[Foundation-l] board elections

Tue Apr 26 23:03:32 UTC 2005

Anthere, Danny et al.,

I have three requests regarding the organization of this year's election:

1) Translations. We need
- the announcement that people can stand for election, and how
- the 1000 character candidate profiles
- the announcement of the actual vote
to be translated into as many languages as possible. To avoid candidate 
bias, a translation of candidate profiles should only be allowed if all 
profiles are included.

If Sj is not going to stand, I think he would make an excellent 
organizer for this. Getting longer platform statements translated could 
remain within an individual candidate's responsibility.

2) I would like the candidate profiles to be displayed *on the voting 
page* in the language set in the user preferences. This should be doable 
as a hack by putting them in the language files or the MediaWiki 
namespace(s); I can write a script to assist with that.

Why? Because this way, voters will not have to seek out information in 
their language about who they are voting on, which should lead to a much 
better informed choice.

3) Given the growing importance of Wikimedia and the Board, I'd like the 
integrity of this election to be closely watched. This should include a 
post-election analysis of the data: checking for sock puppets, double 
votes on multiple wikis, etc. This could be a collaborative effort. I'd 
like to ask the organizers to make this part of their election planning.

I think at least two developers who are not going to stand should serve 
as security advisors to the organizers. Let's also carefully define the 
requirements for being allowed to vote. This should be done in private 
by the organizers and the advisors and published only shortly before the 
vote to avoid trickery.

All best,

Erik