Wikimedia Foundation elections/2022/Community Voting/Election Compass

Thank you for your interest in the Board of Trustees election. There will be 6 candidates for the Board of Trustees and only 2 available seats.

An Election Compass has been made available to support the community members in the selection process. In many countries of the world during election campaigns so-called “Voting Advice Applications" (or “Election Compasses") are quite common to supporters voters in choosing a candidate (or party) to vote for during election campaigns. This Election Compass is possible thanks to an open source, volunteer project called "Open Election Compass".

Common questions on the Election Compass

How was the Election Compass created?

Every community member was invited to propose statements within the broader scope of the Board of Trustees. After the period of proposing statements, community members upvoted the statements they saw as the most differentiating and therefore helpful to learn from the candidates about their views. The Election Committee chose the final 15 statements. More details about the process on this page.

All 6 candidates were asked to position themselves to these statements. Their answers were then included in the Election Compass. Everyone using the tool will be able to easily see how the candidates align on topics perceived as important by the community for this election.

Can I trust the tool?

The Election Compass is based on the open source project called "Open Election Compass", whose source code is publicly available. No changes in the source code were made. The tool has been widely used also in other contexts, e.g. by media pages for the German parliamentary elections in 2022.

Is there another way to see the responses of the candidates?

Sure, all the responses of all 6 candidates are also available on Meta: As a table to get a quick overview, as well as in full-length, sorted by statement.

I want to translate the tool into my language!

Thank you, that's great to hear! For this first use, the tool is available in 18 languages besides English. Please reach out via msgwikimedia.org before August 30, 2022 if your language is not one of those and you would like to make the tool available in your language.

Languages covered by the start of the tool (besides English): Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn), German (de), Spanish (es), French (fr), Hindi (hi), Croatian (hr), Indonesian (id), Japanese (ja), Korean (ko), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Russian (ru), Serbian (sr), Swahili (sw), Turkish (tr), Ukrainian (uk), and Mandarin (zh-han)

Languages added since the start of the tool (that do not include translations of the answers of the candidates, but just interface + statements): Hungarian (hu), Malayalam (ml), Thai (th)

Where can I provide feedback?

We’re happy to receive your feedback on this tool. Please leave your feedback (in any language) here on the talk page, or send an email to msgwikimedia.org.

Process and Timeline

July 8–20: Community members are invited to propose statements for the Election Compass
July 21–22: Elections Committee reviews statements for clarity and removes any off-topic statements
July 23 – August 3: Community members are invited vote on the statements
August 4: Elections Committee selects the top 15 statements
August 5–12: Candidates align themselves with the statements
August 15 23: The Election Compass opens for voters to use to help guide their voting decision