & Governance team, Wikimedia Foundation -- Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

-- Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

Reply

Guettarda

3:38 p.m.

On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 4:26 AM Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Sorry I couldn't get back to you until now, as I didn't see this. Both you and Gerard's response share the same deficiency: Lack of detail. This is basically marketese "sounds good" speak, but without any detail. Sure, that stuff sounds good, but that's not anything to vote on. How do you plan to actually do that stuff? What particular steps will you take to reach those goals? Plans are detailed, not feel-good "We think this stuff sounds nice". Exactly what is it you are proposing to do? That is what the proposal is missing. Otherwise, you're basically asking us to write you a blank check. What EXACTLY are you proposing to do, step by step and detail by detail?

I feel like this is what the movement charter drafting committee is supposed to do - translate these into something practical. I think that's the point - to have community-selected people actually draft the movement charter. It's better to have this process led by a group other than WMF (deserved or not, there are a lot of people in the community who have limited trust in WMF). On one hand, limiting candidates to a 400-word statement makes it impossible for people to address specifics in their candidate statements. On the other hand, with 70 candidates, there's far too much to read even after you've eliminated the candidates you can "quick-fail". I wish there was space and time for a Q&A with the candidates where people could ask specific questions of them. (Of us - just to be clear, I'm one of those 70 candidates.) I don't think anyone expected this level of interest in volunteering to do a vast, and almost certainly thankless task. But we did. Ian

...

Regards, Todd Allen On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 2:34 PM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Dear Todd, Thank you for the feedback! While working on the consolidation of the recommendations coming from the working groups, the writers put a lot of effort into ensuring conciseness of expression for the final recommendations. In some cases it meant that the text became so condensed that It can indeed be somewhat difficult to follow. Regarding the passage related to the Movement Charter, as a non-native English speaker, I do not feel that this is really the case. We do not have a different presentation of the recommendation, but have been using the same text. Perhaps you can point to what exactly is unclear for you in the respective passage, so it could be clarified: - Create a Movement Charter to: - Lay the values, principles <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Glossary#Principle> and policy basis for Movement structures, including the roles and responsibilities of the Global Council, regional and thematic hubs <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Glossary#Hubs>, as well as other existing and new entities and decision-making bodies, - Set requirements and criteria for decisions and processes that are Movement-wide to be legitimate and trusted by all stakeholders, e.g. for - Maintaining safe collaborative environments, - Ensuring Movement-wide revenue generation and distribution, - Giving a common direction on how resources should be allocated with appropriate accountability mechanisms. - Defining how communities work together and are accountable to each other. - Setting expectations for participation and the rights of participants. Wishing you a great continuation to your week! Kaarel On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 8:50 AM Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hoi, Dear Todd, thank you for the invite to read up on this document full of "buzzwords and fury, signifying nothing". I did just that and not find what you suggested, what I found is a determined effort to bring more equity and diversity (you can look up the words in Wiktionary or any other dictionary of your choice). That is a boon for all of us and a necessary departure from the predominantly text based, English dominated culture we have. At this stage children of nine will not use Commons to find pictures for their schooling because whatever structure is English and search does not translate for "hond", "kat"of "eenhoorn". It is an example of how a more diverse and equitable movement leads to different priorities and effectively leads to more inclusion. Something we need to firmly support. Thanks, GerardM On Tue, 12 Oct 2021 at 23:48, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

So, you linked to this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recomme… What does any of that mean? Right now, it is a document full of buzzwords and fury, signifying nothing. Is there a buzzword-to-English translation of it available? Regards, Todd Allen On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 4:02 AM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > Voting for the election for the members for the Movement Charter > drafting committee is now open. In total, 70 Wikimedians from around the > world are running for seven seats in these elections. > > As recommended by the Movement Strategy recommendations, the goal is > to assemble a Drafting Committee that will draft a Movement Charter to ensure > a common framework for decision making in the Wikimedia movement > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Ensure_Equity_in_Decision-making#Establish_a_common_framework_for_decision-making>. > The committee will consist of 15 members in total: The online communities > vote for 7 members, 6 members will be selected by the Wikimedia affiliates > through a parallel process, and 2 members will be appointed by the > Wikimedia Foundation. The plan is to assemble the committee by November 1, > 2021. > > Voting is open from October 12 10:00 UTC to October 24, 2021 23:59 (Anywhere > on Earth <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth>). > > > > Learn more about the candidates > > Candidates from across the movement have submitted their candidatures. > Learn about each candidate to inform your vote > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates>. > The statements are translated to a number of languages, so you can have > access to the information in many of your preferred languages. > > Additionally, we are piloting a so-called “Election Compass > <https://mcdc-election-compass.toolforge.org/>” for this election. > Click yourself through the tool and respond to the 19 statements, and you > will see which candidate is closest to you! The tool is available in ~9 > languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, > Indonesian, Hausa). > > > > Voting > > Similar to the previous Board elections, we have chosen Single > Transferable Vote > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Single_Transferable_Vote> > for the voting system. The benefit of this is voters can rank their choices > in order of preference. Learn more about voting requirements > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting#Voting_eligibility>, > how to vote > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting>, > and frequently asked questions about voting > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting#Voting_FAQ> > . > > > To cast your vote, please go to SecurePoll > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Elections> > . > > > We also offer two question and answer times, if you have any questions > regarding the Movement Charter and the voting process:w > > - > > Wednesday, 19:00 UTC, on Google Meet > - > > Thursday, 13:00 UTC, on Zoom (that’s the Conversation Time with > Maggie Dennis) > > Please write a short message to answers(a)wikimedia.org if you want to > participate in one of these. > > > > Please help select people who best fit the needs of the movement at > this time. Vote and spread the word so more people can vote for candidates. > Our aim is to have a committee with Wikimedians that combine the diversity > of the Wikimedia Movement as well as a great mix of competencies. > > > > Best, > > Kaarel Vaidla, on behalf of the Movement Strategy & Governance team, > Wikimedia Foundation > -- > > Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) > > Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> > > Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, > guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > Public archives at > https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… > To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

-- Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

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Reply

Risker

1:38 p.m.

Adam, you may find the tool discussed here <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates#Candidates_Compass:_One_statement,_all_answers> to be helpful. It is created by one of the candidates, is based on the information submitted by candidates for the election compass, and is quite visual. (Disclosure: I am also a candidate.) I'd also suggest that the written answers illustrate the differences between candidates a little more specifically than the general five-point compass. Perhaps, also, part of the reason that there's some consensus amongst candidates (at least on the surface) is that they could be representative of a pretty broad consensus throughout the global community on some points. Risker/Anne On Thu, 14 Oct 2021 at 09:26, Adam Wight <adam.m.wight(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 12:02 PM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Additionally, we are piloting a so-called “Election Compass <https://mcdc-election-compass.toolforge.org/>” for this election. Click yourself through the tool and respond to the 19 statements, and you will see which candidate is closest to you!

