Picking up on the tips that finding an alternative may not be as easy as the WMF hosting, and perhaps patching, a version of LimeSurvey.[1]
This would be choosing to ignore the fact that WMF funded surveys have and do include questions that if leaked or otherwise linked to the identity of the volunteer, may lead to people because of who they are, they may end up being in prison, being reprogrammed in an internment camp, or being "disappeared" and murdered by the state. Not every Wikimedia volunteer on our projects has the luxury of living in a country where their human rights are protected, and ethically any WMF funded researcher or WMF contractor should be required to assess their proposed projects for risks for the volunteers that engage with their projects.
Being a well-known part of our WM LGBT+ community for many years, I know folx that live in countries where they risk arrest if they are too public about their identity and many active volunteers have approached me in private chats who while not under a legal threat, fear to contribute to our projects in a public way, because of repercussions in their every day lives, such as being excluded by their families or losing their jobs. These risks are far more than hypothetical, particularly given that the projects which rely on surveys apparently make no effort at all to advise volunteers to take steps to protect themselves, such as by filling out the survey from a ToR browser or warning volunteers living in certain countries (like Turkey or China) to just please not fill out the survey. It's also worth noting that our LGBT+ volunteers have been targeted for recent surveys, with repeated requests on our LGBT+ community groups in Telegram and by email to take part. At no point were there associated warnings for the risks, only a link to the WMF privacy terms and a subsequent link to the Google terms, making it the volunteer's responsibility to decipher the legalese (in English) and bizarrely there has never been any effort to restrict the WMF funded surveys to adults, despite Google clearly warning that non-adults cannot give consent to use the system.
In response to the claim that "the proposer" has not approached the WMF in advance, this is at best a bad faith assumption. I have personally been in meetings this year with T&S to discuss problems with WMF funded surveys, raising these issues of protection of volunteers and the risks of compromising privacy. Some things happen behind the scenes for good reasons and to maintain our productive relationships.
Sorry, I do not feel that the greater risk here is that funded projects that might have some inconvenience to handle if one of our many Wikimedia projects takes a stand and bans the use of third party survey tools, in the context that the WMF makes no legal commitment to be responsible for damages if it goes wrong and a volunteer were to suffer real-life harm or the consequences lead them to lose their life. At the end of the day, these surveys are nice and easy to set up, but they do not save lives, they are not mission-critical, nobody will lose an eye if we switch them off while we work out better solutions.
Let's sort it out. The WMF and Affiliates have been addicted to quick free solutions using Google for years, and in the vast majority of cases of funded projects, it can be avoided by giving a few hours work to a paid academic intern; and they need the work.
BTW, yes I use Google mail, that's not a contradiction, this email is not a survey with personal opinions. I will not end up in prison if you quote me on Twitter. Those using tangential "arguments" like this need to take a cool look at why they feel they need to scrape the barrel.
Links 1. https://www.limesurvey.org
Thanks for the feedback, keep going. Fae
On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 at 15:40, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
As a consequence of the promotion of a Google forms based survey this week by a WMF representative, a proposal on Wikimedia Commons has been started to ban the promotion of surveys which rely on third party sites like Google Forms.[1]
Launched today, but already it appears likely that this proposal will have a consensus to support. Considering that Commons is one of our largest Wikimedia projects, there are potential repercussions of banning the on-wiki promotion of surveys which use Google products or other closed source third party products like SurveyMonkey.
Feedback is most welcome on the proposal discussion, or on this list for handling impact, solutions, recommended alternatives that already exist, or the future role of the WMF to support research and surveys for the WMF and affiliates by using forking open source software and self-hosting and self-managing data "locally".
Links
Thanks Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae #WearAMask