Hi Everyone,

2015 is an election year for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation as well as for the Funds Dissemination Committee .

As you may recall the Board has three directly-elected members who serve for two years. Currently they are Phoebe Ayers (Phoebe), Samuel Klein  (SJ) and María Sefidari (Raystorm). As in the past years we rely on an effective election committee to coordinate the elections for us along with staff support and a Board liaison. Not only do they guarantee that the election is overseen by an independent body, but they also make sure that the tremendous amount of work that needs to be done is taken care of. My job, as this year's Board liaison, is to coordinate the formation of this committee and to support them in their work while serving as the primary point of contact with the Board regarding the process..

This is a call for volunteers to serve on the election committee. If you feel that you can contribute to this committee, please email James Alexander (Jalexander@wikimedia.org) and give a small summary of why you think you would be able to help out with this process.

The Committee is responsible for planning and maintaining virtually every aspect of the Board election. For example, the Committee plans the type of voting, suffrage criteria, and criteria for candidacy, helps to draft and organize all of the official election pages on Meta, verifies that candidates and voters meet the criteria, audits votes to ensure there are no duplicate votes or other problems, et cetera. You can expect that this work will take an average 5-10 hours a week with a few periods of relative quiet and a few periods of heavy work during and after each election (the FDC and Board elections are planned to be separate this year).

If you decide to join the committee you will have to identify to the Wikimedia Foundation  because of the personal information you have access too and must be at least 18 years of age. In addition you cannot be part of the election committee if you are planning to be a candidate or are planning to support any candidate publicly.

To ensure we get going as quickly as possible, committee members will start to be seated as soon as we have 4-5 good candidates with an anticipated first meeting of Friday April 10th (or soon after, depending on committee availability). The deadline for volunteers, however, is Friday, April 17th UTC 12:00.  

The committee and staff will be setting up the election pages soon and the call for candidates, led by a letter from the Board, which will be going out shortly. If you're interested in running for either the Board or the FDC, I encourage you to read up on prior elections and the groups themselves to prepare your statements!