[Foundation-l] Election translation and project-level coordinators

[Sj]

We talk about multilingualism a lot, and about how many active
languages Wikipedia has...
translation of instructions for the upcoming Board elections should be
a big deal.  Any contributor who meets whatever criteria are set for
voting, should be able to vote (and to judge the available
candidates).  Translation of profiles is part of this; however for
smaller languages, perhaps that can wait on an explicit request from
an interested voter; in which case there should be a channel for such
requests.

Project-level coordinators would help quickly broaden the pool of
interested translators.
( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_notice_translations_2005 )


An idea for distributing the election work to users on every project:
* Identify at least one respected user from each project who can
oversee announcing the election, and help analyse votes from that
project if necessary.  For the largest projects, two or three users
might be better.
** Individual communities could be asked to nominate people for this
role; we could also tap the pool of international ambassadors (cf.
m:Wikimedia Embassy).  These users could also help coordinate
translations if one was not yet available for their project language.
* Add these users to a list of project-level coordinators, like the
list of translators/translation coordinators above
* Election Officials can work through these project-level coordinators
to reach local VPs and announcement pages, and to gather questions for
the central FAQ.

These project-level coordinators already have announcements to start
distributing -- even the mention that elections are coming up should
be translated widely.

The ideal candidates for these positions:  active, longtime editors
who are primarily active on the project in question.  It might be nice
to find such users who do not normally take part in policy or
organization, and ask them to help out.  (Note that just finding one
voter from each project will increase the project-diversity among
voters by an order of magnitude over last year).

-- 
+sj+