Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees/Call for feedback: Community Board seats/Reports/2021-02-26 Wiki Movimento Brasil

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Conversational Report

Wiki Movement Brazil User Group - 26 February 2021

Attendees[edit]

Objective[edit]

The objective of the meeting was to talk to members of Wiki Movement Brazil User Group, who primarily edit on the Portuguese 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 members were introduced the rationale behind the current Call for Feedback and the main discussion that have happened in the last three weeks in meta, the Office Hours and the Telegram chat.

Feedback on specific ideas[edit]

Ranked voting system[edit]
  • One volunteer is in favor of this idea and states that it creates a more clear approach during the campaign. The volunteer says that you can vote without being afraid of being disqualified because your preference is not shared, so it helps on more marginalized candidates to be taken seriously.
Quotas[edit]
  • One volunteer thinks that the biggest concern with this idea is that the movement cannot easily define quotas during a process this long, and any election process with quotas will need to be slowly thought out.
Regional seats[edit]
  • One volunteer argues that a regional seat in the Board of Trustees doesn't address power dynamics in the region where Brazil, despite being a very large and populous country, has been systematically disempowered and silenced, because of the ways Latin America is structure in the movement. The volunteer asserts that there should be a better bottom-up solution instead of a top-down approach and not recreate the same structure with a democratic deficiency in the way communities in the lower level are being represented on the board.
Candidate resources[edit]
  • One volunteer is favorable to this idea and states that having more resources actually brings community members into the board, not only after they are elected but as part of a continuous process. The volunteer thinks that this idea would help the movement as a whole, as skills are shareable and not only applicable to the board but also to other members of the movement as well.
Misc[edit]
  • One volunteer thinks it is good that the Wikimedia Foundation is having these meetings and listening to the community. The volunteer express that is about the future of the movement, and we need to listen carefully to the Brazilian community.
  • One volunteer thinks that the integration of the region is a mess, it is not transparent, and is not serving the mission of the movement. The volunteer says that it needs to start afresh structure to give a fair voice to Brazil in all decision bodies of the movement that thinks in Latin America as a region, meaning the Board of Trustees, the Regional Hubs, or the Global Council. One idea is having cycles of representation, having people from the Spanish-speaking countries in one cycle, and then having people from Brazil in the other.
  • One volunteer thinks it is important to reach distant areas and contexts beyond comfort zones in Brazil like urban areas (São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro), and that starts with a design that is more distributed as a network, to go beyond a rigid dynamic that only takes in account that reality of wikimedians.