Hi, thank you for facilitating this process and for sharing the interesting "election compass" experiment. After trying the tool, I urge you to take it offline. Its algorithm is opaque, and in my opinion very unlikely to give a helpful result. It's explicitly meant to influence how we vote, but without us having done any validation of what it's actually calculating. If you want to test this tool, you could position it as an "exit poll", to compare the tool's results with how each person actually voted, or you could turn off the "alignment" scoring. My suspicions started with the fact that I answered "strongly support" or "support" to almost every question, which suggests that the axes were not chosen in a way that differentiates between the candidates. Instead, it seems like it's going to amplify tiny differences like "strongly" vs "support"—is this true? Was the tool analyzed with this sort of concern in mind? Are there reasons to believe that the "alignment" scores are meaningful in our scenario? Kind regards, Adam Wight [[mw:User:Adamw]] Writing in my volunteer capacity. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

Reply

Andrew Lih

15 Oct 15 Oct

9:32 p.m.

To echo Risker, I'd encourage the use of more advanced tools by voters. On meta, I've pointed to the two tools that hopefully help: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/El… The links point to: - A table of all the factual information supplied by the candidates in a wiki table, in which each column is sortable. - A browsable interface to all the compass questions and responses, providing much better candidate comparisons. An issue Adam brought up is that there may not be a good understanding of the variance in the answers of candidates. For that reason, this tool is valuable in showing that the following questions had the most diverse responses and are likely to be the most useful for voters to examine directly. 6 - limit the role of WMF to "keep the servers running" 11 - democratic governance structure 20 - new forms of knowledge representation 24 - regional elections 27 - "counter-voice" 45 - "percentage of movement money" to be allocated 92 - ratification from all I'd encourage voters to experiment with these tools. -Andrew On Thu, Oct 14, 2021 at 9:39 AM Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Adam, you may find the tool discussed here <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates#Candidates_Compass:_One_statement,_all_answers> to be helpful. It is created by one of the candidates, is based on the information submitted by candidates for the election compass, and is quite visual. (Disclosure: I am also a candidate.) I'd also suggest that the written answers illustrate the differences between candidates a little more specifically than the general five-point compass. Perhaps, also, part of the reason that there's some consensus amongst candidates (at least on the surface) is that they could be representative of a pretty broad consensus throughout the global community on some points. Risker/Anne On Thu, 14 Oct 2021 at 09:26, Adam Wight <adam.m.wight(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 12:02 PM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Additionally, we are piloting a so-called “Election Compass <https://mcdc-election-compass.toolforge.org/>” for this election. Click yourself through the tool and respond to the 19 statements, and you will see which candidate is closest to you!

Hi, thank you for facilitating this process and for sharing the interesting "election compass" experiment. After trying the tool, I urge you to take it offline. Its algorithm is opaque, and in my opinion very unlikely to give a helpful result. It's explicitly meant to influence how we vote, but without us having done any validation of what it's actually calculating. If you want to test this tool, you could position it as an "exit poll", to compare the tool's results with how each person actually voted, or you could turn off the "alignment" scoring. My suspicions started with the fact that I answered "strongly support" or "support" to almost every question, which suggests that the axes were not chosen in a way that differentiates between the candidates. Instead, it seems like it's going to amplify tiny differences like "strongly" vs "support"—is this true? Was the tool analyzed with this sort of concern in mind? Are there reasons to believe that the "alignment" scores are meaningful in our scenario? Kind regards, Adam Wight [[mw:User:Adamw]] Writing in my volunteer capacity. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

-- -Andrew Lih Author of The Wikipedia Revolution US National Archives Citizen Archivist of the Year (2016) Knight Foundation grant recipient - Wikipedia Space (2015) Wikimedia DC - Outreach and GLAM Previously: professor of journalism and communications, American University, Columbia University, USC --- Email: andrew(a)andrewlih.com WEB: https://muckrack.com/fuzheado PROJECT: Wikipedia Space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WPSPACE

Reply

Guettarda

9:51 p.m.

Hi Mike The questions were selected from this list: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Electio… People voted and the top ones were chosen. (A few near-duplicates that ranked at the top were combined by Cornelius, iirc). The raw data underlying both the Compass and Dusan's tool are here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Electio… Ian On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 5:45 PM Mike Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:

...

Both of these seem like a fantastic way to support your intrinsic biases. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candida… - this supports your language or editor start date bias. Since you are limited to ordering by name/username/region/languages/wiki/editor since. https://krehel.sk/Candidates_Drafting_Committee_Movement_Charter_Statements/ - this seems to support selected question answers (from where?) and encourages you to vote based on other people's views that decide on their rankings (which aren't publicly available)? (Try ordering by Q2 - or looking up where Q6 was posted). We need better tools to help voters. Neither of these tools do that. Thanks, Mike On 15/10/21 22:32:15, Andrew Lih wrote:

To echo Risker, I'd encourage the use of more advanced tools by voters. On meta, I've pointed to the two tools that hopefully help:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/El…

<

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/El…

The links point to: - A table of all the factual information supplied by the candidates in a wiki table, in which each column is sortable. - A browsable interface to all the compass questions and responses, providing much better candidate comparisons. An issue Adam brought up is that there may not be a good understanding of the variance in the answers of candidates. For that reason, this tool is valuable in showing that the following questions had the most diverse responses and are likely to be the most useful for voters to examine directly. 6 - limit the role of WMF to "keep the servers running" 11 - democratic governance structure 20 - new forms of knowledge representation 24 - regional elections 27 - "counter-voice" 45 - "percentage of movement money" to be allocated 92 - ratification from all I'd encourage voters to experiment with these tools. -Andrew On Thu, Oct 14, 2021 at 9:39 AM Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com <mailto:risker.wp@gmail.com>> wrote: Adam, you may find the tool discussed here <

