WikiProjectMed:Election/2021
WikiProjectMed is a community organization which supports the development of free and open medical information in Wiki based projects, and related efforts to encourage wiki-access to media. The organization maintains regular elections of the Board of Trustees. Members of WikiProjectMed in good standing are eligible to vote. This page gives information about the 2021 election of the WikiProjectMed board of trustees.
Quick information
Overview
See election rules at WikiProjectMed:Election. Post any questions to the talk page.
Here is how the election works:
- Candidates for the board nominate themselves
- Members of the organization vote on candidates
- The election committee counts votes and reports a result
- The board of the organization confirms the process, results, and elected candidates
Ballots go to the registered email address for each member. Vote through that email during the election period.
| Date | Task | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 30 September 2021 | Deadline for Membership renewal to be eligible for this election | 119 members eligible as of October 2021 |
| 1 to 20 October 2021 | Nominations | Closed |
| 1 to 8 November | Voting for 3 seats on the board | closed |
| 9 November 2021 | Board meeting and announcement of the 3 board members elected | election results in process |
| 10 November 2021 | results posted on this page | elected:
|
Election stakes
This election is for 3 seats among the WikiProjectMed Board of Seats.
Privileges of these seats include the following:
- Represent WikiProjectMed members in circumstances where this organization is required, such as for institutional partnerships and collaborations
- Present consensus statements when organizations request collective comment, such as for organization surveys from the Wikimedia Foundation
- Be a point of contact for members and curious people outside wiki, who ask about sharing medical information and our community values
Responsibilities of board members include the following:
- participate in 2-hour meetings every two to four months throughout the year;
- answer emails in a timely manner;
- identify by their real name (but not necessarily linked with their Wikimedia username).
As WikiProject Med Foundation is a formal charity in the US, this information is required and is public information. Therefore, all board members are required to agree that their real name is public.
Voting
Eligible voters receive a ballot by email to the address which they registered. Ballots go out after the confirmation of nominees and before the start of the voting period.
Check your email for your ballot. In case of problem please post to the talk page. Non-members may not vote in this election, but may join as members to vote in the next election.
Nominations
- Only members of the organization can nominate themselves for the board
If you'd like to nominate yourself, please add a new sub topic, with your name & optionally your user name, followed by short description of your Wikimedia & Medicine experience. Nominees might want to answer / address in their description the following:
- personal info and background relevant to the work of Wikimedia & Medicine;
- Wikimedia & Medicine activities and major achievements;
- international experience (rather than local one) that might be relevant to this role;
- expertise / relevant governance experience;
- why you believe you are suitable to serve as a Wikimedia & Medicine board member;
- any special areas / types of activities you would like to concentrate on while on the board.
Consider reviewing the style of nominations from past elections.
James Heilman
Hello, my name is Dr. James Heilman (User:Doc James). I am an emergency physician in Cranbrook, British Columbia, and on the faculty of emergency medicine at the University of British Columbia. I have been editing Wikipedia since 2008. I was one of the original founders of Wiki Project Med; however, left this board to join that of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) in 2015. As my term their comes to an end in early October I am interested in returning to this board in an official capacity.
Anjna Harrar
Hello, my name is Dr. Anjna Harrar and I want to join the board of the organization because I can see the benefit to users of the site and wish to contribute to make it as easy to navigate and read as possible. I am a family physician in England, with a particular interest in skin conditions. I have been editing Wikipedia since 2017, and write on a wide range of topics outside medicine.
Alaa Najjar
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I'm Alaa (In Arabic علاء). I am a native Arabic and near native English speaker. Medical student in my 6th year. I'm an editorial board member on WikiJournal of Medicine. I activated Wikiproject Medicine (WPM) in Arabic Wikipedia, also I'm a member on enwiki WPM. I created my account in October 2010, and I have been active (on a regular basis) since December 2014, so, I am active for over seven years now. I am currently a Steward on Metawiki, bureaucrat, sysop and checkuser on Arabic Wikipedia, sysop on Wikidata and sysop on other sister projects. I serve also as an OTRS member for Arabic queues. Over the years, I have made more than 400K edits on Wikimedia wikis, and most of my edits in medicine, anatomy and biology fields.
