[Foundation-l] Future board elections

[Philippe Beaudette]

As another of the members of that committee, I'd like to echo Brad's 
sentiments.  I strongly urge the Board to consider a much earlier 
appointment of the election committee.  The one decision that was made 
because of "lack of time" was the actual election model - I personally would 
have supported (and did push for) more study on election models prior to 
recommending to the board approval voting.  In the end, we recommended 
approval voting both because there was a fairly decent community history 
with it and because we simply didn't have enough time to consider a move 
toward another system with the inherent technology challenges.

If approval voting is the method this community wishes to remain with, 
that's fine, but I didn't like that we were almost boxed into that corner by 
a lack of time for deliberate study.

I urge the Board to consider appointing the new election committee fairly 
soon.

Philippe

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)" <newyorkbrad at gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 12:27 PM
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Future board elections

> Since we are on the subject of Board elections, this might be a good
> time to restart the discussion on Meta concerning the rules and
> procedures for the elections. The Elections Committee for the last
> (June 2007) election (on which I served, as did Aphaia and four other
> Wikipedians) was appointed very late in the process. As a result,
> there was no real opportunity to discuss making any major changes to
> the rules and procedures, even if members had wanted to do so. To
> avoid the same situation in 2008, the 2007 committee recommended that
> this year the organization of the election start much earlier, partly
> for this reason and partly to ensure the best publicity, increase time
> to translate the notices, etc. As it happened, from my point of view
> last year's procedures worked fine and there is no need for major
> changes, but that should be a conscious community decision and not
> just a default one.
>
> Newyorkbrad
>
> On 12/29/07, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks for your reply, Florence.
>>
>> On Dec 30, 2007 12:48 AM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> > I am aware this will make more difficult for all members to meet
>> > together and should increase costs for meetings. However, it seems to 
>> > be
>> > a more reasonable number to welcome both community members and
>> > outsiders, avoid putting too much constant pressure on volunteers,
>> > provide more diversity of skills and allow room for resignations...
>>
>> I've taken the point about "more reasonable number to welcome both
>> community members and
>> > outsiders" (since Jan-Bart, originally designed an outsider expert 
>> > claimed
>> proudly to be a part of community [cf. Board Election 2007] and another
>> appointed ex-life member Jimmy is even considering to run for the next
>> Election, this argument makes a sense, I think), "more diversity and room
>> for resignation". However, since all Wikimedia Board of Trustees are
>> volunteers, while they take many responsibilities and take care of things 
>> in
>> reality not only the highest level of management, but still they are
>> volunteers, it is rather difficult for me to figure out how this 
>> increment
>> can help avoid "putting too much constant pressure on volunteers".
>>
>> Can you please give us some examples to deepen our comprehension?
>> Cheers,
>>
>> --
>> KIZU Naoko
>> http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese)
>> Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD
>>
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