Hoi, some reflections:
You have to appreciate that fulfilling the role of a board member of the
Wikimedia Foundations is very time consuming. The candidates that may be
chosen from are all volunteers, they have a day job. The argument for
having only eleven questions as given to us candidates was: there is a
limit to the number of questions because otherwise it will require too much
of your time.
When I read the unfiltered questions, there are questions, actually
demands, on the time of board members question 52 is a good example.
Members of the board have fiduciary duties in their role. It is reasonable
to expect that more time will be required than what is advertised as the
time commitment. When people expect that individual questions are answered
in a specified timeframe, it becomes unrealistic given the number of
communities and the number of members in those communities.
There are also questions in there that are operational and will as a
consequence not be considered by the board. Eg question 47, 50.
Other questions are framed in a way that gives them a distinct American
slant. Question 55 for instance is important but then consider this: we
have a font for dyslexic people and never considered updating them with
support for cyrillic scripts. The request for funding for fonts for
SignWriting, the only font for sign languages was denied. My point is that
yes, this might be considered but the way it works is that the board
discusses proposals, maybe asks for proposals from the WMF org. The
question is not effective because it points to laws but does not show how
this is to be made practical.
The questions reflect what members of the community are interested in. In
my opinion, it should work the other way around as well. My objective as a
member of the board will be to share more of the knowledge that is
available to us. I want Commons to be searchable in any language, I want
the public to easily find available books from Wikisource in the languages
people know how to read. I want us to share information in lists that can
be used on any projects that has an interest in them (eg all the heads of
state, all the national ministers of all the countries of the world). What
do you think? To give it teeth, I want our traffic to reflect the diversity
of people and the language they know.
When people suggest that the communities have the primacy in their
projects. I respectively remind them of the projects that were closed,
projects where significant people in the community were removed. We have
policies, we have a strategy that binds us all. As a board member, we are
expected to subscribe to both.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Sun, 4 Jul 2021 at 17:55, Nosebagbear <nosebagbear(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I write to highlight concerns shared by a number of editors about how the
questions selected by the Elections Committee <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Candida…
from the broader Community-created list <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Apply_t…
has not been well-chosen, on several grounds.
First and foremost, is that of the questions that received significant
Community endorsement, only one was selected. That the Community felt so
strongly those questions should be answered by any candidate should be
grounds for presumptive inclusion.
The question list is also short - not even a fifth of those presented. As
a role that needs significant time, and in a process that lasts weeks, it
seems dubious to indicate that 11 questions is the most that can be
answered in an election for the most "senior" community-selected positions
in the movement. This is especially in comparison to, say, en-wiki RfA
candidates who answer well over 20, on average.
A number of editors have also raised concerns that some of the questions
on the list are "soft" or "gimme" questions vs much more difficult
ones
left off. As engagement with individual editors is a must for Trustees, it
is also unclear why the page is claiming grounds to prohibit editors from
individually seeking answers from candidates.
Finally, there has been a distinct communications failure, though I am
unsure how much is purely ElectCom, WMF, etc. Questions were asked on the
original Q&A talk page, and not answered. Then there was no reasoning given
for specific questions excluded or included in the refined list.
There are a number of facets in this post - thank you for reading, and I
look forward to answers handling all of these concerns, not merely a
section.
Cheers,
Nosebagbear
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