... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community and movement.
Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this will be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times better than previous one. I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also, if this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now better than we were at the peak of our movement? Then I made my personal community health check: the size of the gzipped file of the discussions on this list [1]. And I was surprised again to realize that this is the *worst* month since December 2004 (it's not likely that we'll pass192KB of the August 2012 in the next few hours) in the sense of quantity of communication. At the other side, the list is not quiet, which makes things a bit more odd. If we just compare quantity of communication vs. quantity of topics, it would be easy to conclude that there are less deep and less heated discussions, which basically means that although we've become more civilized, we care much less about Wikimedia. However, turnout of voters says something completely different. I am a bit puzzled and I don't have the idea what doesn't fit, except to complain that somebody messed up with Universe constants. So, any idea? But, please, something sensible, not things like "We've become more mature". And two more precise requests: 1) May Election committee give unified data for all previous elections? If possible, structured by countries and projects. Output of all democratic elections assume presenting data according to area. It's legitimate to know that voters from country X voted for candidate Y. It gives a clue of what's going on inside of the movement. 2) Besides very intuitive (not to say pseudoscientific, dilettantish) methods of making conclusions that "something is good here" or "something is bad there", we don't have any systematic way for gathering and analyzing data about the state of our community and movement. I think that the responsibility of the Board is to find a way to, for the beginning, quantify whatever could be quantified in relation to the community and movement traits. And to inform the rest of us periodically. (To be more clear: this is not ED's job, this is Board's job; it's not about running the projects, but about running the movement.) [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
