Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees/Call for feedback: Community Board seats/Reports/2021-02-12 Kannada community

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Conversational Report
Kannada community - 12 February 2021

Attendees[edit]

Objective[edit]

The objective of the meeting was to establish contact with the Kannada community and introduce them to the call for feedback regarding the proposed ideas for Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees’ Community seats. The attendee is an active Kannada Wikipedians.

Topics and Notes[edit]

The community members were first introduced to the structure of Board of Trustees, their roles and responsibilities, along with the previous round of changes to the by-laws, in which the number of board seats were increased from 10 to 16, and the trustee evaluation form was approved. This was followed by the problem statement for the call for feedback, and why it is important for them and the larger community to be involved.

Feedback on specific ideas[edit]

Community-elected selection committee
  • Personal biases can have a significant impact on the final results. There is a less chance for bias to have a huge impact with elections. Be it board-delegated or community-elected, the committee should be transparent about their working procedures. Since this will be a major change from the way things are done currently, there is a lot of exploration, it would be good to involve community members in forming the guidelines for the committee.
  • For a community member to get elected to the selection committee is relatively easy, and also to influence the voting process. The selection of the committee members and the procedures need to be good enough to ensure not only enough diversity but also to check over representation from a certain group/people.
Regional seats
  • The idea sounds good, though what a region and how we define it can be tricky. It would be good to rotate these seats every year so that all regions/groups across the movement have a fair chance. Having restrictions on who can vote makes sense, but it can be challenging to implement it practically. There is no way to verify if a user is from or belongs to a certain region.

Follow-up[edit]

A follow-up meeting with community members of Kannada language projects will be conducted. A community notification has been given.