Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees/Call for feedback: Community Board seats/Reports/2021-02-16 Notes from a 1:1 with Claudia Garad, Executive Director of Wikimedia Österreich

Claudia states that the amount of current requests for participation is overwhelming, even for an affiliate with full-time employees. Among these many requests she has to rank, making the Call for Feedback a lower priority.

Claudia couldn’t understand why at this very moment the Board is running its expansion. Due to the Movement Strategy Process and the coming Global Council she expects a shift of competencies and responsibilities from the board to a Global Council soon. This would make a separate restructuring of the board now meaningless and redundant to a later one.

Claudia supports the board’s wish to gather more skills and diversity among the trustees. She sees it as crucial on many levels in the movement, that skills should be enforced versus the current “popularity contest” pattern. She pointed out that this should not lead to a loss of direct involvement of the community in selectional processes, sharing her experience from the Global Council working group "Roles&Responsiblities", where this view prevailed. According to her, this is shared by the vast majority of the members of Wikimedia Austria.

Concerning the ideas of the Call for Feedback, Claudia would welcome any combination of ideas preserving direct involvement of the communities in the selection process with a process ensuring skills and diversity (committees).