Andreas -
Wikimedia staff are as much a part of the community as everyone else is;
hundreds of them come from community roots, and the Wikimedia community
remains the single largest recruitment pool for roles within the WMF. A
non-negligible percentage of WMF staff devote a very significant portion of
their non-working hours to volunteer work on our projects.
If you want to look at historic participation in elections, staff of the
WMF and other affiliates have an exceptionally low participation rate.
It's unclear why you'd think that would change - even when they have had an
opportunity to influence Board of Trustees elections (which actually do
affect them far more than the average community member), they haven't taken
advantage of that. I'm a little concerned that you think Wikimedia staff
are so craven and ill-informed that they could be pressured to vote in that
way. Since it will no doubt be a secret ballot, there is no way for any
employer to control the outcome of this election; all they'd know is
whether or not an employee voted, not *how* they voted. And since any
individual can only vote once, an employee could simply use their volunteer
account, which is usually much easier than having their staff name
whitelisted. Frankly, there are a dozen projects that have a far greater
potential opportunity to control the outcome.
Whatever one may believe about the draft UCoC, it is largely developed from
existing behavioural norms on several of our large projects; thus, most of
it is a summary of what volunteers on various projects have been doing, in
some cases for almost two decades. It also reflects the experiences of the
codes of conduct that have been applied to the volunteer developer area for
several years, as well as the codes of conduct applied to most in-person
events hosted by WMF and Wikimedia affiliates for many years.
I'm not particularly worried that someone will mess up the SecurePoll, or
that it will permit decoding to the point of linking individuals to
specific votes. Having said that, it would be realistic to have the key to
the election retained by someone outside of the direct Wikimedia community
(e.g., someone from EFF) who can be available to decode the results once
the standard checks are done.
Risker/Anne
On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 16:17, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Shani,
The prospect of potentially several hundred Wikimedia
employees/contractors taking part in this vote is somewhat disturbing,
especially in combination with a 50% threshold.
Few decisions in the history of Wikipedia and Wikimedia have attracted
participation from 1,000 or more volunteers. With a head start of 800 or
more WMF and affiliate employees voting, who could be directed to vote as a
block by their management, you would theoretically be able to push through
anything, even if up to 90% of volunteers object ... (I don't think the
UCoC, given its history, is much more popular than the rebranding was) ...
and then declare it the result of a democratic process.
Even if staff are not directed by management to participate, and are not
directed to vote one way or another, I do not see how they (or the
community, for that matter) can trust that this is a free and secret ballot
for them, unless the process is administered outside the WMF.
Could you say something about this?
Best,
Andreas
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