Thanks for the thoughtful response; you've raised some excellent points
that strongly warrant further discussion.
Some more recent initiatives like the Community Tech team have been
specifically meant to help "power users" get stuff done; I hope that's
working out and helping, and that the focus on providing tools that our
contributors want and need continues.
The topic of unpaid labor -- and exploiting addictive behaviors -- is a
general one with free and open source software specifically, as well as
user generated content generally, and I agree it deserves a lot more
thought.
-- brion
On Feb 23, 2016 3:41 PM, "SarahSV" <sarahsv.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 4:02 PM, Brion Vibber
<bvibber(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
I think first we have to ask: why did many people feel attacked or in
unwanted adversarial positions before (both among volunteers, and among
staff)? What sort of interactions and behavior were seen as problematic,
and what led up to them?
The crux of the problem is that we all see ourselves as bosses.
The paid workers don't want to be told what to do by the unpaid, and vice
versa.
There were clashes around the introduction of software, but these were only
flashpoints. There was (and remains) a simmering resentment of the paid
among the unpaid, for obvious reasons. And the paid staff seemed to regard
experienced editors as "power users" who need to be chased off, missing the
point that (a) "power users" have invaluable experience and a very unusual
skill set that should be used not discarded, and (b) that the new users the
Foundation wants to cultivate will become "power users" too one day if
they're cultivated well – unless the idea is to appeal only to occasional
users who want to fix typos, but you won't get an encyclopaedia that way.
You mentioned the "exploitation of employees and users for their labor
" in your email, and I'm glad you did, because that's almost never
discussed. It was in part why there was such a strong reaction to the
misunderstanding about the Knowledge Engine. We had visions of the
Foundation trying to create yet another unpaid workforce to "curate" search
results.
I don't want this email to be essay-length, but let me raise an issue
that's closely related to exploitation, namely addiction. A lot of the
unpaid workers are addicted to what they do, and I've seen staffers discuss
how to keep them that way (e.g. by creating feedback loops of responses to
keep people going). Should the Foundation be paying for that kind of work
and thinking in those ways? I would say not.
So the question of how to support volunteers involves:
1. Recognizing that we are an unpaid workforce.
2. Recognizing that there are questions about exploitation and addiction
that should be discussed, and that these are serious ethical and perhaps
even public-health issues.
3. Developing an attitude of social responsibility toward us within the
Foundation, rather than seeing us as a nuisance and an obstacle.
4. Rethinking Sue's decision that the Foundation would never pay for
content. I can think of several ways in which the Foundation could either
pay or facilitate payment.
I'll leave it there, because this is long, and perhaps reply to your other
points in another email. Just one final thought. When I lived in London
years ago, a new newspaper started for homeless people, The Big Issue. It
is sold by the homeless on the streets, with the idea of giving them a way
to earn an income. The homeless and other volunteers also used to help
write it. The idea was that, as it became more successful, everyone would
be paid, because the concept of it was to lift everyone up.
I would love to see the Wikimedia Foundation embrace that philosophy,
namely that part of its job is to nurture its workforce (paid and unpaid),
offer them opportunity where it can, lift them up, educate them, show them
how to educate others, and respect them, so that everyone who gets involved
seriously with Wikipedia finds their lives improved because of that
involvement.
Sarah
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