The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization which acts as steward of the Wikimedia projects. It is governed by its board of 10. One of the seats is a lifetime appointment for a key member, 4 are reserved for experts and chosen in a traditional way, and the remaining 5 seats are for representatives of the community of the registered and active users of Wikimedia projects. Two of those 5 are elected by organized chapters of the Wikimedia community, and 3 are elected by the community at large.
Until 31 May votes are accepted for the 2015 community election for the 3 community seats. Registered and active Wikipedia contributors may vote now. The three candidates which I most support are Dariusz Jemielniak (pundit), Denny Vrande?i? (Denny), and James Heilman (Doc James). I encourage everyone who is eligible to vote, and if you would, please support these candidates preferentially.
I support these candidates because all of them have the following characteristics which are otherwise uncommon among the others running:
- They all have experience going to large institutions and requesting huge sums of money. The Wikimedia movement is small and underfunded, and I want board members who have an interest in bringing more development to infrastructure and projects. Volunteer actions and good will go a long way, but those things are so much more efficient when they are supported with a little funding.
- Not only do I trust each of these to request and receive funds to deliver to the Wikimedia movement, but I trust these three to put funding into projects which benefit Wikimedia’s community of contributors. Historically most of the Wikimedia Foundations’ investment has been in assistance for theoretical and potential contributors on the premise that when these future contributors come to the site, they will finally give insight on how the community should be supported with funds. Enough investment has been done for future users to now think of the present community of contributors who know the site best and have requested certain interface changes. Many of the changes requested are for things people take for granted on any other website, like getting documentation for features or just being able to depend on site functionality. Tools which help community members assist other community members have been neglected, but all of these candidates spend their personal time helping other Wikimedians directly one-on-one and they would not forget the value of this on the board.
- All of these are involved in huge scalable projects. Denny is a leader in bringing Wikimedia projects into web 3.0 with Wikidata, which will be the wave of future Internet experiences. James is one of the most prolific Wikipedia editors in the Wikimedia community and also contributes significantly with his individual human attention to 50+ languages by recruiting translators of health content and assisting them in posting their translations to the Wikipedia of their language. Dariusz as an academic is a cultural bridge between universities, institutions, and foundations and the Wikimedia community. In his book Common Knowledge he has described the Wikimedia community respectfully and insightfully in such a way as to lay a foundation from which other organizations can recognize Wikimedia projects as peers and potential partners. His hand in supporting research is critical for getting other organizations to recognize the way that Wikimedia projects have become a media center for distributing certain kinds of information.
- All of them have deep participation among Wikimedia communities of many different languages, and have the rare experience of managing international audiences in a personal way.
- All of them are long-time deeply involved Wikimedia community participants who have fluency in the culture of the Wikimedia community, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit sector, the academic sector, and the commercial sector. The experience matters.
Beyond these things, each of these have personal accomplishments that I think make them suitable for acting as board members.
Denny is a data scientist. He was a founder of Wikidata – really the key founder, because he had the vision, secured the funding, and did most of the negotiation. Already that makes him a candidate for being likely to have a place in world history, because I think Wikidata will be of equal or greater impact than Wikipedia, or at least combine with it to make Wikipedia very different and much higher impact. Denny now works for Google and unofficially I expect that he would bring the attention of Google to Wikipedia in whatever way benefits Wikipedia. He is multilingual and contributes in many languages on Wikipedia, in addition to his data projects being designed to deeply contribute information to the ~300 languages of Wikimedia projects. His routine daily activities in his work are likely to affect everyone in the world.
James is the director of the emergency department at his hospital. Of the people running, he has by far spent the most time actually interacting as an editor with the general community of contributors. He is a medical doctor and faculty of a university. He has been in legal trouble for wiki-related activism at least twice, once for the Rorschach test publication and once for establishing Wikivoyage. He participates in community organization and outreach. He has a large number of sideprojects which include the management and coordination of all kinds of people. In short, he is an able manager of large and diverse teams and he completes projects successfully.
Dariusz is a professor of anthropology. He wrote an ethnography of the Wikimedia community called Common Knowledge, which is the first and only comprehensive study of the culture of the Wikimedia community written by someone who deeply participates in it. He has served a range of high-level Wikimedia community roles, including as ombudsman, steward, and as a member of the Funds Dissemination Committee. He has said that as a Polish national he grew up in an environment with censorship and poverty, and I have seen that this experience makes him sympathetic to the particular challenges faced by Wikimedia contributors in the developing world. He addresses LGBT concerns. I regret supporting three white males from the Western world, but considering the options, I think that Dariusz as an LGBT supporter is close enough to gender diversity and as a person from a country which has recently developed a lot, he is close enough to speak effectively for other developing economies. He is effective in those roles in the sense that I believe he will effectively divert resources to advance the causes of those demographics.
Right now the elections are quite casual. I think this is the last election when that will be so. I and others care too much about this. Right now there is no system for presenting voting guides, campaigning, or discussing the candidates openly. I know this is because of a Wikimedia community culture which is adverse to spam, advertisements, and too much favoritism. Still, these board seats determine a lot of people’s education, supplement a lot of people’s career options, and contribute to the determination of a lot of people’s fates. At the next election the Wikimedia Foundation will be an organization which manages 80+ million USD annually and 2-3 times that much value in the investment which other organization build in response to the existence of Wikimedia projects.
In the past a Wikimedia Foundation board seat had little accountability to the community and hardly addressed finance. I have written people on the board in the past and they failed to reply to me. The holders of these positions are something like elected officials from my perspective. I think it would be worthwhile for them to have the support of secretaries to manage the concerns of the community which are addressed to them, and to do more to react to the wishes of the community even as they enact their own vision as elected representatives of the Wikimedia community.