Well, congratulations to 4 people living in Western Europe. If this

result doesn't get the Wikimedia Foundation to rethink their approach to how they select their board members, I don't know what will.

The candidates this year weren't very balanced. When I was deciding who to vote for, I used edit count as a proxy for Wikimedia experience and excluded most of non-US/Europe candidates because their edit counts were too low. Though, I voted for people outside of this area. The issue isn't that there are no suitable editors from Asia or the Global South whom I would vote for—I know there are—but for some reason, none of them were among the candidates.

Based on this, my two cents are that we should try to get people with a solid editing history to run as candidates if we want to elect them to the board. If they aren’t even in the candidates, we can’t vote for them.

Br, -- Kimmo Virtanen, Zache

On Fri, Oct 11, 2024 at 12:50 PM Philip Kopetzky philip.kopetzky@gmail.com wrote:

Well, congratulations to 4 people living in Western Europe. If this result doesn't get the Wikimedia Foundation to rethink their approach to how they select their board members, I don't know what will.

I guess it's up to communities, affiliates and regional structures to create the change we want to see, noe more than ever.

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024, 11:38 Katie Chan, ktc@ktchan.info wrote:

...

*You can find translations of this message or help translate this message on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(short_version).*

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024. 6000 community members from more than 180 wiki projects have voted.

The following four candidates were the most voted:

• Christel Steigenberger
• Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
• Victoria Doronina
• Lorenzo Losa

While these candidates have been ranked through the vote, they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees. They need to pass a successful background check and meet the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.

Read the full announcement on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(long_version)

Best regards,

The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group

-- Katie Chan Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.

Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

---

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Congratulations to all the candidates, and thank you to everyone who ran and put a lot of time into the process. And thanks especially to our ongoing and outgoing trustees. The board is a ton of work, and one of the hardest jobs in our movement.

Re: processes, part of the idea, back in the day, for having two processes for the affiliate votes and the general vote was that it could help ensure geographical diversity (though I'm not sure that was true in practice). These two processes were combined a couple of years ago. I'm not sure going back to the old system is the right answer, but I do think it takes a variety of strategies to get candidates who both understand Wikimedia and the motivations of editors AND are interested in overseeing the governance of a multi-million dollar organization -- which is the job we are asking these folks to do.

Best, Phoebe (trustee 2010-2015)

On Fri, Oct 11, 2024, 05:49 Philip Kopetzky philip.kopetzky@gmail.com wrote:

Well, congratulations to 4 people living in Western Europe. If this result doesn't get the Wikimedia Foundation to rethink their approach to how they select their board members, I don't know what will.

I guess it's up to communities, affiliates and regional structures to create the change we want to see, noe more than ever.

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024, 11:38 Katie Chan, ktc@ktchan.info wrote:

...

*You can find translations of this message or help translate this message on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(short_version).*

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024. 6000 community members from more than 180 wiki projects have voted.

The following four candidates were the most voted:

• Christel Steigenberger
• Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
• Victoria Doronina
• Lorenzo Losa

While these candidates have been ranked through the vote, they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees. They need to pass a successful background check and meet the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.

Read the full announcement on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(long_version)

Best regards,

The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group

-- Katie Chan Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.

Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

---

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Congratulations to all those who were successful, thank you to those leaving the board, thank you for everything the unsuccessful candidates did in relation to the process, and special thanks for the functionaries who have spent the last 6 odd months managing this process.

IMHO diversity, and high edit counts are the least important characteristics for boards members, even ones selected to represent the community. I think the MCDC is a prime example of how trying to ensure every group has a say in the decision process is impractical. What we want is the best people and empower them to act.

What defines the best people we all have our own criteria, that's really subjective measurements the list of options is nearly endless.

Is it more than disappointment or that there are legitimate concerns over the capacity of those who were successful? Then contact those who ran the process directly with appropriately cited reasons before appointments are confirmed.

What I can say after 19 odd years of contributing is that the community is stronger than the Board and even The WMF, as long as the lights stay on and we just keep doing what we can one edit at a time it will be fine.

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024 at 21:18, Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com wrote:

Congratulations indeed!

@Phoebe Ayers phoebe.ayers@gmail.com from a quick glance at : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_of_Trustees diversity still remains an issue, but appointed seats have carried the most diverse profile it seems. Which to be honest make sense as elections are usually a reflection of the composition of the movement.

That being said, and it's a much larger discussion, I also believe we're trying to achieve too many things with that one board. At the same time you need a set of "business" skill set as you're running a very very large and global organisation, we want community representativeness and Diversity in a broad sense. All of that in 12 seats. I would love us to set what is the most important and work from there. We never could and never will be able to strike a balance between those three things :)

-- Christophe

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024 at 13:30, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

...

