Hi, Nosebagbear.

As I said in my first email on the subject (and I said a lot, so I'm not surprised if it gets missed!), I really can only speak to my part of this - I work with the Human Rights Team that does on the ground interventions. The lead of this team has been a substantial input to this process, but the work in the policy is far more expansive than my part. THAT human rights intervention is where we have a playbook to which I refer, and although we don't talk about how, it's not been intended to be a secret that it exists. I first posted about the team on Meta in 2020 and spoke about it at my second office hour, here. I believe it has come up in subsequent calls, and I have mentioned it in each office hour announcement (at least that I wrote myself). I don't think we can safely talk about HOW we are handling human rights threats to community members, but it's never been my intention to downplay that we're working on it!

I will let the Global Advocacy and Public Policy teams speak to the policy as a whole. But in terms of the questions you mailed in, I imagine they received others as well and are working to aggregate them. 

Best,

Maggie

On Tue, Dec 21, 2021 at 7:31 AM <nosebagbear@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Maggie,

Could you answer a few things, or at least provide your (and the team's) reasoning:

1) It has now been stated multiple times it was urgent to get a policy like this. But you tell us there's a secret playbook already in play, and I can't imagine that has changed immediately just because there's now a visible policy, and with the break shortly occurring, the WMF other teams can't really decide major things with it in mind either. And it also took some time to (seemingly purely internally) write. So why is it taking so long to explain why we're having to wait until after Christmas break to discuss it? *Why is it retroactive discussion at all?*

2) The policy includes the line " use our influence with partners, the private sector, and governments to advance and uphold respect for human rights." - you say you note the tension from needing to have such a playbook be hidden to remain functional and be a collaborative community.

I don't doubt your reasoning on the playbook, but this line is in effect "the policy team will lobby for better human rights"...but without us knowing the actual execution of methods, specifically raised areas, a complete listing of ongoing areas of focus and so on. There is already a concern that the WMF spends too much time trying to speak for the movement without actually knowing that their specific positions are backed by the movement as a whole. Doing it with this dichotomy in place surely seems even less wise.

3) Back, more generally, to the process issues. I emailed shortly after this went public, at the time, some considerable time before the Christmas break. I just got a message saying they were collating questions and would answer in the new year. But most of my questions were on either "why was this procedure used" or "why was this paragraph included", rather than substantive content change proposals.

If even I know why I included any given thing in a regular old policy that I help draft and can thus answer questions rapidly, why was this not the case here. Surely the reasoning for each bit of content and failure to publicly consult are already known? So why the lag time?

Yours,

Richard (Nosebagbear)
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Maggie Dennis

She/her/hers

Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.