Is there a way in which people who volunteer, but not through editing or
coding, can vote? For example, Wikimania volunteers from this year, or
those who volunteer time with financial or administrative matters rather
than through adding content?
On 5 Oct 2014 11:44, "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The title should be "WMF Board of Trustee
elections".
Itzik - Wikimedia Israel, 05/10/2014 09:40:
For example, last elections there were 1809 valid
votes.
And this is the issue we should be talking about: the ~99.5 % abstention
rate.*
By comparison, the
number of WMF staff this days is 218, what makes
there voting power 12% of
the total voters last year. This consider to be a great amount of power
when we are talking about elections (In the last election you would have
around 650 votes in order to be elected...)
Did you check how many actually voted?
Wikimedia thematic organizations staff and
contractors for example don't
have the same privilege to vote only because they are employees of the
movement, only if they are editors as well. The question - what make the
WMF staff different, and if this is not a little bit problematic that the
staff have such power to decide on their direct board, but in general -
the
board of the whole movement.
This unequality must indeed be rectified. It's not hard to do so.
1) Just remove the WMF staffers exception: after it was introduced,
requirements have been greatly reduced and most staffers have at least one
merged patch or 300 edits. There could be some minor "discrimination" for
some administrative staff.
2) Extend it to any Wikimedia affiliates. This could cause some minor
inequality in what different affiliates consider "staff". Mostly, there
would be some administrative overhead; but it's trivial to fix with
standard electoral methods: publish the electors list beforehand and let
interested voters report errors.
I wouldn't spend too much time discussing this topic, flipping a coin to
pick either option is fine. :-)
Nemo
(*) No official numbers exist... but I already opened one thread on
transparency this week.
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