Congratulations to all the candidates, and thank you to everyone who ran and put a lot of time into the process. And thanks especially to our ongoing and outgoing trustees. The board is a ton of work, and one of the hardest jobs in our movement.

Re: processes, part of the idea, back in the day, for having two processes for the affiliate votes and the general vote was that it could help ensure geographical diversity (though I'm not sure that was true in practice). These two processes were combined a couple of years ago. I'm not sure going back to the old system is the right answer, but I do think it takes a variety of strategies to get candidates who both understand Wikimedia and the motivations of editors AND are interested in overseeing the governance of a multi-million dollar organization -- which is the job we are asking these folks to do.

Best, Phoebe (trustee 2010-2015)

On Fri, Oct 11, 2024, 05:49 Philip Kopetzky philip.kopetzky@gmail.com wrote:

...

Well, congratulations to 4 people living in Western Europe. If this result doesn't get the Wikimedia Foundation to rethink their approach to how they select their board members, I don't know what will.

I guess it's up to communities, affiliates and regional structures to create the change we want to see, noe more than ever.

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024, 11:38 Katie Chan, ktc@ktchan.info wrote:

...

*You can find translations of this message or help translate this message on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(short_version).*

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024. 6000 community members from more than 180 wiki projects have voted.

The following four candidates were the most voted:

• Christel Steigenberger
• Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
• Victoria Doronina
• Lorenzo Losa

While these candidates have been ranked through the vote, they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees. They need to pass a successful background check and meet the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.

Read the full announcement on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(long_version)

Best regards,

The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group

-- Katie Chan Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.

Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

---

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Ops, 75%, not 66%. Bad math, sorry.

Paulo Santos Perneta paulosperneta@gmail.com escreveu (sexta, 11/10/2024 à(s) 15:56):

I second Gnangarra 100%.

On a personal note, I'm very happy with the candidates elected, even if they do not fit 100% with my top (rather a 66% 😄), and wish them the best while fulfilling their mission, which certainly is no easy task.

I also believe it's worth noting that Victoria and Lorenzo, who were greatly associated with the Movement Chart BoT veto some months ago, were reelected by the community, despite many predictions that they would suffer a big backlash for making public their positions, and a number of people was quick to predict their certain removal from office, especially Victoria. It didn't happen, which opens space for reflecting if such positions were so much detached from the community ones as was said back then.

Best, Paulo

Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com escreveu (sexta, 11/10/2024 à(s) 15:20):

...

Congratulations to all those who were successful, thank you to those leaving the board, thank you for everything the unsuccessful candidates did in relation to the process, and special thanks for the functionaries who have spent the last 6 odd months managing this process.

IMHO diversity, and high edit counts are the least important characteristics for boards members, even ones selected to represent the community. I think the MCDC is a prime example of how trying to ensure every group has a say in the decision process is impractical. What we want is the best people and empower them to act.

What defines the best people we all have our own criteria, that's really subjective measurements the list of options is nearly endless.

Is it more than disappointment or that there are legitimate concerns over the capacity of those who were successful? Then contact those who ran the process directly with appropriately cited reasons before appointments are confirmed.

What I can say after 19 odd years of contributing is that the community is stronger than the Board and even The WMF, as long as the lights stay on and we just keep doing what we can one edit at a time it will be fine.

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024 at 21:18, Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Congratulations indeed!

@Phoebe Ayers phoebe.ayers@gmail.com from a quick glance at : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_of_Trustees diversity still remains an issue, but appointed seats have carried the most diverse profile it seems. Which to be honest make sense as elections are usually a reflection of the composition of the movement.

That being said, and it's a much larger discussion, I also believe we're trying to achieve too many things with that one board. At the same time you need a set of "business" skill set as you're running a very very large and global organisation, we want community representativeness and Diversity in a broad sense. All of that in 12 seats. I would love us to set what is the most important and work from there. We never could and never will be able to strike a balance between those three things :)

-- Christophe

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024 at 13:30, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

...

Congratulations to all the candidates, and thank you to everyone who ran and put a lot of time into the process. And thanks especially to our ongoing and outgoing trustees. The board is a ton of work, and one of the hardest jobs in our movement.

Re: processes, part of the idea, back in the day, for having two processes for the affiliate votes and the general vote was that it could help ensure geographical diversity (though I'm not sure that was true in practice). These two processes were combined a couple of years ago. I'm not sure going back to the old system is the right answer, but I do think it takes a variety of strategies to get candidates who both understand Wikimedia and the motivations of editors AND are interested in overseeing the governance of a multi-million dollar organization -- which is the job we are asking these folks to do.

