User:Globe/Thoughts

Okay, I’m going to be honest. When we first started talking about opening up elections for stewards (and more community governance in general), I was pretty skeptical about it. I figured our meta community just wasn’t active enough to actually show up, and I was worried we’d open things up and hear nothing back. I was wrong. The community showed up for our recent permissions discussions, and it kind of shifted how I’m thinking about all this.

And that’s made something a little more clear to me: we haven’t always gotten governance right. Contributors who’ve put hundreds of hours into this platform or their local wikis deserve better than just having decisions made behind closed doors. WikiOasis will only work if the people who actually build it feel like it’s theirs, or at the very least have some say in its trajectory.

Stewards and global sysops are people who directly serve our community of hundreds of wikis and thousands of users. Those decisions shouldn’t just sit with the board. We’ve already passed a motion letting the community directly elect stewards, and we want to build on that momentum. The goal is to extend that same principle to other roles and develop some open processes, something like an RfC, so the community actually has a voice in platform policy and in who serves them.

If you’ve got thoughts, ideas, or questions about any of this, I’d genuinely love to hear them at [email protected].