Dear Ad,

Thank you for being a part of Affiliate-Selected Board Selection 2019 facilitators — organising a selection process is not an easy task. And thank you for sharing your concerns about the process so far. I would like to clarify and explain some things below.

First, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, as a board of a legal entity, must decide how we select board members. Legally we cannot let a third party decide for us, even if that third party is the Wikimedia movement. This is why we are involving the movement in this call for feedback, to inform the decision that the Board will make. The Board believes requesting community feedback about how to fill Board seats is the right thing to do, as is sharing our reasoning for why we are changing our approach. After the Bylaws community review last October, we committed to organising another feedback round with more time, focusing on the trustee selection pathways [1]. This is that other round.

It is also important to note that deciding deep changes in how the Board selects members is not in the scope of the Elections Committee mandate [2]. We count on them, but we cannot delegate this task to them completely. 

Also, just for clarity, the Affiliate-Selected Board Selection 2019 (ASBS 2019) facilitators were organised for a specific purpose, which all of you completed successfully by the end of that election. But there is no ASBS standing committee — and there never was. The debrief of ASBS 2019 that you shared has been informative and appreciated as well, and was the end of your work. It was therefore inappropriate and misleading to offer your personal opinion “on behalf of the ASBS committee”, I assure you, we respect your opinion as it is, without you trying to add additional weight to it.

About the current process: volunteers (the Board) are leading it, the staff is supporting it. The staff does not decide, the board will make a decision based on the feedback.

The Board has requested to have more venues for collecting feedback, thus a team of multilingual facilitators connected with the communities in multiple regions is reaching out to wiki projects and affiliates to ensure that their perspectives are captured in this call for feedback. As a key stakeholder, we are inviting the Elections committee to participate as well. We think that input is important. Volunteers who served in the 2019 Affiliate-Selected Board Selection are also important, and we invite you to participate as well.

This call for feedback has started and conversations have begun; many more conversations are being scheduled. We invite you to join these, and take advantage of its process and its facilitators. Bring your ideas, mobilise your peers, and help promote this call among volunteers, projects and affiliates who haven’t been involved in governance conversations before. We are hoping to gather input widely from across the movement to ensure that ideas are shared and considered from community members with diverse experience and backgrounds to help build a strong Wikimedia Foundation Board.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard/January_2021_-_Approval_of_Bylaws_amendments_and_upcoming_call_for_feedback_about_the_selection_of_new_trustees