Talk:Affiliate-selected Board seats/2014

Discussion regarding the 2014 process should take place here. To ask candidates questions, do so on the talk pages of the candidate statements. For discussion regarding the process overall, see Talk:Affiliate-selected Board seats.

Missing points?

• Who is allowed to endorse?
• Who is allowed to ask questions?
• Who is allowed to vote? Can user groups vote? --Elitre (talk) 08:48, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
  • Chapters and thematic organizations can make endorsements and cast votes. Per the WMF bylaws amendment, user groups are not eligible to participate. As far as asking questions go, I suppose in principle anyone could ask questions, since the nominations are made in public. harej (talk) 08:51, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

List of candidates

Apparently I am failing at finding subpages :) Is there a way to see a list of the nominations? thanks! -- phoebe | talk 17:53, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

These are all the subpages. Thus, at this point, no one has submitted a nomination. harej (talk) 17:57, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

@Harej: got it, thanks! I thought I just wasn't finding something :) -- phoebe | talk 18:24, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Any particular reason why Affiliate-selected Board seats/2014/Nominations/Mallory Knodel isn't included in the list of candidates? Risker (talk) 22:30, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Her candidacy is now listed on the page. harej (talk) 03:48, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Diversity of process and diversity of outcome

Regarding the candidates' answers about the purpose of the affiliate-selected seats: I'm looking at the candidates that have been picked in the past, and it seems pretty clear that having the chapters pick candidates ends up being no better than community elections when it comes to ensuring diversity by language/region.

• The chapters selected Patricio from the Spanish Wikipedia
• The community selected María from the Spanish and English Wikipedias
• The chapters selected Alice from the German Wikipedia
• The community selected Ting from the German, English, and Chinese Wikipedias
• The chapters selected Phoebe from the English Wikipedia
• The community selected Phoebe from the English Wikipedia

I'm cherry-picking here, but if you add in all the other trustees and the candidates for the current selection process, the picture remains the same.

Having a diversity of selection processes can be a good thing, but it can also actually intensify the biases it's supposed to address: the top candidates for either process are likely to be editors from the biggest Wikipedias. If there were more community-elected seats, the people who currently end up as runners-up would bring a broader range of backgrounds to the board. --Emufarmers (talk) 13:15, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Though to be fair none of us see ourselves as "representing" a particular language community. We are informed by our experiences, but if we weren't interested in the wide diversity of all Wikimedia projects, none of us would be interested in being on the board. Having worked with all of the above people, I can attest to their collective commitment to multilingualism and diversity. Speaking for myself, I am interested in African languages, I occasionally work in Spanish (though it's poor), and I make a real effort to try to understand what is going on in our various communities, in-person and on-line. It is true that none of that is a substitute for personal lived experience, but it does influence my views. I would love to see more trustees from various backgrounds and language communities. But, what makes the difference for driving strategy and policy at the WMF is standing up for diversity in our projects (many languages, global community support, editors from all backgrounds, increased readership and editorship from all parts of the world), regardless of where an individual trustee comes from. -- phoebe | talk 21:10, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

By the way, people may not realize our current board is really quite diverse: the ten members live in 7 countries, and we are evenly split male and female; we also have a wide range of professions, ages, Wikimedia experience and governance experience. That is pretty extraordinary for a board of a large organization. -- phoebe | talk 20:20, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Actually, you are cherrypicking too much. For the last 5 years two of the three non-affiliated-community seats have been given to an English speaking, US-based trustee, while it happened only once with CSBS. If you look at the complete list of trustees, the C/ASBS seems to be more diverse than non-affiliated-community seats both in language and in country of origin; and historically both of them have been more diverse than board-appointed seats (but this is changing). Anyway, the number of people selected is so small that we cannot do any meaningful statistics. - Laurentius (talk) 14:22, 15 June 2014 (UTC)