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Ca…

to be helpful. It is created by one of the candidates, is based on the information submitted by candidates for the election compass, and is quite visual. (Disclosure: I am also a candidate.) I'd also suggest that the written answers illustrate the differences between candidates a little more specifically than the general five-point compass. Perhaps, also, part of the reason that there's some consensus amongst candidates (at least on the surface) is that they could be representative of a pretty broad consensus throughout the global community on some points. Risker/Anne On Thu, 14 Oct 2021 at 09:26, Adam Wight <adam.m.wight(a)gmail.com <mailto:adam.m.wight@gmail.com>> wrote: On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 12:02 PM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:kvaidla@wikimedia.org>> wrote: Additionally, we are piloting a so-called “Election Compass <https://mcdc-election-compass.toolforge.org/>” for this election. Click yourself through the tool and respond to the 19 statements, and you will see which candidate is closest to you! Hi, thank you for facilitating this process and for sharing the interesting "election compass" experiment. After trying the tool, I urge you to take it offline. Its algorithm is opaque, and in my opinion very unlikely to give a helpful result. It's explicitly meant to influence how we vote, but without us having done any validation of what it's actually calculating. If you want to test this tool, you could position it as an "exit poll", to compare the tool's results with how each person actually voted, or you could turn off the "alignment" scoring. My suspicions started with the fact that I answered "strongly support" or "support" to almost every question, which suggests that the axes were not chosen in a way that differentiates between the candidates. Instead, it seems like it's going to amplify tiny differences like "strongly" vs "support"—is this

true?

Was the tool analyzed with this sort of concern in mind? Are there reasons to believe that the "alignment" scores are meaningful in our scenario? Kind regards, Adam Wight [[mw:User:Adamw]] Writing in my volunteer capacity. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines> and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l> Public archives at

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Reply

Guettarda

10:33 p.m.

On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 6:04 PM Mike Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:

...

Cool. How do we find those pages from the advertised tools? Were they shared here before (sorry if I missed them), or can we still vote on them somewhere?

The underlying problem is that we ended up with 70+ candidates for the MCDC. We were allowed up to 400 words for our statements, so there is a lot to work through. In a case like that, there's a tendency to only vote for people you know, or only based on regional representation, or tenure, or something similar. The Compass was an imperfect tool, and one that was put together in response to the problem of too much participation (after all, there was uncertainty initially as to whether 19 people would actually put their names forward). I think there was a week at the end of September when people could suggest statements (the final tally was 108). After that there was another week in which people were able to vote for the statements they wanted the candidates to answer. Not everyone got it right - there were some responses that made it clear that some people were voting based on their own opinions about the statement, rather than what they wanted to hear. Once they were narrowed down, Cornelius created a Google sheet where the candidates were able to give our opinions on the statements, based on a five-point scale. We were also able to add up to 500 characters clarifying our stances. (These were interesting, because it's obvious that some people who voted "support" and some who voted "oppose" had pretty much the same opinion, once you allowed for nuance. After that the Compass tool was created. But even that output is too much to parse. I put together a Google sheet for myself, where I could split people into arbitrary groups - for example, only 54 people gave their opinions on the compass, so I decided to separate those from the rest of the group. I also split Europe/US/Canada from the rest of the world because I want to make sure that I wasn't too biased by *who* I knew well. Being able to sort people by tenure (thanks to Andrew's table) also allows me to be more cogniscent of my biases (as an old-timer, I'm likely to gravitate to people just because I've seen them around for the last 17 years). Dusan's tool is great because it lets you compare responses to individual questions, and lets you see the explanatory statements. Again, as I work my way through the list and try to decide between people it helps me check responses to individual questions. I think confirmation bias would be to pick people you know and like (or and maybe not like so much, but think the committee could use some bomb-throwers). I'm grateful for the tools and summaries that people have created. Now if there was only some way to compare pairs of candidate statements side-by-side Ian

...

Or would it be fairer now to the candidates to let their statements stand alone and for people to vote based on those alone, rather than trying to provide 'advanced tools' that are intrinsically biased? Thanks, Mike On 15/10/21 22:51:21, Guettarda wrote:

Hi Mike The questions were selected from this list:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Electio…

<

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Electio…

People voted and the top ones were chosen. (A few near-duplicates that ranked at the top were combined by Cornelius, iirc). The raw data underlying both the Compass and Dusan's tool are here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Electio…

<

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Electio…

Ian On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 5:45 PM Mike Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net <mailto:email@mikepeel.net>> wrote: Both of these seem like a fantastic way to support your intrinsic biases.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candida…

<

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candida…

- this supports your language or editor start date bias. Since you

are

limited to ordering by name/username/region/languages/wiki/editor

since.

https://krehel.sk/Candidates_Drafting_Committee_Movement_Charter_Statements/

<

https://krehel.sk/Candidates_Drafting_Committee_Movement_Charter_Statements/

> - this seems to support selected question answers (from where?) and > encourages you to vote based on other people's views that decide on > their rankings (which aren't publicly available)? (Try ordering by Q2 - > or looking up where Q6 was posted). > > We need better tools to help voters. Neither of these tools do that. > > Thanks, > Mike > > On 15/10/21 22:32:15, Andrew Lih wrote: > > To echo Risker, I'd encourage the use of more advanced tools by > voters. > > On meta, I've pointed to the two tools that hopefully help: > > >

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/El…

<

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/El…

> >

<

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/El…

<

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/El…

The links point to: - A table of all the factual information supplied by the

candidates in a > wiki table, in which each column is sortable. > - A browsable interface to all the compass questions and

responses,

providing much better candidate comparisons. An issue Adam

brought up is

that there may not be a good understanding of the variance in the answers of candidates. For that reason, this tool is valuable in

showing > that the following questions had the most diverse responses and

are

likely to be the most useful for voters to examine directly. 6 - limit the role of WMF to "keep the servers running" 11 - democratic governance structure 20 - new forms of knowledge representation 24 - regional elections 27 - "counter-voice" 45 - "percentage of movement money" to be allocated 92 - ratification from all I'd encourage voters to experiment with these tools. -Andrew On Thu, Oct 14, 2021 at 9:39 AM Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com

<mailto:risker.wp@gmail.com>

<mailto:risker.wp@gmail.com <mailto:risker.wp@gmail.com>>> wrote: Adam, you may find the tool discussed here

<

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Ca… < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Ca…

to be helpful. It is created by one of the candidates, is

based on > the information submitted by candidates for the election

compass,

and is quite visual. (Disclosure: I am also a candidate.) I'd also suggest that the written answers illustrate the

differences

between candidates a little more specifically than the general five-point compass. Perhaps, also, part of the reason that

there's

some consensus amongst candidates (at least on the surface)

is that

they could be representative of a pretty broad consensus

throughout

the global community on some points. Risker/Anne On Thu, 14 Oct 2021 at 09:26, Adam Wight

<adam.m.wight(a)gmail.com <mailto:adam.m.wight@gmail.com>

<mailto:adam.m.wight@gmail.com

<mailto:adam.m.wight@gmail.com>>> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 12:02 PM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:kvaidla@wikimedia.org>

<mailto:kvaidla@wikimedia.org <mailto:kvaidla@wikimedia.org>>>

wrote:

Additionally, we are piloting a so-called “Election

Compass

<https://mcdc-election-compass.toolforge.org/

<https://mcdc-election-compass.toolforge.org/>>” for this

election. Click yourself through the tool and respond

to the

19 statements, and you will see which candidate is

closest

to you! Hi, thank you for facilitating this process and for

sharing the > interesting "election compass" experiment. After trying

the

tool, I urge you to take it offline. Its algorithm is

opaque,

and in my opinion very unlikely to give a helpful

result. It's

explicitly meant to influence how we vote, but without us

having

done any validation of what it's actually calculating.

