[Foundation-l] Board elections

[Majorly]

On 20/02/2008, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Philippe Beaudette wrote:
> > Hi Andrew:
> >
> > I can only speak for my experience last year.
> >
> > Last year, we had essentially three main tasks: rule-making,
> communication,
> > and logistics.
> >
> > 1)  Rule-making was, far and away, the easiest.  Part of that is because
> we
> > were sort of locked into one voting system for technical and timing
> reasons
> > (no time to change it really), although we spent a good deal of time
> looking
> > at it to see if it could be done prior to making a recommendation to the
> > board.  Then, we created the endorsements system and wrote the documents
> to
> > make them public that had the rules of the election on it.  We also
> codified
> > who was eligible to vote in that election, etc.
> >
> > 2)  In Communication, we (by we, I mean "Aphaia" primarily) found people
> to
> > translate the documents into as many languages as possible and posted
> them
> > as many places as we could think of ... including the Village Pump or
> > equivalent on EVERY wiki ... and pushed the documents out as far as we
> > could.  This took a major chunk of our time.  Throughout the election,
> > communications dominated my life, and I can't even imagine how much work
> > Aphaia put into it.
> >
> > 3)  For logistics, we communicated with SPI to get their agreement to
> help
> > and to audit, and we set up (by we, I mean "Tim and SPI") a wiki on
> SPI's
> > server.  Then, the messages were localized on that Wiki and prepared for
> > voting.  In addition, we reviewed each endorsement to see if they were
> > appropriate to the rules and watched (closely) for sockpuppets on the
> SPI
> > wiki.  We also had to deal with importing (and then re-importing,
> because of
> > a technical glitch) the list of voters with suffrage.
> >
> > It was hard work.  Frankly, there were some things that I wish we'd had
> time
> > to do that just didn't get done.  I couldn't even guess how many hours
> went
> > into it for each committee member.  The committee we had worked well
> > together, as a rule - like any group working under that much stress,
> there
> > were disagreements - and worked hard.  I can remember several IRC
> meetings
> > that were hours long.
> >
> > I hesitate to guess how many total hours I put in, but I'll tell you
> that
> > when the election was over, my partner joked that he hadn't seen me in
> > weeks.  I was up very late many nights, and cancelled a lot of
> "non-wiki"
> > events in order to be online as each of our several deadlines rolled
> over.
> > My boss still shudders when I mention that time.  So, while the time
> > commitment is great, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  As a study in
> web
> > 2.0 communities, it's fascinating work.  As a study in election systems
> and
> > methods, it's even more fascinating.
> >
> > Philippe
> >
> > --------------------------------------------------
> > From: "Andrew Whitworth" <wknight8111 at gmail.com>
> > Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 8:21 AM
> > To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Board elections
> >
> >> A few quick questions about this: First, what are the responsibilities
> >> of this committee? How much work is involved in it? When does work
> >> start?
> >>
> >> I would love to volunteer for something like this, if an opening were
> >> available.
> >>
> >> --andrew whitworth
>
> Agreed, it seems to be a lot of hard work (not that I want to discourage
> anyone here :-)).
> One more point not mentionned: quite obviously, a member of the election
> committee must not be a candidate to the board himself.
>
> Ant
>
>
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Nor can they vote.

-- 
Alex (Majorly)

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Majorly