On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 11:55 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 2:43 PM, James Alexander <jalexander@wikimedia.org
wrote:
On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Itzik - Wikimedia Israel < itzik@wikimedia.org.il> wrote:
Any response or input from the Election Committee?
I think Greg said it relatively well earlier as the coordinator for the committee (I am it's staff advisor). At this point the committee has decided on the voting requirements and it is highly unlikely to change
for
the current election cycle. They did have serious discussions about everything mentioned in this thread both on their list and during the
first
committee meeting but in the end decided that they did not believe there was a strong need for change right now. When this conversation came back
up
it was broached whether we wanted to revisit and no one said expressed a desire to.
Also as Greg said I think this is a good topic for a permanent election committee which I very much think should exist.
James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
This is a weakness in the process. Itzik raised an issue and was told it was too early to discuss. He raised it again when the elections approached, and is being told its too late. Obviously the "committee" conducted its deliberations on this question in secret, which is a strange approach considering there have been requests and a desire for open discussion from the community.
I agree, I also wish that the committee had more time to make the decision. I had hoped to seat them in January and they would have had a lot of time to discuss this both here and elsewhere. Sadly we were waiting for the board on a couple things and were unable to seat them until recently and at that point there was a time crunch and things needed to be decided quickly. As both Greg and I said however, these arguments were in no way ignored, when I introduced the topic (in one of the very first emails to the committee) I listed all of the questions here about staff voting, chapter staff/board, edit requirements etc and then backed off. The committee discussed all of those and decided, in the end, that this was the right decision.
It's also worth pointing out that many of the people in this discussion agreed that the community requirements are so low that there should be no reason any interested employee (of the WMF or elsewhere) can't qualify under other criteria, eliminating the need for a special franchise for WMF employees.
On a completely personal level I actually think the requirements could be lowered. We already had at least 1 individual who I think was a perfect fit for the FDC for example but was unable to run and had to move himself to ineligible because of the edit requirements (he may have had over 150 edits this year and be very active in the movement as a whole but he did not have the 20 edits in the past 6 months required). However the committee decided not to do so and that is their prerogative.
Unfortunately it appears that anyone interested in adjusting the criteria
will need perfecting timing while broaching this subject next year.
This is why Greg (and myself. and the election committee from last year who made a proposal http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Standing_Election_Committee, and from what I've seen the election committee from this year) want to have the board create a standing committee. That standing committee would be empowered to have this discussion at any point and to discuss the positives and negatives both themselves and with the community and make a decision. They are much less likely to run into the problem that a one off committee has where decisions need to be discussed and made and quickly so that they can get other logistics in place.
James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur