Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-05-27/News and notes

News and notes

First community election for FDC positions

The FDC (green) has been allocated more than US$11M for its first two rounds, October 2012 and March 2013.

Alongside the Signpost's interviews with the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees candidates, we asked the candidates for the two new Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) seats and its Ombudsperson a series of questions. The FDC makes recommendations to the WMF Board on how to disburse donors' funds to affiliate organizations (in the first two rounds, more than US$11M), which thus far the Board has accepted without change. The significant responsibility the two successful candidates will take on for recommending allocations and commenting on standards and practices in the movement appears to have garnered little attention from the editing community.

In late news, the election will not begin on 1 June, as notified some time ago. Little more than 12 hours before the advertised start, the election was postponed by a week, to 8 June. The reasons given involve the inability to verify the voter list and that SecurePoll is properly functioning, and the fact that the voter interfaces have not been translated from English to other languages.

Six candidates are standing for the FDC: Smallbones (en.wp userpage), Cristian Consonni (CristianCantoro), Delphine Ménard (notafish), Ben (ImperfectlyInformed), Abbas Mahmood (Abbasjnr), and Mile Kiš (MikyM).

Two candidates are standing for ombudsperson: Matthew Bisanz (MBisanz) and Susana Morais (Lusitana).

For brevity, we will refer to each candidate by first name.