At some time into the WMF Board candidates campaigning season, the
Wikivoices project undertook a sort of "candidates debate", where a Skype
conference served as a central meeting point for at least eight of the
candidates to orally respond to questions posed them. This debate
transpired about two hours of time, and I found it very informative of the
critical issues facing the Wikimedia Foundation.
I was a bit concerned with several things:
(1) That the role of "campaign debate" was filtered into one available time
slot -- if you were not able to participate, you had no voice.
(2) That the English Wikipedia service (and not Meta, or Foundation) was the
"proprietor" of the content.
(3) That the Foundation itself had no representative helping to coordinate
and assure professionalism in the volunteer execution of this effort.
On that last concern, my worry seems to have come true. On July 26th, we
were promised that an audio file of the Skype cast would be posted soon, as
episode # 45:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikivoices&diff=nex…
On August 5th, I made a worried complaint that the audio still had not been
posted. Through the close of the election period (August 10th), I
communicated via private e-mails about what had happened. Now, August 17th,
we are even past congratulating the winners of this election (where 67% of
the available seats are represented by candidates who offer no changes over
the status quo -- huzzah!), and there is STILL NO AUDIO FILE POSTED.
Along with others sharing my view, I find this to be disgraceful. It is an
insult to the participants in the debate, and it reflects on just how little
the Foundation actually cares about who gets seated on the Board, so long as
they are a community rubber-stamp of the editors who hold sway over the
English Wikipedia project, which is really most of what this represents. I
apologize for sounding bitter, but the delay seems to have been in one audio
editor abdicating his responsibility and dumping it in the lap of an
unsuspecting back-up, then trying to "edit" the audio so that it was fair to
those who had had communications problems during taping. I say, at some
point, it would have been far better to simply post the unedited audio, so
that voters still making decisions could have listened for themselves,
before it was too late. As it stands, the audio is practically worthless
now, and the Foundation should be ashamed that they let this happen under
their noses, without so much as a public apology.
Good luck to the new Board member and the returned two Board members to
their warm seats. Will you be making use of the familiar rubber stamps, or
will something actually be learned from this recent disgrace?
P.S. Five days after the election results were announced, we are also still
waiting for the requested data feed of the anonymized votes:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Votes
Greg