The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is organizing a call for feedback about community selection processes between February 1 and March 14. While the Wikimedia Foundation and the movement have grown about five times in the past ten years, the Board’s structure and processes have remained basically the same. As the Board is designed today, we have a problem of capacity, performance, and lack of representation of the movement’s diversity. Our current processes to select individual volunteer and affiliate seats have some limitations. Direct elections tend to favor candidates from the leading language communities, regardless of how relevant their skills and experience might be in serving as a Board member, or contributing to the ability of the Board to perform its specific responsibilities. It is also a fact that the current processes have favored volunteers from North America and Western Europe. As a matter of fact, there had only been one member who served on the Board, from South Asia, in more than fifteen years of history.
In the upcoming months, we need to renew three community seats and appoint three more community members in the new seats. This call for feedback is to see what processes can we all collaboratively design to promote and choose candidates that represent our movement and are prepared with the experience, skills, and insight to perform as trustees? In this regard, it would be good to have a community discussion to discuss the proposed ideas and share our thoughts, give feedback and contribute to the process. Following my email discussion with Fredericknoronha, I will be hosting a meeting at 7 pm (IST) on later today i.e 13 February 2021. It would be awesome to have your participation. The meeting link to join is https://meet.google.com/uff-qtdf-ftv. Let me know if you have any questions.