[Foundation-l] Missing audio of WMF Board candidates

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When someone chooses not to use Skype, the consequences are his or hers. If
you do not want to have Skype installed on your computer, you can install it
temporarily or you can borrow a system that has Skype installed.

An interview is not about existing board activities, it is about elections,
getting the message out what the boardCANDIDATES want to contribute when
elected. Why they should be elected and not someone else.

It is  tough when a candidate has a problem with the format. However it is
politics. This is the real world where people who are not able to
communicate in English have no place on the board. It is just not practical.
This does not mean that people with a stammer, a stutter a hearing problem
cannot or should not be voted in, it is just a tad more difficult.

Reading may be quicker but speech does have benefits when you want to get a
message across. When you read a text you do not learn if people can think on
their feet, you do not learn how they come across and in my opinion that IS
important.

The interview was in the end a waste of time. The idea was a good one but it
lacked in execution.
Thanks,
       GerardM

2009/8/17 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>

> 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.
>
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