Congratulations to the elected (and re-elected) board of trustees.
The composition of the winners are reflective on how we picture the electorate. Where majority of electors are, and the state of the participation of all eligible electors (how many actually voted compared to those who opt not to).
Looking at the bigger picture, I obviously see what is going on. How I see where majority of engaged Wikimedians on movement governance are, where the majority of technical contributors are (look at the hackathon as a good sample and where the global hackathon usually happen), what time global virtual meetings happen, where the voice is most prominent in Wikimedia public policy and many more. It is a meter, a yardstick.The Wikimedia Foundation is doing its best to address the disparity of the global voices but I think this is the reality and I am not optimistic that this will change in my lifetime.
What I could only hope that the Board (I really dont care which region they belong now) must make bold moves in addressing the disparity like coming to our virtual meetings even at odd hours (timezones difference), engage on us (especially the minority electorates) on physical events and not sit on the white castle (I refer to being stuck on the board room most of the time), listen and update with actions (timely decisions whether it favors or not a certain party) and many more.
I also earnestly appeal on the board on the other big picture, the disparity of technological investments (money, people, resources, research and development). Up until today, Wikimedia products (or we call internally as projects) are 10 years behind. If we are too focused on volunteer governance structures, complacent and procrastinate, we will later be 20 years technologically behind.
Visualization of Wikidata in other projects like Wikipedia and Wikivoyage such as charts is still buggy, not impressive or worse not present, Videos are still capped to 4GB (worse some just at 100MB) in the era of 4K, 8K resolution and trove of available free long form videos, the burden of going to volunteer made tools and 3rd party software in converting videos to webm (rather than just do everything on Commons), is the community still too conservative not embracing the mp4 format? Search-ability of Wikisource, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, and other projects remains very low that people start questioning the sustainability of maintaining these projects including the small languages. What is the state of institutional partnerships with technology companies especially those in search engines and LLMs (AI)?
Citations/ reliable sources in articles from the less developed and emerging countries (westerners still called as Global South) are gathered in the developed countries (Global North), was there investments in obtaining sources from the country itself (digitizing free and open papers on Commons/Wikisource, encouraging governments and institutions to place it on their websites).
My apologies for this lengthy post. It is just my kind reminder to the board to be always be at the interest of the greater humanity and not just on your majority electorate in the community.
Kind regards,
Butch