[Wikimedia-l] Are chapters part of the community and board seats for affiliates?

[Bence Damokos]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Thehelpfulone
<thehelpfulonewiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 19 February 2013 13:48, Bence Damokos <bdamokos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > To be perfectly fair, all the nominations for the 2012 selection were
> > public, so this was less of a problem than in 2010 when they were not
> > published.
> >
>
>
> Whilst this is true, is there a good reason as to why much of the
> discussion for chapter-elected board seats happens in private? Looking at
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats/2012/Processit
> appears chapter discussion happens on a private chapters wiki and
> chapters-l, a mailing list restricted to only current board members
> of chapters, during which time candidates lose their access to that
> wiki/mailing list but presumably gain access to it afterwards. Unless all
> the discussions are deleted, what is the benefit of having these
> discussions in private, especially if the candidates will see what was said
> about them after the election?
>
> I understand why we use private voting through SecurePoll for the
> "community" elections but please could someone explain what I'm missing
> with regards to Chapter selected seats?
>
I believe the losing access to the mailing list is meant to ensure that the
candidate has no undue advantage in the process by either influencing the
discussion or knowing the other candidates' answers in advance (I believe
those who "win" would not get re-added as they would become part of the WMF
and have to give up their chapter board positions, while those who lose
re-gain access once the process is over and there is no more a possibility
to have this influence).

As for the private vs. public aspect, there is a difficult balance to make
between being transparent and being able to attract candidates who might
not be comfortable in being publicly identified as unsuccessful. (The
current search for an expert seat also has this guarantee of privacy, as I
understand.) The result of this balancing was I believe (I might be
mistaken) that in the end the chapters selected candidates could opt for
publicity or the default privacy and all of them opted for the public
option. This has actually resulted in the somewhat awkward need to
duplicate everything between the private wiki and Meta.
Furthermore, the process is meant to be consensual between the different
boards involved, so there is a useful place for private discussions either
on the closed mailing list or between individual board members.

Adjusting this balance and making sure that people beyond the boards are
informed (even if the final decision is still made by the boards) will be
an important challenge for the next selection.

Best regards,
Bence