Two new affiliate-selected trustees
The Wikimedia affiliates have announced their selection of the two affiliate-selected trustees they recommend every two years to the WMF board: Frieda Brioschi from Italy and Patricio Lorente from Argentina will start their new terms from the first board meeting after 1 July. The board has determined that for the first time since this system began in 2008, not only chapters but thematic organisations should vote for whom to recommend to the board. This change did not include user groups, of which there are an increasing number. A resolution of the chapters and the one thematic organisation was passed in March, governing the conduct of the 2014 election.
Announcing the result, Chris Keating set out the mechanics. In step 1 of counting in the preferential single transferable voting system, one of the two incumbents, Patricio Lorente, won more than 50% of the vote (15.5 of 27 votes), and was declared a winner. In step 2, Anders Wennersten from Sweden was eliminated, and his second-preference votes were redistributed to the two remaining candidates; this left Frieda Brioschi with more votes than the other two incumbents, and a final total of 17 votes of 27, bringing her over the 50% mark after Alice Wiegand from Germany was eliminated in step 3. Remarkably, only 27 of the 41 eligible affiliates voted.
Frieda Brioschi was born in 1976 and by profession is a computer scientist—specifically a digital communications consultant who works on "tech projects, web strategy, community creation and management, [and] social media". She has presented three TEDx talks: two about Wikipedia, and one about lateral thinking applied to problem solving. She was a co-founder in 2005 of the Italian chapter, an administrator or bureaucrat on several Italian-language sites, and an OTRS admin.
Patricio Lorente was born in 1969 and has qualifications in philosophy and law. He has extensive professional experience in social development cooperation, particularly with NGOs, and in university management. Since 2004 he has served in the administrative management of La Plata University, the second-largest university in Argentina. His first two-year term as a chapter-selected trustee, as they were then known, is coming to an end.