Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/WMF Board elections 2015

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Title ideas

• Final days to vote in the Wikimedia Foundation Board elections!
• Wikimedia Foundation Board Elections: An important opportunity to influence the foundation’s work

Summary

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• The final days to vote in the 2015 elections for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees are upon us. The board elections, held every two years, are an opportunity for the Wikimedia community to select three members of the board. Now is your chance to help decide who will set the vision for the Wikimedia Foundation and play a crucial role in making decisions that sometimes impact the entire Wikimedia movement.

Body

The final days to vote in the 2015 elections for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees are upon us. The board elections, held every two years, are an opportunity for the Wikimedia community to select three members of the board. They will join seven other members of the board and together they set the vision for the Wikimedia Foundation and play a crucial role in making decisions that sometimes impact the entire Wikimedia movement.

It has been a busy time for the Wikimedia Foundation since the last board election, which was held in Spring 2013. Since that time, the board has, among its many tasks:

1. Hired a new executive director to lead over 250 people serving on staff at the Wikimedia Foundation
2. Oversaw an over US$35 million annual budget
3. Approved new trademark, privacy, and access policies

Members of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees at Wikimania 2008

The elected members of the board played a vital role in each of these decisions, imagine what the elected members will be involved with in the next two years!

It takes dedicated and talented people serving on the board. They help the Wikimedia Foundation to evolve and continue to serve a community as diverse and passionate as the Wikimedia movement.

The composition of the Board should reflect our community and users. As diverse in skills, competences and background these groups are, as diverse should be - needs to be - the Board to take all those different interests into account. If there is any reason why we don’t have a volunteer developer, a visionary or a commons photographer in our Board, we should break it through. –Alice Wiegand, board member since 2012

The community seats ideally bring in knowledge of the projects and the community to the Board. I would like a new board member to bring in knowledge of projects or communities that we do know have a lot of knowledge about." –Jan-Bart de Vreede, board member since 2006 and current board chair

There are 54,216 eligible voters this year - engaged members of the community entrusted to select leaders of the Wikimedia Foundation. In the last election, only 1,800 eligible voters participated. So far this year, over 2,700 voters have already participated. We are on track to make this one of our largest board elections, but we want as many eligible and interested voters to participate as possible!

Voting ends at 23:59, 31 May 2015 (UTC). Find out if you are eligible to vote, learn about the candidates, and then go vote! You can also find out more about this year's elections.

Thank you to everyone that has already voted, and please consider submitting ideas on how we can turn out even more voters in the next election on the election's community post-mortem report.

2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee

Notes

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Twitter (@wikimedia/@wikipedia):

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Final chance to vote in this year's #Wikimedia Foundation Board elections!

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• The final days to vote in the 2015 elections for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees are upon us. The board elections, held every two years, are an opportunity for the Wikimedia community to select three members of the board. Now is your chance to help decide who will set the vision for the Wikimedia Foundation and play a crucial role in making decisions that sometimes impact the entire Wikimedia movement.

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