Talk:Wikimedia Election Committee User Group

Community page

This is a Wikimedia community page for Wikimedia volunteer community discussion. No Wikimedia affiliate organization should feel any obligation to respond to what is here. Anyone who wishes to participate can do so. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:44, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Election Protection Connection to empower the Wiki community volunteers

This project seeks to promote Wikimedia volunteer community leadership in managing Wikimedia elections. The likely alternative is Wikimedia Foundation staff leadership in managing Wikimedia elections.

The major changes which this project seeks include the following:

1. Decision making to prioritize Wikimedia community agency and self governance
2. Increased transparency in election management by being open by default, rather than open by exception
3. The encouragement of open and ongoing Wikimedia community discussion about elections, rather than only during short election periods
4. Centralization of documentation and conversation here in a community managed space, rather than spread over many individual election pages and requiring negotiation with the Wikimedia Foundation to publish or discuss
5. Activation of Wikimedia community affiliates in elections to promote regional and subject matter inclusion, rather than expecting any small election committee to attempt to represent all global diversity

Differences between the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation include the following:

1. The Wikimedia community is always active every hour of every day. The Wikimedia Foundation has a tendency to schedule limited time for conversation.
2. The Wikimedia community is comfortable with crowdsourced conversation. The Wikimedia Foundation tends to funnel conversation to designated community liaisons, which creates a bottleneck for conversation quantity and filter for conversation quality.
3. The Wikimedia community is volunteer and the Wikimedia Foundation has paid staff. The payment of staff is problematic because it conflicts with the pace and sorts of activities which volunteers would do. In different situations WMF staff may not be getting pay or resources to collaborate with volunteers, in which case they slow project development to match their paid labor hours. Otherwise, they may consume fantastic amounts of resources (US$10-50,000, possibly much more?) and assert that volunteers will keep up with their pace if those volunteers really care about the issue. This project seeks to set the norm for election activities to match the norm for Wikimedia community volunteer participation.

Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:17, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Let's plan the 2021 WMF Board of Trustees election

There was a planned election for

• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_of_Trustees

started in late 2019 and which was scheduled to resolve in summer 2020.

• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2020
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2020/Board_of_Trustees

COVID-19 disrupted the election. There has been further disruption in conversation between Wikimedia Foundation staff and Wikimedia community volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation staff have designed and implemented various aspects of the election design, which is fine, but among those plans there is not a community space to share election updates, have discussions, and to invite community participation in planning the next election. Sometimes I wonder how things would be different if the Wikimedia community had editorial control of Meta-Wiki and the Wikimedia Foundation staff were guests here, and if Wikimedia Foundation staff mostly posted their site WikimediaFoundation.org. I feel a bit that Wikimedia Foundation staff assert editorial control on some pages and discourage the usual Wikimedia community collaborative editing process when paid staff participate in volunteer community programs as part of their job description. There is no single or group of Wikimedia Foundation staff I have in mind, but rather as an institution, WMF staff and volunteers simply have different values and ethics.

I would like for the wiki community to have freedom and encouragement to plan community participation in the next election. Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:38, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Referenced in 2022 WMF call for comment

• Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees/Call for feedback: Board of Trustees elections/Discuss Key Questions

Bluerasberry (talk) 00:23, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

/reports page starts with sentence fragment

Wikimedia Election Committee User Group/reports starts with "being a group of humans"... I'm guessing that was an editing error, but am not sure what the intent was. ★NealMcB★ (talk) 23:49, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Election compass tool

@Dušan Kreheľ: made an election compass tool which has been used in elections for

• Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Candidates
• Wikimedia Foundation elections/2022

See

• Talk:Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Candidates#The_departmental_studies_of_candidates_and_some_of_their_statistics
• https://codeberg.org/Dusan_Krehel/Dusans_grid_presenter

I am posting links to this here because I would like the Wikimedia Foundation to support development of the tool for all elections. Bluerasberry (talk) 17:50, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: Look Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Miscellaneous/Vote and statistic server. Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 14:18, 7 February 2023 (UTC)