If you

want to test this tool, you could position it as an "exit

poll", > to compare the tool's results with how each person

actually

> voted, or you could turn off the "alignment" scoring. > > My suspicions started with the fact that I answered

"strongly

support" or "support" to almost every question, which

suggests > that the axes were not chosen in a way that differentiates > between the candidates. Instead, it seems like it's

going to

amplify tiny differences like "strongly" vs "support"—is

this true? > > Was the tool analyzed with this sort of concern in mind?

Are

there reasons to believe that the "alignment" scores are meaningful in our scenario? Kind regards, Adam Wight [[mw:User:Adamw]] Writing in my volunteer capacity. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list --

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Reply

Mario Gómez

7:43 a.m.

On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 3:57 AM effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

This is a horribly problematic election. Not only does it take hours to go through the candidates if you actually want to rank them, but you would also need to be willing to spend about a lot of time to enter them into the broken voting interface (which works great for up to 5 candidates - not for 70).

I filled about 14 candidates and it was not extremely bad, but for anyone looking to rank more candidates, I guess it might have been daunting. I agree that the dropdowns are a very inconvenient UI for this kind of votation. I can imagine something more efficient like having chips for every candidate (no dropdown), and then sequentially click on them to add them to the ballot in order, then maybe supporting drag and drop to re-order. Changing the order of candidates once the ballot is prepared is particularly cumbersome. Best, Mario

Reply

Jan Ainali

11:29 a.m.

Thanks for your reply Kaarel, I just wanted to note that UI of SecurePoll caused problem in the board election too, and that the same excuse was used then "in a short time once". Obviously this is a piece of infrastructure that we need in the movement and that any team doing one election should not need to fix the software for it. Hence, a specific project, unrelated to any election, should be tasked to solve this by the Wikimedia Foundation. And it should start soon to avoid us finding ourselves in the same problem when the next election is being called. Thanks, Jan Ainali Den mån 18 okt. 2021 kl 13:02 skrev Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:

...

Thank you everyone for taking the time to vote on the elections, for engaging with the tools that have been created to facilitate the voting, and for taking the time to provide the feedback. Running these elections with 70 candidates is a pilot and it is a great opportunity to learn together and with your support and input. We are gathering the lessons learned, so there can be improvements for the next time. I am responding to some of the points made in the thread: - The *user interface* and, as a result, the user experience for voting on the SecurePoll for 70 candidates with a Single Transferable Voting method is indeed sub-optimal. Unfortunately, we could not figure out how to make it more user friendly in a short time once it became clear that there would be 70 candidates. It would need essential changes on how the voting would happen. There are some suggestions for improvements in this thread (no dropbox, but clickable or drag & drop candidate chips; choosing a different voting method or creating 7-member districts). It would be great to receive further perspectives on this! - Thank you, Lodewijk, for sharing *practical guidance* on how to make the most of the current user interface. Typing the first letter of the candidate name to find the right one in the dropdown box with 70 names is probably the best way to do it. A huge thank you to everyone who is taking the time to cast their vote! - Ensuring the supporting materials to help people to make informed decisions has been a complex matter. The candidate statements <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates#Candidates> add up to 55 pages of text, which is difficult to navigate. It seemed like a *compass tool* could be of help here, but it comes with its own complications: - There was a 10-day window to submit the statements and a 5-day upvoting period. We did our best to communicate it widely on mailing lists (e.g. here <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/7HVBI6M55MNVBKHNEDBEIUPSWFGJIBIE/> and here <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/FAJ57JAR3VP75V23OKX6MEBYUHWIAYUY/>) as well as social media groups, yet as there is so.much going on, not everyone noticed it in the timely manner. - We are no longer collecting or upvoting statements. We hope that 19 that were selected are at least to some extent helpful in informing the voting. We are happy to receive the feedback regarding the statement collection and upvoting, so it would be possible to improve the process in the future. - Election compass has its own user interface and experience challenges. We have opted for all the candidates being selected as default for comparison, as it provides a good comparison across the pool - this helps to have a good overview of the positions of all the candidates. However, this makes navigating their rationale statements more difficult, as it involves a lot of scrolling. Also, if one is interested in comparing 2 candidates, there is a lot of deselecting that needs to happen. It seemed that selecting candidates manually would bring more personal bias into use of the tool, so we have chosen the select all approach as default. Overall, it is the number of candidates that is creating the bulk of the navigation and comparison issues and we are open to feedback on how to improve this in the future. - The length of the statements made by the candidates in the compass tool was capped to prevent us from creating another wall of text. While it helps to better understand the position of the candidate, it would create a further barrier for voter engagement, if the expression is not clear and concise. I believe that the word limits will be an essential part of the future elections and candidate statements, because it reduces the access barrier for voters and also facilitates translations to a wider range of languages, which makes the information even more accessible. What can be discussed is the exact limit size and also what information is the most helpful to collect from candidates. - The tool that we used is Open Election Compass <https://open-election-compass.com/>. We did not do a full code review for this, but we did not experience any anomalies in weighing of the votes during testing. If there are people who are interested in doing the code review, here is the link to the tool in GitHub <https://github.com/open-election-compass/client>. - We are truly grateful to the community members who have stepped in and tried to make the information regarding the candidates more easily digestible. This goes a long way in supporting informed voting in this process! Thank you Dušan Kreheľ and Andrew Lih for your proactive and constructive approach! I apologize for the length of the response - I have tried to break it up so the single points are more clear. I am available to respond to any further questions and specifications, as well as happy to receive any further feedback. Wishing everyone a great week ahead! Kaarel On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 10:44 AM Mario Gómez <mariogomwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 3:57 AM effe iets anders < effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote:

This is a horribly problematic election. Not only does it take hours to go through the candidates if you actually want to rank them, but you would also need to be willing to spend about a lot of time to enter them into the broken voting interface (which works great for up to 5 candidates - not for 70).

