The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is organizing a call for feedback about community selection processes between February 1 and March 14. While the Wikimedia Foundation and the movement have grown about five times in the past ten years, the Board’s structure and processes have remained basically the same. As the Board is designed today, we have a problem of capacity, performance, and lack of representation of the movement’s diversity. Our current processes to select individual volunteer and affiliate seats have some limitations. Direct elections tend to favor candidates from the leading language communities, regardless of how relevant their skills and experience might be in serving as a Board member, or contributing to the ability of the Board to perform its specific responsibilities. It is also a fact that the current processes have favored volunteers from North America and Western Europe. In the upcoming months, we need to renew three community seats and appoint three more community members in the new seats. This call for feedback is to see what processes can we all collaboratively design to promote and choose candidates that represent our movement and are prepared with the experience, skills, and insight to perform as trustees?
In this regard, two rounds of feedback meetings are being hosted to collect feedback from the technical communities in Wikimedia. Two rounds are being hosted with the same agenda, to accomodate people from various time zones across the globe. We will be discussing ideas proposed by the Board and the community to address the above mentioned problems. Please sign-up according to whatever is most comfortable to you. You are welcome to participate in both as well!
- Round 1 - Feb 25, 4:00 pm UTC
- Round 2 - Mar 4, 4:00 am UTC
- Sign-up and meeting details: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees/Call for feedback: Community Board seats/Conversations/MediaWiki and Wikitech
Also, please share this with other volunteers who might be interested in this. Let me know if you have any questions. KCVelaga (WMF), 14:37, 21 February 2021 (UTC)