[Foundation-l] Election mailings

[Andrew Gray]

On 05/07/07, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild) <pathoschild at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is also a problem with selection. Making a few hundred edits to
> user pages and pet articles on one project does not mean they're
> suddenly aware of issues faced by the Wikimedia Foundation, and can
> rationally select trustees. [...] In my opinion, the vote is for *community*
> members, not anyone who edited pokémon articles 400 times; the
> majority of users on en-Wikipedia who received the bulk 'vote!' spam
> are probably not community members.

I am worried about the implications of "we shouldn't tell the
electorate about the election in case they're not the right sort of
people" - if this is not a sufficient threshold for voting, your
problem should be with the people who *chose that as the threshold*,
not with the people who tried to get the eligible voters to vote.
Ought we to be second-guessing what makes people good electors?

The community is large. If we just restrict voting to the subset of
the community that has *already* involved itself in Foundation-type
stuff - which is basically what any "tell the people who already know"
system is - then there is virtually no point in having these elections
at all, since we're just letting the same echo chamber decide
everything. And there are very good indications that what this echo
chamber of a few hundred thinks is not what the thousand or twenty
thousand "community members" think.

I would prefer an appointed board to "elected representatives" that
came out of a badly-publicised, badly-attended, badly-arranged,
election; they would probably be just as effectively selected and we
wouldn't have the embarrasment of an 'election' with a meaningless
turnout.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk