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(a)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
1.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Proposals#Use_of_of…
Thanks
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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