[Foundation-l] Design goals for the election and board selection process

Sat Jul 14 18:24:05 UTC 2007

On Jul 14, 2007, at 11:19 AM, Delirium wrote:
> These relate, I think, to the question of what exactly the community
> *is*.  The core group of the community are probably people who: 1) are
> committed to Wikimedia's core goals (though they may disagree on some
> matters); and 2) spend significant time and effort working towards  
> those
> goals.  But that's a pretty abstract definition, and you can't make
> voting eligibility based on that too easily.  Our current  
> approximation
> is "people who've edited a Wikimedia project at least a little  
> bit", but
> that isn't really the same thing.  As our projects get more and more
> popular, an increasing percentage of the total internet population  
> will
> be eligible to vote under current rules, and "anyone who's ever edited
> Wikipedia" will start to look less and less like any sort of  
> community.
> It'd also make us susceptible to outside advertising campaigns, as
> someone wanting to influence the Foundation would just need to rally
> some otherwise inactive account-holders to rediscover their  
> accounts and
> vote.

I agree completely.  If we feel there was low turnout in this  
election, I think one possible solution would be better  
notification... and this has been discussed extensively already.  But  
*another* thing to think about is whether we have defined voter  
eligibility much too broadly.  I think we mostly do not want the  
board of the foundation elected by casual users or the general  
public, but by "the core group of the community" .. which is of  
course hard to define, but probably means more than just making a  
small number of edits at some point in time.

--Jimbo