Best, Phoebe (trustee 2010-2015)

On Fri, Oct 11, 2024, 05:49 Philip Kopetzky philip.kopetzky@gmail.com wrote:

...

Well, congratulations to 4 people living in Western Europe. If this result doesn't get the Wikimedia Foundation to rethink their approach to how they select their board members, I don't know what will.

I guess it's up to communities, affiliates and regional structures to create the change we want to see, noe more than ever.

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024, 11:38 Katie Chan, ktc@ktchan.info wrote:

...

*You can find translations of this message or help translate this message on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(short_version).*

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024. 6000 community members from more than 180 wiki projects have voted.

The following four candidates were the most voted:

• Christel Steigenberger
• Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
• Victoria Doronina
• Lorenzo Losa

While these candidates have been ranked through the vote, they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees. They need to pass a successful background check and meet the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.

Read the full announcement on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(long_version)

Best regards,

The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group

-- Katie Chan Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.

Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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-- Boodarwun Gnangarra 'ngany dabakarn koorliny arn boodjera dardon nlangan Nyungar koortabodjar'

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Congrats to all elected board members. Hoping those who lost (both the voters and the voted) will take note of the concerns including low edit counts and improper voting to do better next time. It will be good to have a movement with representatives from across the globe, but then what they have to offer matters, too. Change is a process, not a destination.

Warm regards, Kambai

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024 at 22:01, Florence Devouard fdevouard@gmail.com wrote:

I am not 100% sure I understand the graphic well. So please correct me if I am wrong in my interpretation.

But the way I understand it, it seems to me that the issue #1 is that voters are un-educated about how to vote wisely in such a voting system.

For example, let's consider the votes from those who voted for Tesleemah. When she was dropped, 80 of the votes went down the drain. That means 80 people voted either for her ONLY, or for her and maybe Mohammed and Erik. That is IT. Their vote was lost. I in fact suspect that she had a lot of voters for her who actually put only her name and none others. Maybe those voters did not understand how valuable it would have been to put more names on their list.

I know that I realized that situation during the voting process when some people told me that they had voted for "their favorite choice". And when I said "you probably should not vote for only one person but for several", they went "Really ????"

The fact that 413 votes were lost all together as non-transferable is certainly pointing out to a lack of understanding of the process and how to make the best of the vote.

And maybe some communities understand this voting system better than other communities.

My point #2 is that if under represented communities really want to have a person on the board, they really need to adopt a collective strategy where there will be only one candidate for it to avoid spreading thin. OR, if they have two (or more), they need to push the idea that the people voting for them should also put a vote for the other, for the rank immediately below, rather than only for their favorite choice amongst the two (obviously, they should vote for the two only if both options are acceptable in their book). This would ensure the vote to be transferred to the second when their fav choice is eliminated.

Looks to me that the issue might be rethinking on how to teach voters how to vote strategically.

And maybe... maybe... though it is a "decrease of liberty", it should be made mandatory to rank at least half of the candidates ?

Flo

Le 11/10/2024 à 11:49, Philip Kopetzky a écrit :

Well, congratulations to 4 people living in Western Europe. If this result doesn't get the Wikimedia Foundation to rethink their approach to how they select their board members, I don't know what will.

I guess it's up to communities, affiliates and regional structures to create the change we want to see, noe more than ever.

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024, 11:38 Katie Chan, ktc@ktchan.info wrote:

...

*You can find translations of this message or help translate this message on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(short_version).*

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024. 6000 community members from more than 180 wiki projects have voted.

The following four candidates were the most voted:

• Christel Steigenberger
• Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
• Victoria Doronina
• Lorenzo Losa

While these candidates have been ranked through the vote, they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees. They need to pass a successful background check and meet the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.

Read the full announcement on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(long_version)

Best regards,

The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group

-- Katie Chan Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.

Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

---

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*Thank you everyone for all your congratulations, both here and in private!*

Thanks to some unexpected free time, I created a summary of some voting stats based on the publicly available vote dump https://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/1638 (please don't worry, it is impossible to see how any single person voted!).

*The stats are available here: User:Nadzik/BoT elections 2024 stats https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nadzik/BoT_elections_2024_stats on Meta.*

Given my position in this process, I choose to refrain from commenting on the data; I publish it and its visualisation without biased commentary. I invite you to take a look at it and interpret it yourself.

I can only highlight that *some of the points mentioned above have a basis in the available data.*

We also await for more data (i.e. voter turnout) to be published on the official page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Statsby the WMF, which will give some more insights.

