Hi, my name is Josh Lim, and welcome to this special portal dedicated to my campaign for this year's Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election, where with your help I can secure a seat to the highest governing body of the Wikimedia Foundation and thus ensure that the Board will have a developing world voice.
For far too long the Wikimedia Foundation has operated with a glaring lack of voices from outside the developed world. Every single member of the Board of Trustees who has been elected from when the first elections were held in 2004 was either born in, grew up in, or has lived extensively in, the developed world, particularly the United States and Western Europe. If we are to remain committed to this movement's vision of imagining a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge—and by "every single human being" we mean every person in the world—we need someone on the Board who can understand the movement's challenges in both worlds, as well as the opportunities they present.
However, our shortcomings in the developing world is not alone in our growing list of problems. Communities don't trust the Foundation to make major decisions based on consensus. We continue to lose editors faster than we're replacing them, and we're not onboarding enough people outside our traditional mold. We need someone who can make things right: someone who will willingly take the challenge to make things better for everyone and who will fight for the little guy. And I hope that at this point, you believe that person is me.
I invite you to please take the time to look at the portal, check out why I'm running in the first place, and feel free to ask me questions. Most importantly, spread the word. Let people know that a developing world voice is important on the Board of Trustees and that I'm capable of providing it. The movement desperately needs it.
Thank you, maraming salamat po, and together, we WILL make a difference. :)