On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 1:49 PM, Asaf Bartov <abartov(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 8:54 AM, Sydney Poore
<sydney.poore(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I find the WMF staff who I interact with to be an
inspiration to me with
their dedication to the mission to the global wikimedia movement.
So do I. :)
Perhaps the reason that many of them are not
volunteering as on site
contributors is because they are too busy with a day job that is solely
focused on the mission of the movement.
Eh, no, that's not a valid argument. Everybody is busy, most Wikimedians
have day jobs or demanding schoolwork of some sort. People manage to
contribute to the projects if they want to. It's a matter of
prioritization, as always in life. So we mustn't accept "maybe they're
just too busy" as an excuse for why staffers purportedly "can't"
edit.
Many staffers do. Some don't. In both cases, it's by choice and
preference.
I respect the decision of WMF staff to go home and take care of their
personal business, or be involved in other outside activities, and then
come back to work refreshed and ready to work on issues related to WMF and
wikimedia movement.
I fully support allowing our talented and
dedicated WMF staff to have the
opportunity to choose the people who guide the direction of the WMF.
Meeting the suffrage bar as a community member is not difficult. Those
(few) staffers who aren't already eligible to vote as either developers or
content contributors, further filtered by the criterion "cares sufficiently
to read about candidates and figure out voting" -- which I guesstimate to
be under 20, and probably under 10 -- could have, and therefore should
have, simply edited a bit, on any of the projects, to get suffrage. I
don't think there's any disenfranchisement if they don't get an automatic
vote.
A.
At a time in our movement when we are reaching out to partner organization
(GLAM, universities, etc) to engage them in activities that are outside of
making on wiki edits, I think we need to expand our ideas about who is a
member of our movement with the standing to select the BoT.
A good start to recognizing a broadening of the movement roles is to
include WMF staff and affiliate staff who do not make onsite edits.
Additionally, I'm not keen on having people go through the motion of making
just enough edits to get the right to vote as a volunteer when their true
value to the wikimedia movement is through their staff work.
Sydney
--
Asaf Bartov
Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>
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