Cheers,

sob., 12 paź 2024 o 12:47 kayode yussuf via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> napisał(a):

Congratulations to the newly elected board members, and huge thanks to those who chaperoned the process.

I must also second Florence's point on voters' education.

The board is an important instrument for the community and the foundation, we must seek to get the best hands-on board, even if we want minorities represented.

*Kayode Yussuf*

On Friday, October 11, 2024 at 07:46:58 PM EDT, Levi Kambai Timothy < camylevsky@gmail.com> wrote:

Congrats to all elected board members. Hoping those who lost (both the voters and the voted) will take note of the concerns including low edit counts and improper voting to do better next time. It will be good to have a movement with representatives from across the globe, but then what they have to offer matters, too. Change is a process, not a destination.

Warm regards, Kambai

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024 at 22:01, Florence Devouard fdevouard@gmail.com wrote:

I am not 100% sure I understand the graphic well. So please correct me if I am wrong in my interpretation.

But the way I understand it, it seems to me that the issue #1 is that voters are un-educated about how to vote wisely in such a voting system.

For example, let's consider the votes from those who voted for Tesleemah. When she was dropped, 80 of the votes went down the drain. That means 80 people voted either for her ONLY, or for her and maybe Mohammed and Erik. That is IT. Their vote was lost. I in fact suspect that she had a lot of voters for her who actually put only her name and none others. Maybe those voters did not understand how valuable it would have been to put more names on their list.

I know that I realized that situation during the voting process when some people told me that they had voted for "their favorite choice". And when I said "you probably should not vote for only one person but for several", they went "Really ????"

The fact that 413 votes were lost all together as non-transferable is certainly pointing out to a lack of understanding of the process and how to make the best of the vote.

And maybe some communities understand this voting system better than other communities.

My point #2 is that if under represented communities really want to have a person on the board, they really need to adopt a collective strategy where there will be only one candidate for it to avoid spreading thin. OR, if they have two (or more), they need to push the idea that the people voting for them should also put a vote for the other, for the rank immediately below, rather than only for their favorite choice amongst the two (obviously, they should vote for the two only if both options are acceptable in their book). This would ensure the vote to be transferred to the second when their fav choice is eliminated.

Looks to me that the issue might be rethinking on how to teach voters how to vote strategically.

And maybe... maybe... though it is a "decrease of liberty", it should be made mandatory to rank at least half of the candidates ?

Flo

Le 11/10/2024 à 11:49, Philip Kopetzky a écrit :

Well, congratulations to 4 people living in Western Europe. If this result doesn't get the Wikimedia Foundation to rethink their approach to how they select their board members, I don't know what will.

I guess it's up to communities, affiliates and regional structures to create the change we want to see, noe more than ever.

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024, 11:38 Katie Chan, ktc@ktchan.info wrote:

*You can find translations of this message or help translate this message on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(short_version).*

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024. 6000 community members from more than 180 wiki projects have voted.

The following four candidates were the most voted:

• Christel Steigenberger
• Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
• Victoria Doronina
• Lorenzo Losa

While these candidates have been ranked through the vote, they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees. They need to pass a successful background check and meet the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.

Read the full announcement on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(long_version)

Best regards,

The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group

-- Katie Chan Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.

Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

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On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 1:21 AM Bobby Shabangu < bobby.shabangu@wikimedia.org.za> wrote:

Very interesting conversations here!

And indeed I agree with Florence. There really needs to be serious voter education especially in global South Communities, focusing on how the transferable voting system works. I went to these elections very worried about the same thing, raising it sharply during our candidate onboarding session.

I was disappointed during WikiIndaba conference to hear a number of the conference participants wishing me well with the elections adding that they only voted for me!

Anyway, we live to fight another day, thanks to everyone who voted for me - placing me as their top 4 candidate in their vote. And congrats once again to the elected candidate.

Best regards, Bobby Shabangu

Rather than just thinking about how to teach voters how to vote, we should consider ways to adjust the process to make it more intuitive to understand. We have the opportunity to do this as part of the Board governance conversation that is collecting feedback now I think?

The data is clear that ranking this many candidates is overly complex and many voters won’t do it. The data also reflect real-world confusion in political elections implementing ranked choice voting.

The eligibility requirements round did a good job of eliminating a few candidates that would likely not have performed well. We really need to think about ways to decrease the number of candidates to a more reasonable number if we want to increase voter participation.

For instance, we could consider regional primaries where we specifically ask voters from a given set of wikis and organizations to nominate 1-2 Board candidates from their combined geographic + language region. It wouldn’t be perfect but with predefined voter participation thresholds and more targeted campaigns, it could make election outreach more effective at driving proportionally greater voting. This kind of equity is why the Global Council idea was brought forth, but we could achieve a similar outcome without creating an entirely new governance body.

