Hi,

The Wikimedia technical spaces Code of Conduct is enforced by a committee. That committee's selection process is defined as follows:

"The first Committee will be chosen by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Collaboration team. Subsequent members and auxiliary members of the Committee will be chosen by the current regular members through a majority vote." [1]

About a month ago, the CoC Committee put up a slate of "candidates", and was soliciting feedback on them. The decision on these candidates was supposed to happen on June 12, last week. I don't know if it actually happened - I didn't see an announcement, and the candidates page is still up. [2] In any case, I doubt any of these candidates will have trouble getting through, since these candidates are also, for the most part, the people deciding who gets in.

That's what I'm writing about: I now think that the committee should be decided via open elections, instead of having the committee appoint itself. At the moment, this group has a complete lack of accountability: they could make any decision whatsoever at any time, and, according to the rules, there is literally no one who can stop them. With every passing year and additional "renewal" (that's what it's called), [3] it seems to me that their legitimacy as representing the views of the overall community decreases.

I had a strange personal experience that made me start to think about this. Pretty soon after they requested feedback a month ago, I sent en email to the CoC Committee giving my negative view about one member of the committee, and explaining why I thought they shouldn't remain there. The committee responded a few weeks later by saying they were rejecting my feedback - which is their right - but then spent the rest of the email criticizing my own previous behavior. Which I found bizarre. Thinking about it later, it seems to only make sense as what's known in American business as "circling the wagons" - a group of people responding to outside criticism in a defensive way, by rejecting all of it, attacking the critics, etc. Which is not the kind of thing you want to see from people who are supposed to be making rational, unbiased decisions.

Now, it could be that I'm making too much of this one interaction - maybe some people there were just having a bad day - but there's still the larger question of whether elections make sense, and to some extent it's a question that's independent of whatever you think of the people currently on the committee.

As for the mechanics of voting: one option is to give one vote to anyone who has a Wikimedia developer account. The vote could be held on wikitech.wikimedia.org, or perhaps there's an even better technical solution. The key thing for now is just to get a sense for people's views on this.

So, what do people think - is there any kind of significant support for the idea of elections for the CoC Committee?

-Yaron

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee/Members/Candidates [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee#Creation_and_renewa...