Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Set Up Process

The Movement Charter Drafting Committee is expected to start with 15 people.

A call for candidates takes place from August 2nd to September 14th 2021. The call is open to volunteers from wiki projects and affiliates as well as paid staff from affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation.

The list of all candidates is public on Meta. The Diversity and Expertise matrices inform stakeholders about the desired qualities of the drafting committee.

There is a 4-step process for setting up the committee:

Nomination process to create the candidate pool.
Election process for project communities to elect 7 members of the committee.
Selection process for affiliates to select 6 members of the committee.
Wikimedia Foundation process to appoint 2 members of the committee.

Timeline

July - August 1, 2021 - Preparations
August 2 - September 14, 2021 - Nominations
September 15 - October 10, 2021 - Election and selection set up
October 11 - 24, 2021 - Community elections
October 11 - 24, 2021 - Affiliate selection
October 25 - 31, 2021 - WMF appointment
By October 31, 2021 - Announcement of the Committee

Nomination process

The call for candidates takes place from August 2nd to September 14th 2021.
- The call is open to volunteers from wiki projects and affiliates as well as paid staff from affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation.
- The Diversity and Expertise matrices inform stakeholders about the desired qualities of the drafting committee.
The list of all candidates is public on Meta.
- Candidates will publicly nominate themselves filling the candidacy template with a logged in user account.
- Candidates are expected to fill in the nomination template in its entirety.
- The template can be filled in in any language. Candidate statements will be translated to a number of languages and in this process also English translations will be provided.
There is one single pool of candidates regardless of affiliation.
- All committee members will be elected, selected or appointed from this common pool of candidates.
There is an eligibility check for the candidates.
- Candidates should not be sanctioned in any Wikimedia project or have an event ban. There are no eligibility criteria regarding the number of edits.
- They are identified to the Foundation as they are appointed.
Candidates cannot be selectors of the affiliate selection process.

Election process

The election process is designed to involve online project communities in the Drafting Committee set up.

To be eligible for voting a user must:
- not be blocked in more than one project;
- and not be a bot;
- and have made at least 300 edits before 12 September 2021 across Wikimedia wikis;
- and have made at least 20 edits between 12 March 2021 and 12 September 2021.
Affiliates and the Foundation will have their own respective processes and
- Affiliate staff and volunteer organizers will not be eligible to vote.
- Foundation staff will not be eligible to vote;
- (However, individual staff members may still be eligible to vote as ordinary users).
Voting will be conducted using SecurePoll.
- The elections will be set up and managed by the Movement Strategy and Governance team of the Wikimedia Foundation.
- There will not be appointed scrutineers for the election process, yet the data will be published day-to-day for transparency.
The elections will use the Single Transferable Vote method.
- Top 7 candidates will be appointed to be part of the Drafting Committee with a constraint of no more than 2 elected members per wiki project.
- The 8th and 9th candidate will remain in the stand-by list to act as an alternate if needed.
Election process will take place from October 11 to October 24, 2021 (AoE).
Results of the elections will be announced before the end of October 31, 2021.

Selection process

The selection process is designed to involve affiliates in the Drafting Committee set up.

For conducting this process, a selection committee formed by affiliates will be set in place.
The selection committee will be formed based on a regional approach.
The proposed distribution of regions, based on the existing collaborations:
- Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia
- East Asia, South East Asia, and Pacific
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Middle East and North Africa
- North America
- South America and Caribbean
- South Asia
- Western and Northern Europe
- Thematic organizations without a regional component
Each region will appoint 1 selector in a transparent affiliate selecting process to form a 9 member Selection Committee.
- Each region decides their preferred selection method.
- The selectors need to be appointed and the committee formed by October 10, 2021
The selection process will run in parallel to the election process and will focus on adding diverse expert profiles to the Drafting Committee based on the Diversity and Expertise matrices.
- Every selector will create their list of preferences.
- There will be a meeting to discuss the preferences and to finalize the selection across the group.
- The selection will be conducted between October 11 - 24, 2021
The results of the selection process and the Drafting Committee members will be announced before the end of October 31, 2021.
Appointed selectors cannot be candidates for the Drafting Committee.

Appointment by the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation selects 2 members of the Drafting Committee.

The Foundation will nominate two staff members, who will join the common pool of candidates.
The Foundation will appoint 2 selectors by October 10, 2021.
One day after the results of the projects’ election and the affiliates’ selection, the Foundation will select two additional candidates from the pool on the week of October 25 – 31, 2021.
The results of the WMF selection process will be announced before the end of October 31, 2021.

Calculating results

When counting the results, the following order will be taken: 1. elections, and 2. selection.
- This means that, in the elections process, the 7 top candidates will be first appointed.
- Afterwards, the top candidates in the affiliate selection process will be ranked. If any of them has been elected already, they will be skipped. Eventually, 6 additional top candidates will be appointed through the selection process.

Additional appointment and replacement

After the committee is constituted, they can optionally select up to three additional candidates by consensus. This is to bridge any diversity and expertise gaps.
If any of the committee members is no longer available to fulfill their duties, member replacement mechanisms will be used:
- Election process is set up to provide 2 alternates for elected candidates.
- Selection group will be reconvened to replace any candidate nominated by selection.
- WMF selectors will replace any candidate nominated by WMF.

Past versions

Initial version of this page (from July 2021).