Tomorrow voting for Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Election starts – and Yours truly is a candidate.
You can find most of my views on various issues in our question pages (I was somewhat boiling when answering the What will you do about the WMF mishandling it’s funding? one – it probably takes great effort to phrase such a bad question, and so easy to answer it :), as well as Wikipedia Signpost ‘interview’.
I was appointed to the Board back in January 2008, after holding various other volunteer (at some point in time – ‘officer’) positions within the organization since 2004 – and brought in the core technology and operational efficiency skill set there. The appointment was supposed to be somewhat temporary, but board restructure appeared to be much longer process than we expected – both the chapters part, and nomination committee work. As a community member, after the restructure I was in ‘community-elected’ seat, though I never participated in any election – so that wasn’t too fair to the actual community, need to fix that :)
So, even though I wasn’t too visible to actual community (people would notice me mostly when things go wrong, and I’m not in best mood then, usually :-), I feel that the values I’ve worked on, evangelized and supported for all these years – efficiency and general availability of our projects – can win mindshare not only of our read-only users I work mostly for, but also eligible voters.
And I do think, that internal technology expertise has to be represented on board, as things we’ve been doing, and methods we’ve been using, are very much unique in the technology world. Oh, and somewhere I mentioned, our technology spending is close to 50%, that has to be represented too :-)
domas mituzas 