I filled about 14 candidates and it was not extremely bad, but for anyone looking to rank more candidates, I guess it might have been daunting. I agree that the dropdowns are a very inconvenient UI for this kind of votation. I can imagine something more efficient like having chips for every candidate (no dropdown), and then sequentially click on them to add them to the ballot in order, then maybe supporting drag and drop to re-order. Changing the order of candidates once the ballot is prepared is particularly cumbersome. Best, Mario _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

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Reply

Samuel Klein

4:17 p.m.

Agreed. Is this something that the Election Committee <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_committee>, as a standing committee not tied to a single election, can help with? SJ On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 7:30 AM Jan Ainali <ainali.jan(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Thanks for your reply Kaarel, I just wanted to note that UI of SecurePoll caused problem in the board election too, and that the same excuse was used then "in a short time once". Obviously this is a piece of infrastructure that we need in the movement and that any team doing one election should not need to fix the software for it. Hence, a specific project, unrelated to any election, should be tasked to solve this by the Wikimedia Foundation. And it should start soon to avoid us finding ourselves in the same problem when the next election is being called. Thanks, Jan Ainali Den mån 18 okt. 2021 kl 13:02 skrev Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:

Thank you everyone for taking the time to vote on the elections, for engaging with the tools that have been created to facilitate the voting, and for taking the time to provide the feedback. Running these elections with 70 candidates is a pilot and it is a great opportunity to learn together and with your support and input. We are gathering the lessons learned, so there can be improvements for the next time. I am responding to some of the points made in the thread: - The *user interface* and, as a result, the user experience for voting on the SecurePoll for 70 candidates with a Single Transferable Voting method is indeed sub-optimal. Unfortunately, we could not figure out how to make it more user friendly in a short time once it became clear that there would be 70 candidates. It would need essential changes on how the voting would happen. There are some suggestions for improvements in this thread (no dropbox, but clickable or drag & drop candidate chips; choosing a different voting method or creating 7-member districts). It would be great to receive further perspectives on this! - Thank you, Lodewijk, for sharing *practical guidance* on how to make the most of the current user interface. Typing the first letter of the candidate name to find the right one in the dropdown box with 70 names is probably the best way to do it. A huge thank you to everyone who is taking the time to cast their vote! - Ensuring the supporting materials to help people to make informed decisions has been a complex matter. The candidate statements <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates#Candidates> add up to 55 pages of text, which is difficult to navigate. It seemed like a *compass tool* could be of help here, but it comes with its own complications: - There was a 10-day window to submit the statements and a 5-day upvoting period. We did our best to communicate it widely on mailing lists (e.g. here <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/7HVBI6M55MNVBKHNEDBEIUPSWFGJIBIE/> and here <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/FAJ57JAR3VP75V23OKX6MEBYUHWIAYUY/>) as well as social media groups, yet as there is so.much going on, not everyone noticed it in the timely manner. - We are no longer collecting or upvoting statements. We hope that 19 that were selected are at least to some extent helpful in informing the voting. We are happy to receive the feedback regarding the statement collection and upvoting, so it would be possible to improve the process in the future. - Election compass has its own user interface and experience challenges. We have opted for all the candidates being selected as default for comparison, as it provides a good comparison across the pool - this helps to have a good overview of the positions of all the candidates. However, this makes navigating their rationale statements more difficult, as it involves a lot of scrolling. Also, if one is interested in comparing 2 candidates, there is a lot of deselecting that needs to happen. It seemed that selecting candidates manually would bring more personal bias into use of the tool, so we have chosen the select all approach as default. Overall, it is the number of candidates that is creating the bulk of the navigation and comparison issues and we are open to feedback on how to improve this in the future. - The length of the statements made by the candidates in the compass tool was capped to prevent us from creating another wall of text. While it helps to better understand the position of the candidate, it would create a further barrier for voter engagement, if the expression is not clear and concise. I believe that the word limits will be an essential part of the future elections and candidate statements, because it reduces the access barrier for voters and also facilitates translations to a wider range of languages, which makes the information even more accessible. What can be discussed is the exact limit size and also what information is the most helpful to collect from candidates. - The tool that we used is Open Election Compass <https://open-election-compass.com/>. We did not do a full code review for this, but we did not experience any anomalies in weighing of the votes during testing. If there are people who are interested in doing the code review, here is the link to the tool in GitHub <https://github.com/open-election-compass/client>. - We are truly grateful to the community members who have stepped in and tried to make the information regarding the candidates more easily digestible. This goes a long way in supporting informed voting in this process! Thank you Dušan Kreheľ and Andrew Lih for your proactive and constructive approach! I apologize for the length of the response - I have tried to break it up so the single points are more clear. I am available to respond to any further questions and specifications, as well as happy to receive any further feedback. Wishing everyone a great week ahead! Kaarel On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 10:44 AM Mario Gómez <mariogomwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 3:57 AM effe iets anders < effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote:

This is a horribly problematic election. Not only does it take hours to go through the candidates if you actually want to rank them, but you would also need to be willing to spend about a lot of time to enter them into the broken voting interface (which works great for up to 5 candidates - not for 70).

I filled about 14 candidates and it was not extremely bad, but for anyone looking to rank more candidates, I guess it might have been daunting. I agree that the dropdowns are a very inconvenient UI for this kind of votation. I can imagine something more efficient like having chips for every candidate (no dropdown), and then sequentially click on them to add them to the ballot in order, then maybe supporting drag and drop to re-order. Changing the order of candidates once the ballot is prepared is particularly cumbersome. Best, Mario _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

-- Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

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-- Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266

Reply

Samuel Klein

4:26 p.m.

Risker writes:

...

To the best of my knowledge, the Elections Committee has had no

involvement in the MCDC election,

...

and there's no indication at all that the Board asked them to assist or

to manage the election.

...

