A pointed exchange on the mailing list, between Risker and Quim Gil from Trust & Safety…and Mike Peel, who seems to be running for the Board of Trustees.
Mike Peel said:
So I just received this:
…
Thank you all again for submitting your candidatures
for the Wikimedia
Foundation Board of Trustees. The Board Selection Task Force and the
Elections Committee are excited to inform you about the first community
engagement opportunity of this 2022 Board election process.
The Affiliate Representatives will be submitting questions for
candidates to answer. The process will use the new Movement Strategy
Forum <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/>, based on the open-source
platform Discourse <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software)>.
The great thing about Discourse is replies can be automatically
translated by users into their preferred languages. We will send you
each an email invitation to join a private category once the time to
answer questions begins (June 18). Each candidate will use their
Wikimedia account to log in, there is no need to create a new account
and password.
Quim Gil said:
…* Let affiliates propose and select their questions by themselves. This is why we are providing a private space for affiliate representatives to propose questions and vote for them.
* Give all candidates three days to writel their replies before they can be
read by anyone. This allows all candidates to organize their time to
respond, not taxing as much those who have less free time or less flexible
schedules. This is why we give access to candidates to this private space
at the same time, when the questions are ready, and then make this space
public at the date announced.
* Give everyone more time to read the candidates’ answers in their
preferred languages, using automatic translation. We want to reduce the gap
that non-English speakers have to endure when texts are only available in
English, and when translations take extra days to arrive, if they arrive
for their language at all. This is another reason to use the forum.
Risker said:
Just to change the subject for a short minute: This is a Board of Trustees election. It is supposed to be managed by the Elections Committee <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_committee>, a Board-appointed committee of community members. Their mandate was reviewed and updated within the past month by Board resolution. (Yes, I know this used to be the “affiliate-selected” round, but now that it is an election, things have changed.)
Is there a reason why every single communication I have seen about this election has been authored by staff members, none of whom are listed as staff support for the committee? Did the Elections Committee carry out a consultation with the community to make this significant change in the manner in which candidate questions will be handled, as is indicated by their charter?
There’s a reason why these elections have never been managed by WMF staff – I think anyone could see the conflict of interest if they were to do so – and the Elections Committee or a committee selected by affiliates has handled these matters to date. I’d like to know why this does not seem to be the case in this election.
You may now wish to return to your previous discussions about where to talk about this election. Please excuse my interruption. /s
Risker/Anne
Quim Gil said:
Hi, thank you for this conversation. It is especially important to hear more opinions from more people. If you are willing but still hesitating to add your perspective, please go ahead and comment here or in the channel you prefer. I will comment on the forum related points later today, but in the meantime I just wanted to say .. On Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:42 AM Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This thread about the forum is dense enough already. Given that this is a mailing list, please consider “changing the subject” indeed 🙂 and discussing the elections in a separate thread.
Yeah, I’ll bet they want the discussion to take place “somewhere else”. But with the new format of the mailing list, that does not display comments by author, how would we ever find it — and would that be a bug or a feature.
Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_committee said:
Per 17 May 2022, the Committee has the following responsibilities:
…
-
- to the extent possible, consult with the wider Wikimedia community in developing and revising election procedures within the scope of the Charter;
If there is an RfC somewhere, I’m not seeing it. And I think answering Risker’s /s with a smiley and a brush-off was inadvisable. T&S needs to address this, or get someone else to, and in the same thread where the question was raised.
Dan Gerry (Deskana) is right “I get that we like community consultations and all that, but defining a problem, launching a potential solution, then asking the very people participating in the experiment what they think the experiment’s success measures should be, strikes me as more of an abandonment of responsibility than a consultation, as well as invalidating the experiment.”
And then holding a private hidden election candidate space in a place where the WMF holds powers of moderation, ….and on a experimental platform that looks a lot like Flow….what could possibly go wrong.
This is starting to look like when they tried to have the Flow discussion on a very broken Flow platform, and then just force implementation.
Gender Desk 