Wikimedia Foundation elections/2025/Candidates/Lane Rasberry
Lane Rasberry (bluerasberry)
bluerasberry (talk • meta edits • global user summary • CA • AE)
| Candidate details | 
| |
|---|---|---|
| Candidate video statement | ||
| Total word count for the whole application (required + optional questions) is 2500 words. | ||
| Have you read the minimum candidate requirements and verified you meet the minimum qualifications and the candidate eligibility requirements? | Yes | |
| Have you read the candidate guidelines and agree to abide by the guidelines? | Yes | |
| Required questions | ||
| ||
| Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about? | Wikipedia is the only Internet platform where the user community governs the values, ethics, budget, and everything. This is the most important election on the Internet, and your vote has a global, history-changing impact! As trustee, I will continually tell the media and the world that the Wikimedia Foundation protects, trains, and supports voters like you to govern and control Wikipedia.
Here are my positions:
| |
| Please describe your Wikimedia experience (such as contributions to the Wikimedia projects, memberships in Wikimedia organizations or affiliates, activities as a Wikimedia movement organizer, or participation with a Wikimedia movement ally organization). | I have maximum Wikimedia involvement.
Most Wikipedia editors never join groups and that's fine, but for me, I like groups. I have been active for 10+ years in Wikimedia New York City, Cascadia Wikimedians, and Wikimedia Bangladesh. I have hosted 100s of meetups for Wikimedia NYC, organized conferences including Queering Wikipedia and WikiConference North America, and I co-founded and remain active in Wikimedia LGBT+ and Wikimedia Medicine. My experience is that we make progress quickly when groups are eager to collaborate. I have 50k edits to Wikipedia, 10k to Commons, and 100k to Wikidata. I have given hundreds of Wikipedia talks and interviews to media and conferences. I am an editor for English Wikipedia's newspaper, Signpost. | |
| From your perspective, what should the Wikimedia Foundation be prioritizing over the next 3-5 years, and why do you see these as the most important priorities? | The most important priority is being able to organize useful conversations between the online community and the Wikimedia Foundation about difficult topics. For problems we face, the solution is that the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia user community need better conversations and mutual trust with each other.
We are facing alarming challenges which threaten Wikipedia's existence. For example, the United States government is persecuting editors and threatening to remove Wikipedia's legal status. We have serious threats from other governments, the advent of AI, and certain nations of Wikipedia editors being left out of decisions. We need to talk among ourselves, train regional volunteers to speak to media, and also get researchers, journalists, and other allied nonprofit partners to talk with us about challenges. The best thing that could happen for the Wikimedia Movement is for the Wikimedia Foundation and user community to 💙 each other. | |
| Please describe your experience with governing bodies of organizations (nonprofit or for-profit), mentioning the scope of your responsibilities, as well as the complexity of the organization (in terms of scale of operations, budget, number of people involved, or other meaningful measures) and the size of the board or body. | Since 2018 I have been a principal investigator for Wikipedia research in the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia. I get expert advice from university faculty and student research assistance in public policy, accounting, computer science, my home department, and everywhere else. As trustee, these university resources will support my board work and help me communicate more effectively to the board, media, and online users.
For 6 years I managed a Wikipedia program at Consumer Reports, which is a consumer organization in the United States. We improved Wikipedia articles for medical safety. Since 2007 I have served on the ethics board for human subject research on vaccines for HIV/AIDS at the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. The research is global, and my scope is advocating for access to online information. I am on the board of my region's university worker labor union, and affiliated with Communication Workers of America. All of these roles involve me managing projects, budget, and strategy. | |
| Questions from the Community (required) | ||
| These questions were sourced from the community. These questions are required to consider your application complete. If this section is not complete by 23:59 AoE, July 8 (11:59 UTC, July 9), your application will not be considered. | ||
| How do you plan to ensure transparency and accountability in your decision-making processes as a member of the Board of Trustees? | I give interviews to media, I post videos to YouTube, I publish as a researcher, I write for The Signpost newspaper, and do whatever I can to get attention. I will ensure transparency and accountability by doing what I always do, which is talk online.
I set up a Right to Information project on Meta-Wiki because years ago, I wanted information, and I could not find a way to communicate to the Foundation. As trustee, I encourage the user community to organize to make public information requests to me. | |
| What will be the first new issue you would like to bring to the attention of the Board for discussion, and how would you approach it? | I want access to Wikimedia Foundation financial records so that I can analyze them at my university, or otherwise, the WMF can just be direct in saying it does not want to share this info. Right now the WMF's financial reports are incomprehensible to the user community. We need transparency in those reports so that Wikimedians in each country can know what money the Foundation spends on their behalf, and what the development strategy for that country is.
