Dear friends,
I hope you’ve all had a lovely week.
This email contains key takeaways from the WMF Global Advocacy team who attended a series of high-level digital rights events in Geneva.
At the end of May, experts on technology, online platforms, human rights, and disinformation representing governments, industry, and civil society descended upon Geneva, Switzerland for a week of important discussions impacting the long-term future of our movement and projects. The Wikimedia Foundation sent staff members to cover three concurrent conferences and to both learn and represent our movement throughout. Below is our recap of the discussions that took place and their implications for our movement.
Key Takeaways
- Wikimedia's involvement in international processes like the Global Digital Compact is appreciated, important, and should continue (even beyond the GDC discussion).
- The Foundation's Human Rights Impact Assessment and Child Rights Impact Assessment, as well as publications on disinformation, are VERY compelling and concrete assets we can use in discussions to prove our commitments and signal our value in digital governance discussions. The same is true of the WikiforHumanRights campaign and how the movement increases the amount of human rights-related information on-Wiki, particularly in non-English languages (flagging for @Winnie Kabintie). As a movement we don't just talk the talk, we do the hard work to implement our values too, and we lead by example here compared to other major platforms. More movement members should point to and use these materials in public policy discussions.
- Wikimedia has essential strengths that we bring to the table for important discussions. These include: (a) protecting and supporting journalist and promoting awareness that information is a public good ; (b) avoiding an internet that is dominated by the English language and a handful of US companies, a challenge that we counter with a vision of linguistic and cultural diversity and representation, driven by bottom-up community content governance. AI is part of these discussions.
- A lot of civil society and even government officials still haven't noticed that we are a 'very large online platform' (VLOP) under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which poses a risk to us if they are advocating for enforcement processes and mechanisms that don't take Wikimedia projects into account at all.
____Reflections from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)+20 Forum High-Level Event 2024 and the AI For Good Summit
Session: "To share or not to share: the dilemma of open source vs. proprietary Large Language Models"
Industry experts from the Linux Foundation, Meta, the Future of Life Institute, Google, and the Wikimedia Foundation engaged in a deep dive into the complexities of open-sourcing large language models (LLMs). The conversation was framed around the benefits, challenges, and ethical considerations of open source versus proprietary AI models.
Chris Albon of the Wikimedia Foundation spoke about the role of open source language models in expanding access to knowledge. He emphasized the importance of credit and sustainability for volunteer-driven platforms like Wikipedia and the value of transparency and adaptability in open source models. Albon also shared concerns about the potential for AI-generated content to disconnect users from the original sources of information. You can watch Chris’ talk here.
Session: “Milestones, Challenges, and Emerging Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development.” This session sought to look back over the years at how the international community is doing to advance a WSIS commitment made back in 2003 to essentially promote a responsible, pluralistic media landscape. What surprised me is how, in looking back at the original commitment from 2003, what many of those of us who attended came to discuss - AI, disinformation at scale, social media, digital platform governance, digital activism, etc. - were hardly imaginable when the commitment was first drafted. Takeaway: Despite the vast changes in the media landscape in the past 21 years, there was a consensus among participants that in order to protect the supply of reliable information for citizens around the world, the international community must work to protect and support journalists, debate platform governance, and promote awareness that information is a public good. The Wikimedia movement is, of course, well positioned to not only participate but to lead in these areas and there are many allies out there for us to engage still. Flagging for @Patricia Diaz as you raised this recently.
Session: “Unpacking and Expanding Multistakeholderism in Practice.” This session focused largely on multi stakeholder participation in the Global Digital Compact and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Panelists agreed that now is a pivotal moment for multistakeholderism as internet governance discussions, as the mandate for the IGF is up for renewal. A key component of multistakeholderism is, one panelist noted, capacity building among civil society organizations to participate effectively, particularly in the global majority. The same panelist lamented that (I’ll paraphrase) “we’ve been talking about capacity building for decades, so why the hell are we still having to talk about it? There’s still a need for it and now is the moment, so we need to get it right and get it right quickly.” Takeaway: This made us think about our own efforts to build the policy advocacy capacity of Wikimedia affiliates- such as the workshops and Chile and the skills building workshops we’ve been developing around Wikimania - and convinced us that this is an important focus of our work and will help us to amplify our impact in these discussions.
Session: “Technology and Opportunities to Promote Human Rights.” This session was hosted by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Google, and Business for Social Responsibility (BSR). During this session, the Global Advocacy team highlighted our human rights policy and human rights and child rights impact assessments, as well as the work our team does to shape policies that uphold human rights online proactively by engaging with policymakers and civil society organizations. We also shared information about the WikiforHumanRights campaign and how the Foundation works with volunteers to increase the amount of human rights-related information on-Wiki, particularly in non-English languages. Takeaway: This was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate our values and hard work to new stakeholders so that we can increase the number of allies we have supporting us in these spaces.
Reflections from the Freedom Online Coalition Strategy and Coordination meetings:
About: The Wikimedia Foundation is part of the advisory network of the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC), a partnership of 39 governments that work to advance Internet freedom. WMF also co-chairs the FOC task force on Information Integrity. Flagging for @Justice Okai-Allotey and @Olushola Olaniyan as I know you were interested in FOC work after DRIF.
The FOC organizes strategy and coordination meetings, usually twice a year, to bring together the Freedom Online Coalition's member states and the members of the FOC Advisory Network (AN), including the Wikimedia Foundation. 2024 is a pivotal year for the governance of digital technologies, marked by actions that could either strengthen or undermine human rights online as well as existing global commitments to the multistakeholder approach to Internet governance. Therefore, it was crucial that the Foundation attended and brought its perspective on the future of Internet governance.
We had a chance to discuss two of the main processes in discussion this year and, more in general, the future of the WSIS process, which comes to a close next year, and whose future is under discussion at this time. The meetings focused in particular on the Freedom Online Coalition’s own activities, but also on this year’s Internet Governance forum, as well as on the Global Digital Compact’s process with which the Foundation has been highly involved (see our open letter).
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I hope you found this useful! Have a great weekend,
Ziski & WMF GA Team
Franziska Putz (she/her)
Senior Movement Advocacy Manager
Global Advocacy, Wikimedia Foundation
UTC Timezone
