I would like to suggest a few direction of thoughts...
Last year, a couple of concerns erupted before/during/after the elections.
First, some wondered what the role of the board was.
I would be pleased that some feedback is given regarding that topic
during the election. So that the next board may try to do its best for
taking community opinion into consideration.
I have also wondered if it would not be interesting that some of you
prepare a sort of short list of questions, which each candidate would
have to answer or comment.
Second, the participation rate of languages have been very diversed.
English participants represented a huge number of voters.
German were second and french third. Other languages had basically not
participated but for a very few people.
Link : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image%3AElection_participation2.png
Our project is international. It is not very suitable that such a
discrepancy exists.
I would like that all non english editors on foundation-l take special
attention in involving their projects.
Third, last year, some rather heated discussions occured when results
were not fully displayed. I would be pleased that this is set before the
election, so that editors are not surprised when results are not
published. Hence the questions : which results should be published ?
Interest and disadvantages of not publishing certain results ?
Publication of results per projects ? Only limited to bigger projects ?
Fourth, do you have overall some feedback to give on last year
organisation, so that this year organisers can take them into account ?
Thanks.
Anthere
--- Sj <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> However, the beginning of my statement would be a request to re-elect
> Angela and Anthere. We were lucky to have chosen so well last year.
> I doubt anyone could have foreseen that the Board's first year would
> proceed so smoothly, so calmly, or with so much transparency, despite
> many growing pains and opportunities for conflict and crisis.
Yep. They have both done a great job and I'd like to see them stay on. So if
they are both running and there are only two seats up for election, then I'm
not going to run and will campaign for both of them.
-- mav
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We talk about multilingualism a lot, and about how many active
languages Wikipedia has...
translation of instructions for the upcoming Board elections should be
a big deal. Any contributor who meets whatever criteria are set for
voting, should be able to vote (and to judge the available
candidates). Translation of profiles is part of this; however for
smaller languages, perhaps that can wait on an explicit request from
an interested voter; in which case there should be a channel for such
requests.
Project-level coordinators would help quickly broaden the pool of
interested translators.
( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_notice_translations_2005 )
An idea for distributing the election work to users on every project:
* Identify at least one respected user from each project who can
oversee announcing the election, and help analyse votes from that
project if necessary. For the largest projects, two or three users
might be better.
** Individual communities could be asked to nominate people for this
role; we could also tap the pool of international ambassadors (cf.
m:Wikimedia Embassy). These users could also help coordinate
translations if one was not yet available for their project language.
* Add these users to a list of project-level coordinators, like the
list of translators/translation coordinators above
* Election Officials can work through these project-level coordinators
to reach local VPs and announcement pages, and to gather questions for
the central FAQ.
These project-level coordinators already have announcements to start
distributing -- even the mention that elections are coming up should
be translated widely.
The ideal candidates for these positions: active, longtime editors
who are primarily active on the project in question. It might be nice
to find such users who do not normally take part in policy or
organization, and ask them to help out. (Note that just finding one
voter from each project will increase the project-diversity among
voters by an order of magnitude over last year).
--
+sj+
