Wikimedia Foundation elections/2022/Affiliate Organization Participation/Candidate Questions

You can also read this page on the Movement Strategy Forum.

During the 2022 Board of Trustees election, Affiliate Organization Representatives had the opportunity to propose questions for candidates to answer.

Process

Affiliate Representatives upvoted the questions to select the 15 questions candidates would answer. The process used the new Movement Strategy Forum, based on the open-source platform Discourse. Messages can be automatically translated by users into their preferred language using this platform.

Affiliate Representatives and candidates were offered alternative options to using the Forum. The Affiliate Representatives and candidates could email their questions and answers to be posted on the Forum on their behalf. The questions were emailed directly to the candidates and are posted here. Candidates can post answers on the Movement Strategy Forum and/or Meta-wiki. Answers from all candidates will be synced in both places.

Questions were made available on June 18 for candidates. Candidates have time to work privately on their answers until June 24 at 18:00 UTC. This timeline was set so that candidates get a reasonable chance to thoughtfully answer the questions without feeling a need to rush to answer just so their answers are available earlier than others. This "waiting period” reduces potential disadvantages for non-native English speakers/writers, who may take longer to answer the questions posed to them in English. Similarly, this also allows candidates not to worry about not being able to answer answers quickly if they happen to be busy in other areas of their life as the questions are made available.

Affiliate Questions

Below you have the 15 questions proposed and selected by affiliates, sorted by the number of votes each received.

1. What experience do you have in trying to make the Wikimedia projects more inclusive and equitable?
2. What roles and responsibilities currently centrally held by the Wikimedia Foundation would you support being decentralized to other movement entities?
3. How do you imagine the Wikimedia Foundation in 5-8 years? What does it look like, what’s its role, what does it do and what does it not do?
4. What key qualifications and experience would you bring to the role in terms of the leadership, management and strategic planning of a large organization such as WMF?
5. How would you like to see the role of affiliates change in the next five years?
6. How would you approach the many Movement Strategy initiatives that haven’t been started yet?
7. How will you as an individual board member align your duty of loyalty to the organization with the diversity of stakeholder expectations from across the movement?
8. We learn from both successes and failures. In what crucial ways did the Wikimedia Movement fail, and what do we learn from these failures?
9. How do you see the role of the collaboration with other free knowledge projects such as OpenStreetMap and the Internet Archive?
10. What should be done in the short term to ensure more equity in the distribution of resources and in funding protocols for affiliates?
11. How to deal with the language barrier of small or underrepresented languages?
12. How do you envision changes to our technological infrastructure that will improve access and participation from underdeveloped communities in our projects in the next five years?
13. What do you think are Wikipedia’s needs to improve its public image and perception?
14. Would you support the idea of WMF sponsoring free knowledge projects it benefits from such as the OpenStreetMap Foundation or the Internet Archive?
15. How do you see the movement’s strategy being made possible within local communities?

You can check the rest of the questions at Affiliate questions proposed and not selected for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election 2022.