I would really like to see a couple of stewards acting as scrutineers for

this election, simply because they are

...

really experienced at identifying the kinds of problems that turn up on

elections like this I do hope there are scrutineers of that sort. Can someone involved w/ the process advise on how that is happening? I'd like to see us have an explicit standing group that keeps up with all of these large-scale selection processes, shares best practices from a range of variations implemented on different projects, and can discuss them publicly in a number of languages. Running polls + votes is broadly useful, so we should expand the pool of people fluent in their implementation. It is good to have staff support and complement this work, but it would be a loss five times over (in cost, delay, warmth, capacity, communal knowledge) to remove this work from active community maintenance and oversight. On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 4:28 AM Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Agreed. Is this something that the Election Committee

<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_committee>, as a standing committee not tied to a single election, can help with? SJ

I would like the answer to this to be 'yes', but the Elections Committee doesn't seem to do anything except supervise the community elections to the Board (which are, in effect, now run by WMF staff). They did not, for instance, appear to be particularly involved in the work that led to the changes to the Board election structure. They do not publish any information about what they are doing, and they don't appear to be particularly responsive to inquiries even when there is a Board election on. Making the elections committee a 'standing' committee does not appear to have resulted in anything changing, and suggests this committee is not the right group to take any further changes forward. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

-- Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266

Reply

Risker

19 Oct 19 Oct

2:40 a.m.

Just for the record, the Wikimedia Foundation Election Committee <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_committee> has been a standing committee since 2015, and reports to the Board Governance Committee. It is tasked with making recommendations on how elections are carried out, and specifically is responsible for community elections to the Board of Trustees, the FDC and the FDC ombuds, as well as " Similar community-selected positions as determined by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustee <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_of_Trustees>s". To the best of my knowledge, the Elections Committee has had no involvement in the MCDC election, and there's no indication at all that the Board asked them to assist or to manage the election. I would really like to see a couple of stewards acting as scrutineers for this election, simply because they are really experienced at identifying the kinds of problems that turn up on elections like this (you'd be surprised how often there are issues, I certainly was when I was on the EC), and the Strategy folks who are in charge of the election already have more than enough on their plate. DISCLOSURE: I am a candidate in this election. I am curious what is meant by a "7-member district". Lodewijk, could you explain in more detail? What isn't really obvious is that at the same time as the content management community is carrying out this single-transferable-vote election, a special committee representing affiliates from different geographic areas is also, in parallel, selecting 6 people from exactly the same list of candidates. Thus, we have the same slate of candidates running simultaneously in two separate elections, competing for 7 community-selected seats and 6 affiliate-selected seats. As a candidate, I find this situation quite uncomfortable. It's not well understood, and the number of candidates makes the selection process much more complex for both groups. I hope that for the STV election, we see exactly the type of results that we saw for the Trustee election a few weeks ago, in the same format, so that it is very clear how the STV process worked in this case. I understand and accept that the affiliate selection process is going to be very different, and there will be a fair amount of negotiation to come up with the most favoured result, but since there's a reasonable chance at least some of their selected candidates will be selected already by the community, they'll need to ensure they have a final selection of at least 13 people so that any duplicates or otherwise ineligible candidates (due to the 2-per-wiki rule) will still result in filing all the seats. Risker/Anne On Mon, 18 Oct 2021 at 12:47, effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

There's that, +1 for sure. But even within the current limitations, there are some configuration options that could have been chosen to improve user experience. For example, various WMF staff members have communicated different cutoff points when people shouldn't have to worry about their ranking any longer. Great. But this is hidden in a wall of text. A more user friendly way would have been to actually limit the interface to the top-X positions, if you can show with some basic simulations that this is indeed the reasonable cutoff. Not that this would have been a 'good' voting method by any standard with rank-top15 but it would be 70/15 times less painful :) It's also odd that I have to discover the first-letter-trick. There may be more tricks out there! I honestly was fully expecting that the WMF would have fixed the software before setting up the vote, so I didn't give it another thought. But a few of these pain points could have been clearer if there would have been a test period with a few volunteers... (although I assume at least the election committee was thoroughly consulted) Lodewijk On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 4:30 AM Jan Ainali <ainali.jan(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for your reply Kaarel, I just wanted to note that UI of SecurePoll caused problem in the board election too, and that the same excuse was used then "in a short time once". Obviously this is a piece of infrastructure that we need in the movement and that any team doing one election should not need to fix the software for it. Hence, a specific project, unrelated to any election, should be tasked to solve this by the Wikimedia Foundation. And it should start soon to avoid us finding ourselves in the same problem when the next election is being called. Thanks, Jan Ainali Den mån 18 okt. 2021 kl 13:02 skrev Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org

:

Thank you everyone for taking the time to vote on the elections, for engaging with the tools that have been created to facilitate the voting, and for taking the time to provide the feedback. Running these elections with 70 candidates is a pilot and it is a great opportunity to learn together and with your support and input. We are gathering the lessons learned, so there can be improvements for the next time. I am responding to some of the points made in the thread: - The *user interface* and, as a result, the user experience for voting on the SecurePoll for 70 candidates with a Single Transferable Voting method is indeed sub-optimal. Unfortunately, we could not figure out how to make it more user friendly in a short time once it became clear that there would be 70 candidates. It would need essential changes on how the voting would happen. There are some suggestions for improvements in this thread (no dropbox, but clickable or drag & drop candidate chips; choosing a different voting method or creating 7-member districts). It would be great to receive further perspectives on this! - Thank you, Lodewijk, for sharing *practical guidance* on how to make the most of the current user interface. Typing the first letter of the candidate name to find the right one in the dropdown box with 70 names is probably the best way to do it. A huge thank you to everyone who is taking the time to cast their vote! - Ensuring the supporting materials to help people to make informed decisions has been a complex matter. The candidate statements <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates#Candidates> add up to 55 pages of text, which is difficult to navigate. It seemed like a *compass tool* could be of help here, but it comes with its own complications: - There was a 10-day window to submit the statements and a 5-day upvoting period. We did our best to communicate it widely on mailing lists (e.g. here <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/7HVBI6M55MNVBKHNEDBEIUPSWFGJIBIE/> and here <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/FAJ57JAR3VP75V23OKX6MEBYUHWIAYUY/>) as well as social media groups, yet as there is so.much going on, not everyone noticed it in the timely manner. - We are no longer collecting or upvoting statements. We hope that 19 that were selected are at least to some extent helpful in informing the voting. We are happy to receive the feedback regarding the statement collection and upvoting, so it would be possible to improve the process in the future. - Election compass has its own user interface and experience challenges. We have opted for all the candidates being selected as default for comparison, as it provides a good comparison across the pool - this helps to have a good overview of the positions of all the candidates. However, this makes navigating their rationale statements more difficult, as it involves a lot of scrolling. Also, if one is interested in comparing 2 candidates, there is a lot of deselecting that needs to happen. It seemed that selecting candidates manually would bring more personal bias into use of the tool, so we have chosen the select all approach as default. Overall, it is the number of candidates that is creating the bulk of the navigation and comparison issues and we are open to feedback on how to improve this in the future. - The length of the statements made by the candidates in the compass tool was capped to prevent us from creating another wall of text. While it helps to better understand the position of the candidate, it would create a further barrier for voter engagement, if the expression is not clear and concise. I believe that the word limits will be an essential part of the future elections and candidate statements, because it reduces the access barrier for voters and also facilitates translations to a wider range of languages, which makes the information even more accessible. What can be discussed is the exact limit size and also what information is the most helpful to collect from candidates. - The tool that we used is Open Election Compass <https://open-election-compass.com/>. We did not do a full code review for this, but we did not experience any anomalies in weighing of the votes during testing. If there are people who are interested in doing the code review, here is the link to the tool in GitHub <https://github.com/open-election-compass/client>. - We are truly grateful to the community members who have stepped in and tried to make the information regarding the candidates more easily digestible. This goes a long way in supporting informed voting in this process! Thank you Dušan Kreheľ and Andrew Lih for your proactive and constructive approach! I apologize for the length of the response - I have tried to break it up so the single points are more clear. I am available to respond to any further questions and specifications, as well as happy to receive any further feedback. Wishing everyone a great week ahead! Kaarel On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 10:44 AM Mario Gómez <mariogomwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 3:57 AM effe iets anders < effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote: > This is a horribly problematic election. Not only does it take hours > to go through the candidates if you actually want to rank them, but you > would also need to be willing to spend about a lot of time to enter them > into the broken voting interface (which works great for up to 5 candidates > - not for 70). > I filled about 14 candidates and it was not extremely bad, but for anyone looking to rank more candidates, I guess it might have been daunting. I agree that the dropdowns are a very inconvenient UI for this kind of votation. I can imagine something more efficient like having chips for every candidate (no dropdown), and then sequentially click on them to add them to the ballot in order, then maybe supporting drag and drop to re-order. Changing the order of candidates once the ballot is prepared is particularly cumbersome. Best, Mario _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

-- Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

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Reply

Anupam Dutta

4:40 a.m.

Hi all, To me, a slightly better approach would have been to divide the 70 candidates into 7 blocks of 10 each, chosen in a random way, but the block remaining fixed. Then force the voter to visit each block and view the candidates ( so that nobody has any undue advantage). After that, the voter will have the choice to choose any or all or none...... (Disclaimer : I am one of the candidates). Anupamdutta73 On Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 08:55 effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Just for quick context: I was mostly trying to say that any *simple* system may have benefits in the scenario when you don't have the resources to make a complex system work properly (read: userfriendly). A 7-member district was intended as shorthand for "out of these 70 people, pick 7 favorites". That does not allow as much nuance as ranking, but it also has much less mental load. There are more systems that would have been easier on the voter, most likely. I fear that with the 'rank these 70 people into an order of 70' will scare away too many participants. Lodewijk On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 7:40 PM Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

<snip> I am curious what is meant by a "7-member district". Lodewijk, could you explain in more detail? <snip> Risker/Anne _______________________________________________

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Reply

Bodhisattwa Mandal

6:17 a.m.

Hi, IMHO, for a person to be in a committee which will shape the movement charter, he/she needs to be experienced enough to have a broad understanding of the movement. Newcomers without any insight of the historical context will not be able to draft a charter effectively. Also, popular elections don't properly judge the weightage of different candidates; it puts every candidate to the same level, which they are not. It would be absolutely unfair to put a Wikimedian with 10-15 years of experience and having a good standing with the larger community and a complete newcomer who is almost unknown to the community on the same ballot box. It was not at all necessary to bring all the 70 candidates to the same table. A certain threshold could be determined first and then candidates could be filtered out before election. Plus, drafting movement charter is not a capacity building program for newcomers, it will shape the future of the movement, so quality control was necessary. I am not sure if these points will be taken into consideration while (s)electing the committee members, but if not, I am sure, it will frustrate many Wikimedians who care about the movement. Regards, Bodhisattwa On Tue, 19 Oct 2021 at 11:24, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

I still believe that a screening phase where people with limited support below a certain threshold can quit the race or be removed is the best way to have a functional ballot... to me it's just simpler this way. Even at real-life elections you need to show some signatures to access the race. If, after weeks of debate, a person get 1/5th of the support of an average candidate, it simply does not have a real chance. I point out again here, this would not be an additional phase, it's just something that can be done in parallel to the presentation of the candidates. For example, at the nth support signature, you enter the ballot. For some reasons, some people assume that "plurality" means that everybody can join, but a crowded ballot is just chaotic. For n places to be selected, you should not give more than 2n-3n candidates on a final ballot, IMHO. Especially if you want to use certain electoral methods. I tried to revise all 70 profiles and it was really boring. So after a while, I just put 10 names I kinda liked and that's it, I probably missed some of them. I also had negative feedback... which went wasted but could have also helped. Maybe in this scenario, the old method of "positive-neutral-negative" tipping box per each candidate could have also worked better than a STV ranking. In any case with the other election I could more or less predict the probable final output (gender balanced, with actual limited chance for so-called GS), here it's almost impossible, the vote will be diluted so much and I really cannot focus on all the candidates. This ould probably mean that bugs of UI (fixed display of candidates, problem of selecting from menu if initial letter has an unusual accent...) might influence the outcome more than usual. Alessandro Il martedì 19 ottobre 2021, 06:41:56 CEST, Anupam Dutta < anupamdutta73(a)gmail.com> ha scritto: Hi all, To me, a slightly better approach would have been to divide the 70 candidates into 7 blocks of 10 each, chosen in a random way, but the block remaining fixed. Then force the voter to visit each block and view the candidates ( so that nobody has any undue advantage). After that, the voter will have the choice to choose any or all or none...... (Disclaimer : I am one of the candidates). Anupamdutta73 On Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 08:55 effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote: Just for quick context: I was mostly trying to say that any *simple* system may have benefits in the scenario when you don't have the resources to make a complex system work properly (read: userfriendly). A 7-member district was intended as shorthand for "out of these 70 people, pick 7 favorites". That does not allow as much nuance as ranking, but it also has much less mental load. There are more systems that would have been easier on the voter, most likely. I fear that with the 'rank these 70 people into an order of 70' will scare away too many participants. Lodewijk On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 7:40 PM Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote: <snip> I am curious what is meant by a "7-member district". Lodewijk, could you explain in more detail? <snip> Risker/Anne _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

Reply

Dan Garry (Deskana)

9:19 a.m.

