Dear Dariusz,

I am surprised your post has not attracted more attention. It's probably because you did not spell out what the adopted recommendation involves. It says (my emphases):[1]

The Board of Trustees wants to improve the set of skills and the diversity contributed by newly selected trustees. For this reason, the Board has approved a new process to select two community-and-affiliate trustees this year. The objective is to have two trustees confirmed by October 1st. Affiliates will vote to pre-select 6 candidates. A community vote will decide who from these 6 candidates will be recommended for the two seats.

This is a fundamental change to the WMF board election process. Many people will feel that this further disenfranchises the volunteer community. 

Moreover, this pre-selection of electable candidates is performed by functionaries who are financially dependent on the Wikimedia Foundation. Arguably, this builds further conflicts of interest into the process – at a time when the Wikimedia Foundation already asks the public for more and more money each year.[2] 

The WMF simply no longer represents the volunteer community, and no longer even considers that to be its role – if it did, it would hold free elections. 

Personally, I think that is a shame. I guess if volunteers would like to have an organisation representing their interests, they will have to form one themselves.

Best,
Andreas


On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 6:59 PM Dariusz Jemielniak <darekj@kozminski.edu.pl> wrote:

Hi everyone,


The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees met between March 23-24 for our first in-person meeting in over two years. It was an opportunity to welcome our new CEO and several new trustees who have recently joined the Board. Further updates from the meeting will be shared soon, I am writing now to report on resolutions that the Board made regarding the upcoming 2022 elections: 


  1. We resolved to adopt recommendations related to the elections process. These recommendations have been developed as a result of feedback from the community Call for Feedback that happened in January and further discussions by a Board Selection Task Force. They will be implemented on a trial basis for the 2022 election.

  2. In service of maintaining continuity and stability in our leadership, we resolved to make some modifications to our plans to expand the Board.


You can read about the details of these resolutions on Meta. We are happy to discuss and answer any questions on the corresponding talk pages.


Best,

Dariusz on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees


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