On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 3:49 PM, Itzik - Wikimedia Israel itzik@wikimedia.org.il wrote:
Pine,
As far as I know, government employees in most of the countries can vote only if they are citizens. So yes, of course we are not taking there democratic voice. As I didn't said a staff member can't vote because he is a staff member. Just saying that it is not enough to be a staff member in order to get the vote privilege.
IMO the minimum thresholds should be set at levels such that any staff member who has employed for a reasonable period of time is likely to be eligible, if they are engaging with the community on public projects, which is how a person becomes part of 'the community', and would be a suitable voter for community seats on the board.
e.g. Danny Horn joined in April 2014, and now has 284 edits globally, albeit spread across seven projects.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/DannyH_(WMF)
Danny will no doubt hit the 300 global edit mark by the cutoff date which would be ~March 2014., roughly one year after he started. I suspect he may also meet any sensible criteria established for merged patches, but havent checked that.
If we include the wikitech and foundation wikis in the edit counts, many more staff and contractors will likely reach the thresholds we set.
I checked a few of the WMF admin staff who have been employed more than a year, and many dont look likely to reach the 300 threshold, even with wikitech and foundation wikis included. Maybe they are editing on a private wiki? Maybe those private wiki edits can be imported to meta??
We could include different criteria geared more towards including staff, based around edits per year. e.g. 50 contributions per year during employment at an approved movement entity, sounds to me like a reasonable expectation of most roles at WIkimedia organisations. That would be inclusive of staff like Anna Lantz, whose role includes documentation of our movement, using our public wiki projects.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:ALantz_(WMF)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/ALantz_(WMF)
(sorry Danny and Anna for using you as examples)