On Wed, 20 Oct 2021 at 10:10, Dan Garry (Deskana) <djgwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

You're definitely right about that. SecurePoll is a mess. I was the product lead for a project to improve it in 2014, and whilst we did manage to make quite a few improvements to the functionality and management, we only got a fraction done of what we wanted to, the tool is still sorely deficient. There's documentation about the project <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SecurePoll_2014_Redesign>, if you're interested. I'm not surprised that WMF leadership is very reluctant to improve it, and if I were in their shoes, I'd be avoiding it, especially since none of the people involved in the 2014 project work at the WMF anymore. I think we need to get over the "not invested here" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here> tendency when it comes to running elections, and research to see if there's a good third-party solution. I suspect we'd actually save money using a third-party solution compared to trying to improve SecurePoll. I've not done a competitive analysis, so I don't know what sorts of things are available, and maybe there aren't any. But, at least, we should look.

Or, scope out designing a lightweight tool hosted on Toolforge or similar infrastructure, that integrates with the wikis and other data sources via the API, rather than actually being a MediaWiki extension. So many of the things that SecurePoll does (voter eligibility list generation, authentication, vote collection and collation, etc.) can be done using API integrations or data dumps; there's nothing instrinsic to it that requires it to be a MediaWiki extension, it was only done that way because that's the way we did everything back when. Developing a tool like that on Toolforge is so much easier and less complex than developing a MediaWiki extension. There's so many successful examples of this way of doing things; pageviews.toolforge.org is a good example. (Sorry for the follow-up email spam, the thought occurred to me as soon as I hit send.) Dan

Reply

Kaarel Vaidla

12:01 p.m.

The voting for the Movement Charter Drafting Committee is now closed. We are truly grateful to all the voters who participated (despite the complexity of the voting procedure). We will look through the data this week and plan to announce the election results next Monday, November 1 2021. Thank you for your kind attention! Kaarel On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 12:01 PM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

This is a short note that *the elections of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee will close October 24, 23:59 Anywhere on Earth. This is in 3 hours*. If you have not voted yet, but would like to do so, here is the link to the landing page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Elections> . Thank you for your kind attention and have a great week! Kaarel On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 12:20 PM Dan Garry (Deskana) <djgwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 20 Oct 2021 at 10:10, Dan Garry (Deskana) <djgwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

You're definitely right about that. SecurePoll is a mess. I was the product lead for a project to improve it in 2014, and whilst we did manage to make quite a few improvements to the functionality and management, we only got a fraction done of what we wanted to, the tool is still sorely deficient. There's documentation about the project <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SecurePoll_2014_Redesign>, if you're interested. I'm not surprised that WMF leadership is very reluctant to improve it, and if I were in their shoes, I'd be avoiding it, especially since none of the people involved in the 2014 project work at the WMF anymore. I think we need to get over the "not invested here" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here> tendency when it comes to running elections, and research to see if there's a good third-party solution. I suspect we'd actually save money using a third-party solution compared to trying to improve SecurePoll. I've not done a competitive analysis, so I don't know what sorts of things are available, and maybe there aren't any. But, at least, we should look.

Or, scope out designing a lightweight tool hosted on Toolforge or similar infrastructure, that integrates with the wikis and other data sources via the API, rather than actually being a MediaWiki extension. So many of the things that SecurePoll does (voter eligibility list generation, authentication, vote collection and collation, etc.) can be done using API integrations or data dumps; there's nothing instrinsic to it that requires it to be a MediaWiki extension, it was only done that way because that's the way we did everything back when. Developing a tool like that on Toolforge is so much easier and less complex than developing a MediaWiki extension. There's so many successful examples of this way of doing things; pageviews.toolforge.org is a good example. (Sorry for the follow-up email spam, the thought occurred to me as soon as I hit send.) Dan _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

-- Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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Mario Gómez

9:40 p.m.

Thank you for the Election Compass! While the quantitative ranking was not very useful for me, these clear statements and concise answers by all candidates helped me a lot in the decision, and also the Election Compass tool was quite decent to explore them. The process of wider community input to draft questions and upvoting them has clearly led to a much more useful set of questions than what we had at the Board of Trustees election. So, while tooling could be improved in the future, I think the general approach to questions was great, and next elections (for Board of Trustees or whatever other body) should do it in a similar way. Best, Mario On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 12:02 PM Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

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Hello everyone, Voting for the election for the members for the Movement Charter drafting committee is now open. In total, 70 Wikimedians from around the world are running for seven seats in these elections. As recommended by the Movement Strategy recommendations, the goal is to assemble a Drafting Committee that will draft a Movement Charter to ensure a common framework for decision making in the Wikimedia movement <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Ensure_Equity_in_Decision-making#Establish_a_common_framework_for_decision-making>. The committee will consist of 15 members in total: The online communities vote for 7 members, 6 members will be selected by the Wikimedia affiliates through a parallel process, and 2 members will be appointed by the Wikimedia Foundation. The plan is to assemble the committee by November 1, 2021. Voting is open from October 12 10:00 UTC to October 24, 2021 23:59 (Anywhere on Earth <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth>). Learn more about the candidates Candidates from across the movement have submitted their candidatures. Learn about each candidate to inform your vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates>. The statements are translated to a number of languages, so you can have access to the information in many of your preferred languages. Additionally, we are piloting a so-called “Election Compass <https://mcdc-election-compass.toolforge.org/>” for this election. Click yourself through the tool and respond to the 19 statements, and you will see which candidate is closest to you! The tool is available in ~9 languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Indonesian, Hausa). Voting Similar to the previous Board elections, we have chosen Single Transferable Vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Single_Transferable_Vote> for the voting system. The benefit of this is voters can rank their choices in order of preference. Learn more about voting requirements <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting#Voting_eligibility>, how to vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting>, and frequently asked questions about voting <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Voting#Voting_FAQ> . To cast your vote, please go to SecurePoll <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Elections> . We also offer two question and answer times, if you have any questions regarding the Movement Charter and the voting process:w - Wednesday, 19:00 UTC, on Google Meet - Thursday, 13:00 UTC, on Zoom (that’s the Conversation Time with Maggie Dennis) Please write a short message to answers(a)wikimedia.org if you want to participate in one of these. Please help select people who best fit the needs of the movement at this time. Vote and spread the word so more people can vote for candidates. Our aim is to have a committee with Wikimedians that combine the diversity of the Wikimedia Movement as well as a great mix of competencies. Best, Kaarel Vaidla, on behalf of the Movement Strategy & Governance team, Wikimedia Foundation -- Kaarel Vaidla (he/him) Movement Strategy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org

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