There were a lot of factors that went into the vote turnout. Some of it we should be able to build on going into the next election, others are likely snapshot moment in time factors that we may not be able to capture again.
James has pointed out a number of key technical considerations, and there were additional barriers we are asking the developer staff to look into that will hopefully make the next one even better. Clearly the work that Philippe and James putting into preparing for this year's election paid off, now we need to set the cycle again for improvements to continue based on what we learned this year. Some of those have already been entered into Phabricator.
My colleagues on the elections committee have also done a fantastic job this year, and brought a lot of unique ideas on how to get out the vote. There are a lot of ideas we are still discussing and will be capturing in our committee post mortem report. It also seems likely that we will be discussing the idea of a standing committee as a possible method of continuing work on these efforts, and removing some of the time hurdles this committee faced.
There is also reason to believe that people in general are just more aware of what Wikimedia is vs. Wikipedia (press around new ED, NSA case, SOPA blackout, etc.) - which certainly could have been a catalyst in other get out the vote efforts. Also, the affiliates have increasingly done a good job of engaging their core audiences in the community elections. The board was also very engaged this year in helping get out the vote, and recruit a diverse set of candidates. The diversity of candidates may have inspired more attention from communities that do not typically vote.
I believe the committee is indeed interested in trying to provide as much data as reasonably possible to help with these discussions, and the requests made are helpful to us figuring out what to share. I want to encourage folks to share their ideas, comments, and concerns on the community post mortem page - that is our best chance at having a broad community discussion that is maintained in the easiest way for volunteers working on future elections to see: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Post_mor...
The committee's ideas and discussions will be documented on the committee's post mortem page. That will likely begin in a more noticeable way once the vote counting concludes: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Committe...
-greg (User:Varnent) 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 6:20 PM, James Alexander jalexander@wikimedia.org wrote:
Ukraine has done great this year! Your work clearly paid off, currently 11.74% of the eligible users on ukWiki have voted (making it one of the highest % wikis, and the highest if you only count medium/large wikis some of the smaller ones get an advantage when % is factored in). It also accounts for 2.58% of the total votes compared to less then 1% (.99%) of the whole electorate.
James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 3:14 PM, attolippip attolippip@gmail.com wrote:
There were only 9 votes from Ukrainian community in 2013, I believe
So this year we just made sure that our community REALLY knows about the elections, thus we:
- translated the candidates statements into Ukrainian
- prepared a short table with the essence of these statements in
Ukrainian
and posted it in the Village pump [1]
- created a list of everybody eligible to vote from Ukrainian Wikipedia
and
sent them a message with invitation to vote and with the links to read
more
about the candidates via talk pages
- and just talked :)
[1]
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%...
Best regards, antanana ED of Wikimedia Ukraine
2015-06-01 1:00 GMT+03:00 Johan Jönsson brevlistor@gmail.com:
2015-05-31 22:57 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community and movement.
Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this
will
be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times better than previous one.
I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also,
if
this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now better than we were at the peak of our movement?
There's a fair chance the difference says far more about the amount of effort spent getting the word out about the election, than about how
much
the movement cares about it compared to previous elections.
//Johan Jönsson
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