On Sat, 19 Oct 2024 at 13:53, Wikipedysta Nadzik < pl.wikipedia.nadzik@gmail.com> wrote:

...

*Thank you everyone for all your congratulations, both here and in private!*

Thanks to some unexpected free time, I created a summary of some voting stats based on the publicly available vote dump https://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/1638 (please don't worry, it is impossible to see how any single person voted!).

*The stats are available here: User:Nadzik/BoT elections 2024 stats https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nadzik/BoT_elections_2024_stats on Meta.*

Given my position in this process, I choose to refrain from commenting on the data; I publish it and its visualisation without biased commentary. I invite you to take a look at it and interpret it yourself.

I can only highlight that *some of the points mentioned above have a basis in the available data.*

We also await for more data (i.e. voter turnout) to be published on the official page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Statsby the WMF, which will give some more insights.

Cheers,

sob., 12 paź 2024 o 12:47 kayode yussuf via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> napisał(a):

...

Congratulations to the newly elected board members, and huge thanks to those who chaperoned the process.

I must also second Florence's point on voters' education.

The board is an important instrument for the community and the foundation, we must seek to get the best hands-on board, even if we want minorities represented.

*Kayode Yussuf*

On Friday, October 11, 2024 at 07:46:58 PM EDT, Levi Kambai Timothy < camylevsky@gmail.com> wrote:

Congrats to all elected board members. Hoping those who lost (both the voters and the voted) will take note of the concerns including low edit counts and improper voting to do better next time. It will be good to have a movement with representatives from across the globe, but then what they have to offer matters, too. Change is a process, not a destination.

Warm regards, Kambai

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024 at 22:01, Florence Devouard fdevouard@gmail.com wrote:

I am not 100% sure I understand the graphic well. So please correct me if I am wrong in my interpretation.

But the way I understand it, it seems to me that the issue #1 is that voters are un-educated about how to vote wisely in such a voting system.

For example, let's consider the votes from those who voted for Tesleemah. When she was dropped, 80 of the votes went down the drain. That means 80 people voted either for her ONLY, or for her and maybe Mohammed and Erik. That is IT. Their vote was lost. I in fact suspect that she had a lot of voters for her who actually put only her name and none others. Maybe those voters did not understand how valuable it would have been to put more names on their list.

I know that I realized that situation during the voting process when some people told me that they had voted for "their favorite choice". And when I said "you probably should not vote for only one person but for several", they went "Really ????"

The fact that 413 votes were lost all together as non-transferable is certainly pointing out to a lack of understanding of the process and how to make the best of the vote.

And maybe some communities understand this voting system better than other communities.

My point #2 is that if under represented communities really want to have a person on the board, they really need to adopt a collective strategy where there will be only one candidate for it to avoid spreading thin. OR, if they have two (or more), they need to push the idea that the people voting for them should also put a vote for the other, for the rank immediately below, rather than only for their favorite choice amongst the two (obviously, they should vote for the two only if both options are acceptable in their book). This would ensure the vote to be transferred to the second when their fav choice is eliminated.

Looks to me that the issue might be rethinking on how to teach voters how to vote strategically.

And maybe... maybe... though it is a "decrease of liberty", it should be made mandatory to rank at least half of the candidates ?

Flo

Le 11/10/2024 à 11:49, Philip Kopetzky a écrit :

Well, congratulations to 4 people living in Western Europe. If this result doesn't get the Wikimedia Foundation to rethink their approach to how they select their board members, I don't know what will.

I guess it's up to communities, affiliates and regional structures to create the change we want to see, noe more than ever.

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024, 11:38 Katie Chan, ktc@ktchan.info wrote:

*You can find translations of this message or help translate this message on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(short_version).*

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024. 6000 community members from more than 180 wiki projects have voted.

The following four candidates were the most voted:

• Christel Steigenberger
• Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
• Victoria Doronina
• Lorenzo Losa

While these candidates have been ranked through the vote, they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees. They need to pass a successful background check and meet the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.

Read the full announcement on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(long_version)

Best regards,

The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group

-- Katie Chan Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.

Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

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On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 11:51 AM Matej Grochal matej.grochal@wikimedia.sk wrote:

Dear all

interesting idea with the regional primaries but I am not sure it is the right way. It seems that having more rounds would alienate voters more than draw them in. We keep having so many elections. Remember, there would have to be elections for the electoral committee that would coordinate the primaries in the regions in addition to a central/global election committee. And there would have to be a committee to decide how those primaries will be run and what the distribution of the regional seats will be and so on. But then it is still probably easier and fairer than trying to coordinate who will be _the_ candidate that all of one region should vote for. And more transparent. Not having done any kind of research on this, my hunch is that a big factor in this election was name recognition. There are tons of people who do good work and lead well but are just not easily recognized "household names" for community members on a global scale, they might be recognized within their region. Voters should try to get to know the candidates a bit more, invest an hour and listen to their statements, read about their ideas and accomplishments. The session at Wikimania was quite useful for this purpose.

Be well!

Matej

More rounds is significantly more work to coordinate and participate in, you're 100% right Matej. It's well known that primaries tend to draw fewer voters than general elections. It's a big drawback.

Another alternative would be to iterate on the idea of dedicated Board seats to represent some groups of stakeholders. One of the main issues with both the current system and the old one (which lumped together all of the chapter / affiliate seats in one global block) is that *both* systems ended up just biasing toward candidates from North America or Europe. If the Board seats allocated to community-elected seats were more granular with dedicated regional seats—similar to how legislative bodies for a city or state get broken down into geographic districts—that could help correct for it, while being realistic about the biases inherent to effectively participating in the Board or other movement bodies (like English fluency).

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 8:11 PM Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com

wrote:

...

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 1:21 AM Bobby Shabangu < bobby.shabangu@wikimedia.org.za> wrote:

...

Very interesting conversations here!

And indeed I agree with Florence. There really needs to be serious voter education especially in global South Communities, focusing on how the transferable voting system works. I went to these elections very worried about the same thing, raising it sharply during our candidate onboarding session.

I was disappointed during WikiIndaba conference to hear a number of the conference participants wishing me well with the elections adding that they only voted for me!

Anyway, we live to fight another day, thanks to everyone who voted for me - placing me as their top 4 candidate in their vote. And congrats once again to the elected candidate.

Best regards, Bobby Shabangu

Rather than just thinking about how to teach voters how to vote, we should consider ways to adjust the process to make it more intuitive to understand. We have the opportunity to do this as part of the Board governance conversation that is collecting feedback now I think?

The data is clear that ranking this many candidates is overly complex and many voters won’t do it. The data also reflect real-world confusion in political elections implementing ranked choice voting.

The eligibility requirements round did a good job of eliminating a few candidates that would likely not have performed well. We really need to think about ways to decrease the number of candidates to a more reasonable number if we want to increase voter participation.

For instance, we could consider regional primaries where we specifically ask voters from a given set of wikis and organizations to nominate 1-2 Board candidates from their combined geographic + language region. It wouldn’t be perfect but with predefined voter participation thresholds and more targeted campaigns, it could make election outreach more effective at driving proportionally greater voting. This kind of equity is why the Global Council idea was brought forth, but we could achieve a similar outcome without creating an entirely new governance body.

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On the English Wikipedia, this is referred to as "editcountitis". Just looking at the raw number, without the quality, doesn't tell you too much about an editor. One editor may do hundreds of revert-and-warn vandal edits in the time it takes another to research and write a well-written paragraph in one edit, but is the second contribution of less value? I certainly don't think it's of hundreds of times less value.

That said, it's not worthless. I would be very hesitant to elect someone as a "community" board member if they had very little activity on community projects altogether, say a couple hundred edits. But get higher than that, and the difference in experience between a thousand edits and two thousand is not tremendous. The main thing is, I want our community representatives on the Board to be people who participate in the community and the editing process regularly, not occasionally.

Todd

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 9:06 AM waltercolor--- via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

In this discussion thread, I was moved by the statement of Kimmo Virtanen (On Fri, Oct 11, 2024) :

*"When I was deciding who to vote for, I used edit count as a proxy for Wikimedia experience and excluded most of non-US/Europe candidates because their edit counts were too low."*

The cumulative numbers of edits is something very important in Wikipedia, and it shows that it determines the social weight in the movement and thus, the chance to be elected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edi...

But I'm not sure the movement can only be represented by high level editors. This system prevents many valuable editors and candidates from 'punching at its weight' in the different elections of the movement.

So wouldn't it be a good thing to create something like a "Weight class" (as it exists for example in boxing) for the elections of the Movement where people could candidate and vote in different categories ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weight_class_(boxing)

Creating different classes of voting could allow people to express and discuss concerns which are specific to their categories and vote in their polling division for people who represent them. This would give a chance to more skilled people to be elected.

