User:Bluerasberry/election 2017

Please vote in the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Community Seat Elections

The Wikimedia community invites all eligible Wikimedia contributors to vote in the 2017 election for community seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The Wikimedia Foundation Board is the highest authority in the Wikimedia Foundation. Duties of the board including overseeing the work of the Wikimedia Foundation director Katherine Maher and approving every annual budget of the organization, last reported to be US$75 million in 2015.

The board has 10 seats. In this election, 3 of those 10 seats are at stake for a 3-year term of service. These particular seats are the “community elected seats”, which means that they are chosen on the basis of a vote by eligible Wikimedia community members. The current requirements for eligble voters are that they must be humans, have registered Wikipedia accounts, can only be blocked on a maximum of one Wikimedia project, must have made 300 edits total in their history of their Wikimedia participation, and must have made 20 edits in the last year. Voters may check their eligibility with account eligibility tool.

The Wikimedia Foundation elections committee manages the election and the terms of the election. Eight Wikimedia community volunteers form the committee. They get support from Wikimedia Foundation staff who advise them and help with administering the election under their guidance. Anyone with questions about the election should contact that committee.

Voters can learn more about the candidates on their candidate presentation pages and by reading their answers to questions asked of them. The election committee invited candidates to a virtual group discussion which they are sharing as a video on YouTube.

Let's all have a nice election with high participation while we all be friendly to each other. No election is a perfect process for representing the will of a large number of people, but this is the process that we have now. For anyone who feels strongly about Wikimedia Foundation governance, please feel invited to join the organizers of any future election and to have civil discussions with others about advancing our shared Wikimedia mission.

• Visit the official election page
• Vote now