Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees/Call for feedback: Community Board seats/Reports/2021-02-25 Wikimedistas de Ecuador

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Conversational Report
Wikimedistas de Ecuador - 25 February 2021

Attendees[edit]

Objective[edit]

The objective of the meeting was to talk to members of Wikimedistas de Ecuador, who primarily edit on the Spanish language projects, to collect their thoughts, feedback and questions, on the proposed ideas for candidates for community-sourced seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

Topics and Notes[edit]

The community member was introduced the rationale behind the current Call for Feedback and the main discussion that have happened in the last two weeks in meta, the Office Hours and the Telegram chat.

Feedback on specific ideas[edit]

Ranked voting system[edit]
  • The volunteer feels there may be some problems with this system and might end up being another type of popularity contest. The single transferable vote could work but on a more regional level.
Quotas[edit]
  • Referring to quotas on gender, this volunteer thinks that advocating for a 50/50 board is a binary solution that don't take into account all those persons that don't define themselves as men or women.
Call for types of skills and experiences[edit]
  • The volunteer thinks it is important to have the right tools and mechanisms to train people from inside the movement in leadership roles like the Board of Trustees, without the need to look for people externally.
Regional seats[edit]
  • The volunteer is in favor of a regional seat for Latin America, taking into account other factors such as the economic and social proximity of the countries. The volunteer thinks that a regional seat would give context to what is happening in the region and might reduce gaps of needs, financial and human.
Misc[edit]
  • The volunteer thinks there is a greater need to allocate movement funds to volunteers to build the skills needed to aspire to be board members of the WMF in the future.