Board of Trustees elections: Voting begins, candidate interviews
Elections for three seats on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees are scheduled to begin on Tuesday, 28 July. The board's current structure consists of ten seats, including three community-elected seats and two seats chosen by the Wikimedia chapters, plus four board-appointed "specific expertise" seats (two of which are currently vacant), and one "Community Founder" seat appointed yearly by the board and assumed to be reserved indefinitely for Jimmy Wales.
The field of eighteen candidates includes Wikimedians with a wide range of experience in the projects. Three are current members of the board, several others have run unsuccessfully in previous elections. Most candidates joined the Wikimedia community between 2003 and 2005, although a few joined as late as 2008. The original cutoff for declaring candidacy was 20 July; it was extended to 27 July because of concerns that technical problems with sitenotice had hampered efforts to attract candidates, and six of the current candidates joined the race during this extension period.
All three incumbents who currently hold community-elected seats—Kat Walsh, Ting Chen, and Domas Mituzas—are candidates in the 2009 election. Walsh has served on the board since the 2006 election and was reelected in 2007, Chen joined the board in July 2008 after winning the only seat available in the 2008 election, and Mituzas was appointed to a chapter-selected seat in February 2008 and was moved to a nominally elected seat, which had been vacated mid-term by Frieda Brioschi, as part of the May 2009 board reshuffling that put Arne Klempert in a chapter-selected seat.