[Foundation-l] Missing audio of WMF Board candidates

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Gregory Kohs<thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:
> At some time into the WMF Board candidates campaigning season, the
> Wikivoices project undertook a sort of "candidates debate", where a Skype
[snip]
> I was a bit concerned with several things:

In addition to the concerns you raised the format discriminated
against candidates unable or unwilling to use the Skype software.

Further— a realtime voice interview is arguably pretty
unrepresentative of the board activities as they are mostly conducted
online. Should a candidate who stutters, has an impossibly thick
accent, or is just deaf suffer a poor showing even though those
limitations would have a negligible impact on their ability to
participate on the board?  It's fairly rare that board members need to
make decisions on the spot— the whole role is well suited to those
with a deliberative style, even ignoring the 'voice' part, simply
being realtime is pretty inapplicable.

If there were to be some audio part of the process, I'd rather it be
an optional audio addition to the candidate statements

I expect that some number of people reviewed the english only Q/A with
the help of machine translation, but tools like that would not be
available for the audio interviews. ... so thats another downside of
audio.

Beyond that, typical adult reading speed is more than twice the
typical speaking speed and text is amenable to skimming while audio
recordings are not. Voter's time would be better spent in other ways
than in listening to an audio recording, which may explain the lack of
demand for an audio presentation from the voters.

Yet— Even though I think the that methodology used in this specific
instance was poor and that idea of a realtime audio interview is a
poor, perhaps actually harmful, idea… and I could have guessed that
the whole thing would be vaporware…  Yet, I did not protest the
process because it was non-official.

That same non-officialness is why I think your complains about it are
unreasonable and mistargeted.

[snip]
> the Foundation actually cares about who gets seated on the Board, so long as
> they are a community rubber-stamp of the editors who hold sway over the
> English Wikipedia project, which is really most of what this represents.  I

Ting represents the English Wikipedia?

[snip]
> P.S.  Five days after the election results were announced, we are also still
> waiting for the requested data feed of the anonymized votes:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Votes

Thanks for prodding on this.