WikiProjectMed:Election/2024
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 2024 election of the WikiProjectMed board of trustees.
Quick information
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 5 2024 | Deadline for Membership renewal to be eligible for this election | Invite to renew sent via Email Jan 6th 2024. |
| 10 to 30 Jan 2024 | Self nominations | Nomination closed with 4 individuals running for re election for 4 spots. |
| Voting for 4 seats on the board | ||
| before Feb 28 2024 | Board meeting and announcement of the 4 board members elected | |
| Feb 26, 2024 | Results posted on this page | elected: Tesleemah Abdulkareem, James Heilman, Anjna Harrar, and Deb Rotman |
Election stakes
This election is for 4 seats among the WikiProjectMed Board of Seats. Duration of the term is 4 years.
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 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 Wiki Project 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.
Tesleemah Abdulkareem
I am the founder of Mira Sight Foundation, an editor of optometry Mails who has improved upon a good number of health articles on Wiki Project Medicine and translated more into the Yoruba Language.
I am an optometrist in training with over 6 years of experience who has worked with different health-related organizations such as Optometry mails, Food and Gene initiative among others in Nigeria.
I feel that there's a need of a board member from Nigeria who will represent Africa at large as there's need to bridge medical content gap over here, as well as translate more medical content to the local languages in Nigeria
I am one of the Administrator of 'Medical World' , A Medical platform role with over 800 medical professionals from Nigeria, As a board member, I will help in recruiting new medical editors who will contribute towards the wiki project Medicine from Nigeria and spreading to Africa Continent with time. I was one of the Core Organizers of Wiki climate campus tour Nigeria project spanning across 300 participants and 6 higher institutions in Nigeria. This influence will make it easy to recruit medical editors from Nigeria on wiki project Medicine.
James Heilman
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James Heilman (Doc James) is the current Board Chair and Co-treasurer of Wiki Project Med Foundation. He has been active within the movement for 15 years (since 2008) and has made more than 44,500 edits to MDWiki and more than 334,000 edits to WMF wikis as of 2024.
Key projects with which he has been involved include medical translation efforts, the development of CopyPatrol, VideoWiki, and OWID mirror, and the launch of WikiVoyage and NC Commons. He has been involved with publishing about a dozen peer reviewed papers on the topic of Wikipedia.[1]
He is a Canadian emergency physician and a founding member of Wiki Project Med. He did his undergraduate training and medical degree at the University of Saskatchewan followed by residency at the University of British Columbia were he is currently an assistant clinical professor. He previously was on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, having been elected by the community twice for the position.
Anjna Harrar
Dr. Anjna Harrar (until 2024) is a family physician in England, with a particular interest in skin conditions, general medicine and history of medicine. She graduated from St George's Hospital, London and has qualifications in history, dermatology, women's health and family planning. She has done research on the risk of spread of infection via flight in the interwar years and has spoken on history of organ transplantation. She was introduced to Wikipedia editing in 2017, via the library at the Wellcome Institute during an event created for the purpose of improving medical pages. She writes on a wide range of topics outside medicine, and has helped with projects when approached such as with a Wikipedia:Vaccine safety project. She is also an examiner in history of medicine.
Deb Rotman
I am the Director of Operations for Hacks/Hackers and oversee all aspects of their finance and administration. For more than three decades, I have been in various leadership roles in academic, cultural resource management, and non-profit organizations. Most recently, I spent 15 years at the University of Notre Dame in academic administration. I bring my expertise in financial and legal compliance, Human Resources, process improvement, annual reporting, and strategic planning to Wiki Project Med. I look forward to helping the organization evolve and grow.
I have a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. As a scholar, I am fascinated by the ways in which human experiences are shaped by the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts within which people live, particularly at the intersection of class, gender, and ethnicity. I was a Fulbright US Scholar (2015-2016) to the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (now Atlantic Technological University) in Castlebar, County Mayo, where I studied Irish life in the small rural settlements, known as clachans, from which so many immigrants came.
Election results
The election selected Tesleemah Abdulkareem, James Heilman, Anjna Harrar, and Deb Rotman.
We received 35 ballots from 76 eligible voters, which constitutes a quorum of membership.
There were four candidates on the ballot and four seats, so this was not expected to be a competitive election. The membership selected those standing candidates to be trustees. At the next board meeting, the current trustees of Wikimedia Medicine will review the result and confirm trustee appointments.
This election also had one write-in vote for a fifth candidate. While this election did not confirm that candidate, I encourage interested people to stand as candidates in future elections so that they can be on the ballot.
If anyone has questions about this election then please take them to the talk page. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:30, 26 February 2024 (UTC)