The latest report says that 34% of the money is "support for volunteers", but other than this election for trustee, volunteers have insufficient say in how that is spent and few options to check how money is spent in their name. Most of our user communities do programs by either country or language, so if the Wikimedia Foundation were more transparent about its regional spending, then it would become easier for communities to organize their own strategies, recruit accounting and business students as consultants, give feedback on their own budgets, and plan their own future directions without needing to check in with someone from another culture at the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia community wants its freedom and power to plan its own future knowing what resources it has. Lack of information is more problematic than being honest that we have have scarce resources. | |
| How should decisions about trade-offs and prioritisation in Wikimedia technology or product areas be approached? Please explain what the trade-off is in your view. | The reason we let users vote for trustees is so that users can have power in this decision making process. Consequently, one important tradeoff is increasing community participation versus leaving certain decisions to experts.
There are many aspects of the Wikimedia platform which work well without much community participation. In May 2025, Wikidata had a graph split for WikiCite, and it required technical expert decision making for databases. Hundreds of affected users doing open science projects wanted Wikidata to work, but they did not need to learn database design. I described the technical issue as well as I could, and in response, Wikimedia Foundation staff gave me updates to support the creation of community documentation. This experience demonstrates that when technology updates disrupt user editing, then Wikimedia developers who share information get community support. Another process which works well with thousands of community participants is the Community Wishlist, where anyone can request a feature for staff to develop and others can vote to support it. The solution is often having conversations to build and maintain trust. | |
| The number of Wikimedia affiliates has grown significantly over the past few years, but ensuring adequate resourcing can be a challenge. Given this, how might we rethink the movement ecosystem, including how affiliates are evaluated, engaged, and resourced? | We have never had a process for evaluating the impact of Wikimedia community organizations. Affiliates write annual reports and show metrics, but the Wikimedia Foundation does not have staff who demonstrate use of these reports. I appreciate the 2024 effort to shorten the reporting process, but still community members spend thousands of hours a year writing reports of what they do. If we are going to request reports, then we need to respect them by analyzing them. There is a simple solution: before the Wikimedia Foundation asks the community for anything, there needs to be a public estimate of how many volunteer hours are being requested. Too often, the Wikimedia Foundation wants only a little community time, but mistakenly asks the question in a way that it drives 1000s of volunteers to each contribute hours of labor. Community attention is a scarce resource. We should only ask for time if we have a plan to use it, and we should measure and report time consumed to better thank volunteers for participating. | |
| As the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) position transitions, what qualities do you believe the incoming leader should embody, and how would these contribute to the advancement of the Wikimedia movement? | I wish the CEO would be careful to only say nice things about our user community.
In 2015, I wrote an essay about how the staff and leadership of the Wikimedia Foundation sometimes criticize the Wikipedia user community. I routinely present Wikipedia programs at public events and conferences, and I know from experience that strangers who do not edit Wikipedia will approach me to say that Wikipedia is biased against women and minorities. They get this idea from Wikimedia Foundation communication campaigns which take a negative tone while not celebrating our accomplishments. I recognize that we have serious diversity gaps, but at the same time, it is also true that Wikipedia has the world's largest, most comprehensive, best fact-checked, most diverse collection of biographies and cultural topic articles for many minority groups. Wikipedia is biased, but everything else is much worse. The Wikimedia Foundation should clearly communicate that our user community creates the least biased information source, the best functioning civility process, and the only user community which has user governance. Discussions would be easier if we saw the positive and reacted constructively, rather than saw the negative and criticized what we have. | |
| Optional questions - Professional Experience, Skills and Education | ||
| These questions are optional. Responses will count towards the total word limit on your application. (Reminder: You will not have other opportunities to provide this information). | ||
| Please describe your professional career experience and relevance to board work. | I study artificial intelligence as Wikimedian in Residence at the School of Data Science. I already mentor student researchers, and as trustee, I would collaborate with students from all disciplines to assist me with board work. I would send students into Wikipedia to help me analyze, report, and uplift, and deliver Wikipedia community conversations and decisions to researchers, media, and public policy discussions.
