On Jul 14, 2007, at 11:19 AM, Delirium wrote:
These relate, I think, to the question of what exactly the community *is*. The core group of the community are probably people who: 1) are committed to Wikimedia's core goals (though they may disagree on some matters); and 2) spend significant time and effort working towards those goals. But that's a pretty abstract definition, and you can't make voting eligibility based on that too easily. Our current approximation is "people who've edited a Wikimedia project at least a little bit", but that isn't really the same thing. As our projects get more and more popular, an increasing percentage of the total internet population will be eligible to vote under current rules, and "anyone who's ever edited Wikipedia" will start to look less and less like any sort of community. It'd also make us susceptible to outside advertising campaigns, as someone wanting to influence the Foundation would just need to rally some otherwise inactive account-holders to rediscover their accounts and vote.
I agree completely. If we feel there was low turnout in this election, I think one possible solution would be better notification... and this has been discussed extensively already. But *another* thing to think about is whether we have defined voter eligibility much too broadly. I think we mostly do not want the board of the foundation elected by casual users or the general public, but by "the core group of the community" .. which is of course hard to define, but probably means more than just making a small number of edits at some point in time.
--Jimbo