This categorization could also enrich a future Global Council with more various profiles and concerns.

waltercolor as a modest editor

---

*De :* Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com *Envoyé :* dimanche 20 octobre 2024 22:18 *À :* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Objet :* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Preliminary results of the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 11:51 AM Matej Grochal matej.grochal@wikimedia.sk wrote:

Dear all

interesting idea with the regional primaries but I am not sure it is the right way. It seems that having more rounds would alienate voters more than draw them in. We keep having so many elections. Remember, there would have to be elections for the electoral committee that would coordinate the primaries in the regions in addition to a central/global election committee. And there would have to be a committee to decide how those primaries will be run and what the distribution of the regional seats will be and so on. But then it is still probably easier and fairer than trying to coordinate who will be _the_ candidate that all of one region should vote for. And more transparent. Not having done any kind of research on this, my hunch is that a big factor in this election was name recognition. There are tons of people who do good work and lead well but are just not easily recognized "household names" for community members on a global scale, they might be recognized within their region. Voters should try to get to know the candidates a bit more, invest an hour and listen to their statements, read about their ideas and accomplishments. The session at Wikimania was quite useful for this purpose.

Be well!

Matej

More rounds is significantly more work to coordinate and participate in, you're 100% right Matej. It's well known that primaries tend to draw fewer voters than general elections. It's a big drawback.

Another alternative would be to iterate on the idea of dedicated Board seats to represent some groups of stakeholders. One of the main issues with both the current system and the old one (which lumped together all of the chapter / affiliate seats in one global block) is that *both* systems ended up just biasing toward candidates from North America or Europe. If the Board seats allocated to community-elected seats were more granular with dedicated regional seats—similar to how legislative bodies for a city or state get broken down into geographic districts—that could help correct for it, while being realistic about the biases inherent to effectively participating in the Board or other movement bodies (like English fluency).

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 8:11 PM Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 1:21 AM Bobby Shabangu < bobby.shabangu@wikimedia.org.za> wrote:

Very interesting conversations here!

And indeed I agree with Florence. There really needs to be serious voter education especially in global South Communities, focusing on how the transferable voting system works. I went to these elections very worried about the same thing, raising it sharply during our candidate onboarding session.

I was disappointed during WikiIndaba conference to hear a number of the conference participants wishing me well with the elections adding that they only voted for me!

Anyway, we live to fight another day, thanks to everyone who voted for me - placing me as their top 4 candidate in their vote. And congrats once again to the elected candidate.

Best regards, Bobby Shabangu

Rather than just thinking about how to teach voters how to vote, we should consider ways to adjust the process to make it more intuitive to understand. We have the opportunity to do this as part of the Board governance conversation that is collecting feedback now I think?

The data is clear that ranking this many candidates is overly complex and many voters won’t do it. The data also reflect real-world confusion in political elections implementing ranked choice voting.

The eligibility requirements round did a good job of eliminating a few candidates that would likely not have performed well. We really need to think about ways to decrease the number of candidates to a more reasonable number if we want to increase voter participation.

For instance, we could consider regional primaries where we specifically ask voters from a given set of wikis and organizations to nominate 1-2 Board candidates from their combined geographic + language region. It wouldn’t be perfect but with predefined voter participation thresholds and more targeted campaigns, it could make election outreach more effective at driving proportionally greater voting. This kind of equity is why the Global Council idea was brought forth, but we could achieve a similar outcome without creating an entirely new governance body.

---

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Very big thank you Maciej for this additional analysis of the votes and for the absolute clarity of its presentation. Very well done. It is fascinating.

In any cases, it also indicates that the "un-education" with regards to how this voting system works actually extend to all voters, whoever the candidate they primarily voted upon. It does not seem to matter whether they are from an under-represented community or not. In completion to your ""1 candidate only" votes", I simply draw a percentage of 1 candidate only compared to all #1 votes per candidate It ranks from 7% (for  Mohammed, Erik, Bobby, Rosie) to 23% (for Lorenzo). With most percentages being between 7% to 15% The highest percentages are for Maciej, Lorenzo and Farah.

So really... it is a very general issue. I do not think my comment here is biaised. Voters just do not get it. That's it.

To be honest... I can not say that the "explanation" page provided ahead of the elections is bringing much light : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Single_Transf... My biased comment is : it does not speak to me. I think the Sankey diagram of this election only would speak more to most voters to increase their skills.

After battle thought... do the most popular candidates have a sort of special responsibility to call their fans to vote beyond their "hero" ? As is... what if a candidate was asked in the "standard questions" pre-election to provide a recommandation as to who they would love to work with as board members (=suggest their voters to also vote for X and Y).

Otherwise, two general trends, geography and gender (eg, one who voted for a woman, is more likely to vote for another woman next), but we already knew that from the previous graphic.

