On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 8:54 AM, Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.com wrote:
I find the WMF staff who I interact with to be an inspiration to me with their dedication to the mission to the global wikimedia movement.
So do I. :)
Perhaps the reason that many of them are not volunteering as on site contributors is because they are too busy with a day job that is solely focused on the mission of the movement.
Eh, no, that's not a valid argument. Everybody is busy, most Wikimedians have day jobs or demanding schoolwork of some sort. People manage to contribute to the projects if they want to. It's a matter of prioritization, as always in life. So we mustn't accept "maybe they're just too busy" as an excuse for why staffers purportedly "can't" edit. Many staffers do. Some don't. In both cases, it's by choice and preference.
I fully support allowing our talented and dedicated WMF staff to have the opportunity to choose the people who guide the direction of the WMF.
Meeting the suffrage bar as a community member is not difficult. Those (few) staffers who aren't already eligible to vote as either developers or content contributors, further filtered by the criterion "cares sufficiently to read about candidates and figure out voting" -- which I guesstimate to be under 20, and probably under 10 -- could have, and therefore should have, simply edited a bit, on any of the projects, to get suffrage. I don't think there's any disenfranchisement if they don't get an automatic vote.
A.