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@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/Candidates/CandidateQ%26A> from the broader Community-created list <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Apply_to_be_a_Candidate#Community_Questions_for_Candidates> 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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