Why am I running in this election? To fight for the little guy, especially in the developing world.
When I filed my candidacy in late April, I had in mind one thing: that there would be no strong candidate from the developing world who not only intimately knows what the movement's challenges are in our part of the world, but who could also relate to the problems of editors in the developed world as well and who can effectively fight for those causes. Yes, the call for candidates says that we need diversity on the WMF Board, and that diversity ought to be a really big thing in this election because it hasn't been. But that begs the question: will it really?
In the entire history of community-selected Board seats there have only been two candidates from Asia who have stood for election to the Board: the first in 2004, the other in 2013. Both of them were not elected. The number of candidates meanwhile from the developing world at large is only a drop in the bucket compared to the sheer number of candidates from the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe who have run, and even then those candidates weren't elected either. We may have had three Board members from the developing world at varying points in time from 2010 until the end of 2014, but with the departure of Bishakha Datta and Ana Toni (both of whom were not elected to the Board) we're down to only one. And we risk going back to zero.
That is a shame. Actually, no. That is an outrage. And I've had enough.
I'm running because we can no longer afford as a movement to only pay lip service to the entire idea of "diversity" no matter the form, whether geographic, gender-based or otherwise. We have been complaining for so long that the Foundation is out of touch with the community, but "listening to the community" is more than taking user feedback into account when tweaking the VisualEditor or not supposedly ramming the Media Viewer down users' throats. In the greater scheme of things, many people—especially people from the developing world—don't care about movement politics so long as they get to edit. But that's not enough, and that's never going to be enough. We doom ourselves to obscurity if we continue to ignore the greater political realities around us: that the movement is being shaped under our very noses and we have no place at the table because we felt that it was 'inconvenient'.
Rather, for us to grow as a movement, we seriously need to think about our stake—the stake of the rest of the world outside the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe—in securing our movement's future success. For far too long the Wikimedia Foundation has lacked the critical mass of developing world voices that would help make it relevant to the developing world, that would help it understand the developing world, and at the same time help grow its reach in places where it desperately wants it to reach the most. But at the same time, we cannot afford to alienate our core editor base who happens to be from the developed world. I strongly think that we both have a stake in ensuring Wikimedia's future not only as a movement, but as a community of people where we understand each other and not have to rely on assumptions and good graces to get ahead.
Our editors feel that the Foundation is irrelevant and out of touch with community demands, constantly encroaching on the time-honored tradition of community consensus and independence. Editors in the developing world probably don't even know that the Foundation exists to begin with, and if they do, they probably don't care. This dual apathy in our community is sickening, and unless we do something about it, we will continue to damn ourselves to oblivion until it's too late.
We're all little guys in this. And we all need to fight together to make ourselves heard. I hope I can be that voice all of you deserve.