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@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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