Flo

Le 19/10/2024 à 13:52, Wikipedysta Nadzik a écrit :

*Thank you everyone for all your congratulations, both here and in private!*

Thanks to some unexpected free time, I created a summary of some voting stats based on the publicly available vote dump https://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/1638 (please don't worry, it is impossible to see how any single person voted!).

*The stats are available here: User:Nadzik/BoT elections 2024 stats https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nadzik/BoT_elections_2024_stats on Meta.*

Given my position in this process, I choose to refrain from commenting on the data; I publish it and its visualisation without biased commentary. I invite you to take a look at it and interpret it yourself.

I can only highlight that *some of the points mentioned above have a basis in the available data.*

We also await for more data (i.e. voter turnout) to be published on the official page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Statsby the WMF, which will give some more insights.

Cheers,

sob., 12 paź 2024 o 12:47 kayode yussuf via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org napisał(a):

Congratulations to the newly elected board members, and huge
thanks to those who chaperoned the process.

I must also second Florence's point on voters' education.

The board is an important instrument for the community and the
foundation, we must seek to get the best hands-on board, even if
we want minorities represented.


*Kayode Yussuf*



On Friday, October 11, 2024 at 07:46:58 PM EDT, Levi Kambai
Timothy <camylevsky@gmail.com> wrote:


Congrats to all elected board members. Hoping those who lost (both
the voters and the voted) will take note of the concerns including
low edit counts and improper voting to do better next time. It
will be good to have a movement with representatives from across
the globe, but then what they have to offer matters, too. Change
is a process, not a destination.

Warm regards,
Kambai

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024 at 22:01, Florence Devouard
<fdevouard@gmail.com> wrote:

    I am not 100% sure I understand the graphic well. So please
    correct me if I am wrong in my interpretation.

    But the way I understand it, it seems to me that the issue #1
    is that voters are un-educated about how to vote wisely in
    such a voting system.

    For example, let's consider the votes from those who voted for
    Tesleemah. When she was dropped, 80 of the votes went down the
    drain. That means 80 people voted either for her ONLY, or for
    her and maybe Mohammed and Erik. That is IT.
    Their vote was lost. I in fact suspect that she had a lot of
    voters for her who actually put only her name and none others.
    Maybe those voters did not understand how valuable it would
    have been to put more names on their list.

    I know that I realized that situation during the voting
    process when some people told me that they had voted for
    "their favorite choice". And when I said "you probably should
    not vote for only one person but for several", they went
    "Really ????"

    The fact that 413 votes were lost all together as
    non-transferable is certainly pointing out to a lack of
    understanding of the process and how to make the best of the vote.

    And maybe some communities understand this voting system
    better than other communities.

    My point #2 is that if under represented communities really
    want to have a person on the board, they really need to adopt
    a collective strategy where there will be only one candidate
    for it to avoid spreading thin.
    OR, if they have two (or more), they need to push the idea
    that the people voting for them should also put a vote for the
    other, for the rank immediately below, rather than only for
    their favorite choice amongst the two (obviously, they should
    vote for the two only if both options are acceptable in their
    book). This would ensure the vote to be transferred to the
    second when their fav choice is eliminated.


    Looks to me that the issue might be rethinking on how to teach
    voters how to vote strategically.

    And maybe... maybe... though it is a "decrease of liberty", it
    should be made mandatory to rank at least half of the candidates ?


    Flo




    Le 11/10/2024 à 11:49, Philip Kopetzky a écrit :

...

    Well, congratulations to 4 people living in Western Europe.
    If this result doesn't get the Wikimedia Foundation to
    rethink their approach to how they select their board
    members, I don't know what will.

    I guess it's up to communities, affiliates and regional
    structures to create the change we want to see, noe more than
    ever.


    On Fri, 11 Oct 2024, 11:38 Katie Chan, <ktc@ktchan.info> wrote:

        /You can find translations of this message or help
        translate this message on Meta
        <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(short_version)>./

        Hello all,

        Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024
        Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election
        <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024>.
        6000 community members from more than 180 wiki projects
        have voted.

        The following four candidates were the most voted:

          * Christel Steigenberger
          * Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
          * Victoria Doronina
          * Lorenzo Losa

        While these candidates have been ranked through the vote,
        they still need to be appointed to the Board of Trustees.
        They need to pass a successful background check and meet
        the qualifications outlined in the Bylaws. New trustees
        will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2024.

        Read the full announcement on Meta-Wiki
        <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Announcement/Results(long_version)>

        Best regards,

        The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group

        -- 
        Katie Chan
        Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.


        Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
             - Heinrich Heine

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