Wikimedia Election Committee User Group/reports

being a group of humans who have their own interests and who are seeking to grow their careers, support their employer, and make personal choices in their work. Only the Wikimedia community can clearly focus on the mission of the Wikimedia Movement. The Wikimedia Foundation and all its staff have a conflict of interest. If it ever happens that the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation conflict with the Wikimedia Mission, then staff of the Wikimedia Foundation may act against the Wikimedia Mission for reasons such as reducing their work burden, personal opinion, orders from the office hierarchy, or simply the shortcoming of being an individual human in a complicated environment of shared community discussion.

Majority community elected seats

The established norm and tradition in representation is regular elections through which Wikimedia volunteers select 50% of trustees, plus have one additional seat in which Jimbo Wales the Wikipedia founder advocates for the Wikimedia community. Let the future of Wikimedia governance never lose this foundation of community protection, and strive for a future where the community has closer and more full representation on the board.

Anyone who wants the same or more Wikimedia volunteer leadership may sign to show their support. Feel free to discuss and debate how the Wikimedia community achieves this growth. At the same time, please keep agreement that there are elections which empower volunteer governance of the Wikimedia Movement, and that volunteer consensus is the ethical authority of the Wikimedia Movement, and that volunteers have a right to discuss among themselves!

Roles and responsibilities

Election Protection Connection organizes to manage various Wikimedia elections. It does this by conducting elections, hosting Wikimedia community discussions and events for elections, and seeking consensus on electoral matters of Wikimedia community values and ethics.

The objective of this project is to advocate for the Wikimedia community of volunteers in defining and protecting their right to manage Wikimedia elections. While supporters of this project all agree the Wikimedia community speaks for itself in matters relating to Wikimedia elections, all details of how to do this are open for discussion. Anyone who wishes to show support for Wikimedia community consensus as the governing authority in election management should sign below to demonstrate the Wikimedia community expectation of retaining this right.

Conducting elections

When there is Wikimedia Community consensus to do so this project can present an election. When this happens, this project will call for Wikimedia community volunteers to form an election committee. The Wikimedia community will confirm this committee to conduct all aspects of the election on the authority of Wikimedia community consensus.

Hosting community discussions

At any time any Wikimedia community member may freely discuss Wikimedia elections in this project's talk pages. At this project's establishment in 2020 there was not any other designated place for ongoing Wikimedia community election conversation, as organizers had managed previous elections either on single-use election project pages or in spaces for Wikimedia Foundation staff to manage. This project receives friendly community conversation at any time.

Publishing documentation

The Election Protection Connection publishes documentation on elections, including records and explanations of documentation which exists but is private. In general, all information which any election committee has is non-private and available for sharing. As this is a Wikimedia community project, one bottleneck to access is the labor of producing documentation, which is significant. Election committees greatly appreciate and encourage volunteer participation in reporting election procedure and results. Every election produces documentation and develops the presentation and culture of Wikimedia elections.

Protecting Wikimedia community values

The Election Protection Connection seeks to protect Wikimedia community values and its discussion pages are a forum for identifying issues and possible improvements. Wikimedia community values in elections include the following:

1. The priority of the Wikimedia community volunteer participant
2. Transparency of information sharing as a default practice, unless otherwise explained
3. Respect for elections, community voting, and a democratic decision making process
4. Accessibility of elections both for voters and volunteer organizers
5. The foundational respect for Wikimedia community consensus, including by using Wikimedia community consensus to seat members of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

Conduct of elections

The conduct of elections happens with Wikimedia community consensus and grows from the precedent of past elections. The start of a typical election is the formation of an election committee to manage that election. This committee will schedule and plan the election, ready the voting process, and report results. While the committee is the point of contact for questions and discussion be aware that most election information is public. The usual Wikimedia way to ask questions is to present them on the talk page to the wider Wikimedia community, and to only escalate to the election committee when somehow the committee has information which is not publicly available.

Formation of an election committee

In the planning of an election any volunteers may organize to propose an election committee, perhaps of 5-10 members. This election committee will seek community confirmation to recognize its authority to run the election. Ideal characteristics of an election committee are the ability to manage an election in a way comparable to the best previous elections. Useful skills for members include cultural fluency to represent diverse voter demographics, administrative skill to organize voice or video meetings for the election committee, enough mathematical understanding to scrutinize voting results, and respect for Wikimedia community values.

Scheduling and planning

The election committee marks the beginning of an election process by publishing a draft of the schedule or setting up an election project page.

Setting the voting process

Wikimedia elections are of various sorts. For each one there are various election types available as options to use. After the Wikimedia community has selected a voting process in the planning phase, the election committee implements it. When the voting process is ready then voters should know how to access and cast their ballot and how the election will determine results.

Translation sponsorship

Any organization which wishes to sponsor Wikimedia community elections may do so. The most requested sponsorship is language translation. Precedent in the Wikimedia community has shown that there are some underserved languages which simply cannot have a reasonable expectation of recruiting volunteer labor for timely translations. Because of this, the Election Project welcomes translation sponsorship. The best sponsorships clearly communicate how they sought the collaboration and support of individual Wikimedia language community members and Wikimedia movement affiliates which best represent any given language demographic.

Scrutiny of ballots

The election committee will examine the ballots and invite the Wikimedia community to engage in some amount of ballot examination.

Public information includes the list of voters casting a ballot. Possibly public information may include how identified individuals voters actually voted, depending on the election. Private information which is only available to the election committee may not exist at all, but could possibly include some kind of security information.

Reporting results

The Election Committee reports the election results following its own independent deliberation. For many Wikimedia elections most election data is public, so anyone should be able to scrutinize the ballots or voting calculations without any special permission. Anyone who wishes for an election recount or examination should be able to do this for themselves, as the election committee is un

Documentation and archiving

Anyone with anything to say about an election should document as they like. Whatever is not published will be forgotten.

History

The Wikimedia Foundation elections committee is similar to this Wikimedia Community Election Project, except that one acts at the direction of Wikimedia Foundation staff and this one acts at the direction of the Wikimedia community. On many issues the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia community want the same things. An obvious difference between the two is that the Wikimedia Foundation's few staff cannot anticipate or set the agenda for what the Wikimedia's community large decentralized membership will want to discuss.

In 2013 there was a proposal for the Wikimedia Foundation to sponsor the establishment of a Standing Election Committee. One of the motivations for this was to encourage ongoing discussion about elections, even when an election was not in process. The Wikimedia Foundation never organized their own standing committee.

The proposal for the Wikimedia Community Election Project came with the postponement of the 2020 Wikimedia Foundation Trustee Election due to COVID-19 disruption. This project sought to increase Wikimedia community participation in the election process and to organize difficult voting discussions in the context of the pandemic and crisis.