Talk:Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Set Up Process

Will the call for candidates be announced through CentralNotice/Request? Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 10:19, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Responding for documentation purposes: Yes, eventually we did run a banner campaign for the final 2 weeks of the call for candidates from September 1 - 14. Here is the link. --KVaidla (WMF) (talk) 09:33, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Please mark for Translation

Please mark for Translation @Abbad (WMF): thank you :D Christoph Jackel (WMDE) 12:58, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

@Christoph Jackel (WMDE): Done. Good luck! :) --Abbad (WMF) (talk) 20:26, 31 July 2021 (UTC).

Strange calculation

From the front side: "The Movement Charter Drafting Committee is expected to start with 15 people." [...] "The 7 top ranked candidates get a seat." [...] "This ranking happens during the election, and results are published with the election results. After removing the 7 who got a seat through the election, the 6 top ranked candidates get a seat."

Seven elected plus six appointed members shall be a total of fifteen members. But my Excell says 7 + 6 equals 13! Where did the two excess members come from or is my Excell broken? syrcro 08:33, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi there, syrcro! Your math is partly there. I think you're missing the Wikimedia Foundation 2 appointed members of the committee. Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 17:58, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

E mail adress

Hi, the footnotes say "This may be provided to the Wikimedia Foundation via email (_AT_) secure-infowikimedia.org." Is email@ the actual adress? Christoph Jackel (WMDE) 08:33, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

@Christoph Jackel (WMDE): the (AT) should be after secure-info. It's fixed now. Thank you for pointing it out! --Abbad (WMF) (talk) 14:22, 11 August 2021 (UTC).

Election method

[Usual disclaimer: am a candidate]

Hi @JKoerner (WMF) and Qgil-WMF:, could I ask why STV was selected rather than S/N/O? As has been noted by multiple individuals in the BOT washup, the current STV system, while amazing for the short time given to work on it, has a couple of significant flaws with it.

The most relevant (and also most supported as a need for change) one of these is that the system doesn't allow for giving equal ranking for candidates, but that not ranking someone puts them below (in functional terms) the lowest rank actually given, as ranks can't be skipped. Therefore, if you have individuals you support you put them first, but if you have any candidates you think would be unwise to be elected, then in order to actually put them bottom the intermediate slots all need to be filled.

To do that fairly requires knowing and being able to rank all the candidates - that was tricky enough to do in the BOT elections, and the MCDC election has an amazing 73, but which makes it functionally impossible for voters to know all candidates well enough to order. This means that large numbers of candidates will have to be dropped randomly into the order. The effective electoral negative of this grows the more candidates there are - that might be a 50 place variance. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:22, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Hey there, Nosebagbear! Thanks for your feedback and thoughts on this. We hear this and I might know of something to make this a little easier. One major things the Movement Strategy and Governance team is trying out is a "voting advice application." Some people noted a tool to help voters choose would be most helpful, especially with 19 candidates for the Board election. Of course, with more than triple the amount here, deciding on choice candidates is no small feat either.

Let me quote Cornelius from his mail on Wikimedia-l:

"In many countries of the world during election campaigns so-called “Voting Advice Applications (or “Election Compasses) are quite common. Thanks to an open source project called “Open Election Compass, we’d like to adapt the same for this election. We have built a prototype of it, which you can access on Toolforge."

Community members can submit statements for the candidates to rank before the voting period. Fifteen to twenty of those statements (decided on by a poll) will be entered into the tool. During the voting period community members can use the tool to rank statements. The tool will then share which candidates best represent the community member's thoughts. Read about the whole process on the Election Compass Statements page. Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

@JKoerner (WMF): - I'd assumed I'd just missed that, I hadn't realised that it was published today with a timeline of 5 days to get the questions in (and, thus far, I believe is only available in English, so significantly less than that by the time it is in the 10 most common languages, let alone every language represented just by the candidates).

I've had a go with the system (commendably easy to use), and I am glad that reading the latter part, indicates that candidates can provide statements to justify their reasoning. What is the specific effect of tagging something as "important to me" on the final outcome, and will there be a "less/not important to me" option? (As that is distinct from "I don't know").

I'd also ask if it has a scale functionality - lots of logical queries will be things like "how much detail should there be on pre-existing bodies in the MC" - and, to give an example, I happen to agree with the poll data on that which was on the cusp between "light" and "moderate", so not possible to fairly portray on a 3-option setup. A 1-5 number set-up would help resolve this.

While it's certainly a mitigation, and an interesting one at that, I would still like to know why STV was chosen over SNO, and without it being raised as a discussion topic over the last 2 months for Community feedback - this system either will be used as an voter tool or will require at least reading c.1100 statements (73 candidates x 15-20 compass statements) to be able to fairly place every candidate, at a rough guess, around c.25,000 words. Nosebagbear (talk) 19:59, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Small change in the selection of Wikimedia Foundation staff

Hi everyone,

According to the Movement Charter Drafting Committee creation process we proposed (see also initial proposal, the Wikimedia Foundation presents two staff members as candidates and also appoints two members of the committee. The idea was that these staff members would join the election & selection process with the rest of the candidates even if in a way or another their access to the committee was guaranteed. In the context we had on July, this idea made sense.

However, we have received feedback from volunteers saying that, in practice, this puts our staff members in direct competition with volunteers in the election. With more than 70 candidates running (a scenario nobody could imagine a few months ago), we understand this concern. For this reason, we propose that the two Foundation candidates, Runa Bhattacharjee and Jorge Vargas will not be part of the election and selection, and they will be directly appointed by the Foundation making use of our two slots.

If we receive no complaints about this proposal, we will proceed accordingly as we open the election on October 11. --KVaidla (WMF) (talk) 09:23, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

• The rules, as written, do not in any way say that the WMF selectors would choose the two WMF staff members. Specifically, there is nothing in any version of the set up process that guaranteed the WMF staff two seats at the table - an extremely disproportionate level of representation. Stop changing the rules, please. You've now worsened the odds considerably for volunteers. Risker (talk) 14:44, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for responding in this thread. We posted this message on two relevant talk pages and it seems that the other conversation on the candidates page is more substantial, so I am adding the link to that discussion here. --KVaidla (WMF) (talk) 08:14, 7 October 2021 (UTC)