Moreover, I attended and helped in the organization of many Wikimedia-related events. For example, I helped in the organization of WikiArabia 2017, and I attended m:Wikimania 2017, 2018 and WikiArabia 2019. I am also a member of m:Wikimedians of the Levant since May 2015. In addition to this, I am one of the members of Arabic Wikipedia's social networking team. That's the team that manages the official accounts of Arabic Wikipedia on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
I am honored as «2021 Wikimedian of the year». I'm the 7th Top medical editor in 2019. I was ranked 10th in the Top medical editors list in 2018 and 9th in 2017, 221th in 2016. I'm the highest Arabic medical editor in 2017 and 2018. Per Arabic Wikipedia statistics, I'm 1st Top medical editor in 2017 (both edits and articles creation), same in 2018 and in 2019 I'm 1st Top medical editor in articles creation and 2nd on edits.
I helped in launch and update the offline Arabic medical wikipedia app (Now, volunteer with Kiwix on support the Arabic version of the app), and I created learning videos about IIAB and sharing them on arwiki offical social accounts. Also, I'm a member on Arabic Wikipedia Graphics Lab as I'm translating more than 220 files most of them in medical field.
I think that there's a need for another Arabic speaking board members because it is one of the most popular and widely spread languages. Also, I've a lot of ideas that I hope we can apply it on WPMEDF that can affect the medical contents on all languages specially poor-medical content projects. Moreover, I hope to expand WPMEDF activities in the Arabic countries.
Thanks a lot.
Election results
2021 Election results
Election outcomes are not yet determined, and will be announced after final review.
These results are preliminary as the election still has some hours left, but I wanted to get some info posted before the board meeting tomorrow.
The commentary that I have is that running elections in the Wikimedia community is challenging. I estimate that there are ~100 elections a year for various Wikimedia community organization decisions. Besides that, the Wikimedia community has straw polls or !votes (not votes) to gauge consensus in many decision making processes, and these probably number to the tens of thousands a year. Despite this and even after about 10 years of me organizing elections, I still struggle to find an appropriate balance between software, communication, transparency, and time commitment for running elections. With Wiki Project Med we have a more casual organization with no budget to manage, but still, these seats are prestigious and we want to take the election seriously. At the same time, managing elections is hard, and even a relatively simple one like this probably consumed about 70 hours of administrative labor among 10+ people, including discussing software platforms, rules, reviewing precedents, deciding how much information to give, doing candidate outreach, seeking community approval, scrutinizing voter eligibility, and documenting activities. Beyond what is documented in the wiki there is always so much voice and video discussion, and this among Wikimedians who have themselves organized elections for years and already know a lot of the ethical issues.
For the 2021 election there were 119 eligible voters. There are about 12 hours left to the election, and the board wants to know tomorrow at a meeting in about 13 hours whether the election seemed to have valid results. I currently have 36 ballots. I did identity verification on all ballots to confirm that they came from a registered voter email address, and in all cases either the ballots passed verification immediately or I was able to get verification on follow up. I checked for duplicates and where they existed, voting was identical, and I accepted only one copy. Ballots varied and there was support and opposition for all candidates. Having different voting results matter because even in a relatively simple election like this one, an expected outcome is that informed voters will have a range of perspectives, and voting results will vary in some ballots.
Several people wrote in with questions about the election. I responded to queries by email and posted more information on the wiki talk page for the election, sometimes linking to that talk page. People should have asked questions here on the organization's own website, but I also watched for questions in places where people might have posted, including on the Wikimedia page in Meta-wiki for the organization.
Again, the board has asked for an election report tomorrow morning. I expect to have results in a week at most. This is the information that I have for now. Election reporting cannot be rushed and I want to set expectations that checking votes takes time. Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:00, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
- I have examined and counted the ballots and results are final. We have 36 ballots. To have a valid result we needed 20% of the membership to vote, which for 119 members would be 23 ballots. Consequently we have enough votes for a valid result. All candidates received at least one opposition vote, but also each candidate mostly votes in support. New board members are
- James Heilman
- Anjna Harrar
- Alaa Najjar
- I did receive an additional ballot since the last calculation, but it was a duplicate from someone who wanted to be sure that they voted, so it changed nothing and already was counted. I have received no comments to challenge the election or process, and as this election was not contentious, I am closing the results. If anyone has comments on this election or ideas for future ones feel free to post them on this talk page.
- Yesterday there was a meeting of the board of the Wiki Project Med Foundation. At that meeting I gave preliminary results that I expected a clear result, but that I wanted more time to check for additional comments. That meeting was one hour after the end of the voting period. I am giving the results now. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:40, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
- Thank you User:Bluerasberry Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:09, 10 November 2021 (UTC)