Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees/Call for feedback: Community Board seats/Reports/2021-02-12 Meeting with French speaking North Africa wikimedia communities

2021-02-12 Meeting with French speaking North Africa wikimedia communities

Participants

Mahuton - (Facilitation for French language) Notetaker
Bachounda - (Facilitation support for French language and MENA region.)(Facilitator)
Ravan - (Facilitation for MENA region)
Anass (Morocco)
Benloulou (Algéria)
Yamen (Tunisia)

Ideas discussed Regional seats, Specialization seats, Quotas, Vetting of candidates and Selection committee

Regional seats

All participants agree with the idea suggested by Anass, participant to the meeting. Another participant suggested having regional elections with a minimum of 1 seat per region. He suggested linking the community board seat process to the regional hub one. Each hub will then be represented by its own candidates with 2 possible options:

Candidates elected from hubs could directly seat at the board
Candidates elected from hubs could run with candidates from other hubs in a final election.

Specialization seats

All participants disagree with the idea. They argued that community representatives don’t need to be experts to represent it. Experts could be nominated by the board if needed. They suggested having an advisory committee with experts to advise the board if needed.

Quotas

Participants are ok with the idea of quotas. A participant suggested an equitable gender quota. Another participant suggested having a minimum defined quotas per gender.

Note: Other participants including members of the Wikimedia LGBT+ user group complained, saying that 50/50 gender concepts were binary and implicitly biased against non-binary, trans or genderqueer people. The Facilitation team acknowledged this problem and rectified the related mentions in their reports. Here this phrasing was updated to reflect the feedback in a non-biased manner.’’ JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 21:01, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Vetting of candidates

All participants are ok with the idea. They precise that candidates should not be vetted on the basis of their expertise but based on some defined criteria related to their experience in the movement.

Selection committee

All participants are in favor of letting the community lead and manage all the process itself. A participant said the board should not intervene at any step of the process.

Board functioning

All participants said that most community members don’t know of the existence of a board and how it works. They suggested that creating and sharing awareness videos could be a good idea to ensure everyone participates in conversations at the same level of the foot.