Ed, SJ,
on top of what Aaron and Jonathan said (for example, the use of WMF’s logo) there were
other concerns that we had to address.
The scope of DERP shifted from an informal communication broker between organizations and
academic researchers to a body that – at least according to the original press release –
would be responsible for:
• setting guidelines for ethical research (for example, by prohibiting any kind of feature
testing/experimentation)
• aggregating and sharing privacy sensitive data
• reviewing data requests
on behalf of the member organizations.
The Foundation has specific policies on what data can be collected from readers and
contributors, how long this data is retained, how it’s released and licensed and under
what conditions third parties can obtain access to private data hosted by the Foundation.
We felt that we could not join an initiative that would commit the organization to make
promises about data access to external parties, without having a conversation with our
internal stakeholders first–not just WMF Legal or the WMF analytics team but also our
volunteer community, chapters etc.
The press release was later amended to remove language that would suggest specific
commitments for member organizations but our concerns remain the same.
Jonathan, Aaron and I are all interested in creating opportunities for cross-platform
research on online collaboration and we have plans in the pipeline to make more data
publicly available. We are big fans of DERP and are still involved in a personal capacity
in the initiative, but we are not in a position to take Wikimedia with us at this time.
I hope that clarifies how the decision was made.
Dario
On Sep 3, 2014, at 1:03 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 8:12 AM, Ed Summers
<ehs(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On Sep 3, 2014, at 11:00 AM, Jonathan Morgan
<jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Sigh. Yes. We were early adopters of DERP. Then
we had to pull out. But it might still happen someday. It's complicated :/
If you can share why it's complicated I'd love to hear ; I suspect it's
political, but oftentimes these politics have research implications.
Ditto.
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