[Foundation-l] Notice of the results of the WMF Board ofTrustees election

[Brianna Laugher]

On 13/07/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> So, if I read you well, you consider that the fact the notices were not
> translated in languages such as arabic and chinese, should be blamed on
> the board.

My comment about translation was actually in reply to Ray' Saintonge's
message about (in response to me) about low
participation/responsibility of raising election awareness. He said

 If eligible voters can't be bothered to
> look when an election is advertised in all reasonable places, they get
> the result they deserve.

I replied,

 It's pretty funny to blame
> people for not being aware of something happening when there wasn't
> even information available in their language for them to read about
> it.

I consider the important part of my message to actually be:

> I consider it WMF's responsibility to communicate to its projects what
> the relationship between them is. I consider it WMF's responsibility
> to communicate to Wikimedians about why the election (and indeed WMF
> itself) is important.

If people have the attitude "why should we vote, who cares, how is
this relevant anyway", then I think this communication is not too
successful.

Australia is due to have a federal election in late 2007. At the
moment there is lots of neutral advertising from the Electoral
Commission encouraging people to enrol to vote/ensure their electoral
roll details are accurate.

Maybe an election is an appropriate time to request/hire outside help.
It was done for the vote counting, why not the election organising?

The election and has come and gone, and on the whole IMO it was
handled well. I don't mean to attack the committee or the Board about
it.

> That the board pays translators ?
[...]
> I also think that if the board makes the decision to hire translators,
> there will be a HUGE uproar of complaints, because we indeed have the
> resources internally.

As Sue Reed said, If we do, then where were they? If no one
volunteers, IMO it would be appropriate to pay translators for events
such as this.

regards
Brianna