I was Wikimedian in Residence at Consumer Reports from 2012-18, and before that I did clinical research through which I also did medical Wikipedia editing. In all these things I did project management, budgeting, and strategy. | |
| Please describe how you handled, or advised others on, a complex problem in an organization. How did you work with others to address the situation? What was the change that resulted from your efforts? | At my school I helped to develop our open access guidelines. It is a common wish for Wikimedians that universities, museums, and organizations would adopt open source practices and implement them. Organizations worry about losing control of their media, but demonstrating the reach and popularity of Wikipedia is a great argument to convince organizations to freely share their knowledge online. | |
| Please describe your educational background, including degrees, certificates, and courses of study finished, and their relevance to board work. | I studied chemistry and am a research professional at a university. I do things the university way and not the way of a corporation, NGO, or government. | |
| Please add any relevant links describing your professional background, experience, profile (such as LinkedIn, staff page, etc.). | -
| |
| Optional questions - Leadership Experience | ||
| These questions are optional. Responses will count towards the total word limit on your application. (Reminder: You will not have other opportunities to provide this information). | ||
| Please describe ways in which you have helped to form a bridge between multiple communities (such as by working on projects outside your home wiki, or working on a collaboration between multiple affiliates). | To form bridges, people have to become friends by socializing repeatedly over time. An amazing part of Wikipedia that feels amazing is continually having positive interactions with other users by collaborating on projects. Bridges are the result of friendly collaboration on Wikimedia projects.
As described above, I have hosted 100s of Wikimedia events. Away from Wikipedia, I operated a queer punk rock house concert venue which presented 100 bands and indexed them in Wikidata. | |
| Can you describe a policy, on wiki or off, that you helped to create or change? What did you learn from this experience? | There is no need to turn a conversation into a conflict. We are Wikipedia and we can present all sides in our disagreements just like we do in encyclopedia articles.
There have been times when 1000 volunteer users signed petitions, but not a single WMF staff person publicly joined the conversation. Surely there must be at least one staff person who wished to sign, but felt afraid to do so. Humans define Wikipedia's values and ethics, and when the user community is having deep conversations on major issues, then WMF staff need to feel safe to join those discussions. I was active in organizing community demonstrations including for Superprotect, the removal of the CEO, the rebranding, fundraising messages, and others. These are major wiki demonstrations with many petitioners. The lesson to learn is that we have to listen to all sides, collaborate, and edit the story together. | |
| How have you been able to empower people to make their voices heard? | I lived in the small rural town of West Orange, Texas from birth to age 18. Because I had problems for being gay, I moved to Seattle not knowing anyone there just because it was a big city far away. I did not have money so I lived for years in a building with no water or electricity. I experienced how society exploits vulnerable people.
I am more fortunate now, but because of my personal experience, I find other Wikipedia editors from fringe backgrounds. Wikipedia has editors who are homeless, unemployed, disabled, in poverty, in drug abuse, doing sex work, serving as caretakers for others, displaced or immigrant, but who still edit Wikipedia because they believe in sharing information. Editing Wikipedia is a pleasurable productive activity to all kinds of people. I try to make Wikipedia more accessible to the scared young person I used to be. | |
| Can you describe how you have demonstrated the ability to guide others in solving problems, adapting to change or achieving goals, particularly at a leadership or management level? | Management in Wikimedia projects means finding ways to consistently convert the money from Wikipedia donations into the impact that we decide is most meaningful. I recommend that Wikimedia community organizations ask questions like, "How much money does it cost to recruit a new editor?", "What is the worth of a Wikipedia article which is read 5000 times monthly?", or "What museums will sponsor Wikipedia programs if we develop GLAM tools?"
The leaders of a program should publish brief fantasy best case scenarios for their programs, and more realistic probable outcomes. After a project, compare the predictions to the outcome. Doing these exercises will confirm that the development team and community have a shared dream of a good outcome. For anyone applying for grants to the Wikimedia Foundation or for anyone making Wikipedia products, make these predictions before you begin. | |
| Optional questions - Strategic Thinking | ||
| These questions are optional. Responses will count towards the total word limit on your application. (Reminder: You will not have other opportunities to provide this information). | ||
| Please describe your experience participating in or leading an organization in planning for its future. How did your work contribute to picking the right path for the organization? | At the start of any project, write a draft of your final report so that you have a clear idea of how success should look. The right path is the one that leads to the dream that everyone wrote at the start of the project. | |
| Verification | Identity verification performed by Wikimedia Foundation staff and eligibility verification performed by the Elections Committee | |
Eligibility:  Verified
|
Identification: Verified Verified by: – NahidSultan (WMF) (talk) 04:57, 16 July 2025 (UTC) | |