Greetings!
As Maggie said, the Global Advocacy/Public Policy team will be sharing more detailed answers to many questions about the Human Rights Policy in January. In the meantime, I thought I'd offer a bit more context that might be helpful.
I
joined the WMF in late September as VP for Global Advocacy and am responsible for the final version of the Human Rights Policy approved by the Board of Trustees, building on a great deal of earlier work led by the WMF's Director of Public Policy (who reports to me) and the WMF's Human Rights Lead who reports to Maggie.
The exact timing of the Human Rights Policy's depended on the Board of Trustees meeting schedule. They had a meeting in early December. The next meeting after that will not be until March. While approving the policy right before the holidays was indeed sub-optimal for reasons many have noted, waiting until March to enact it would be too late for WMF's annual planning cycle. Given that implementation of the policy has implications for how budget is allocated in the coming fiscal year, the consequences of delay beyond the December Board of Trustees meeting would be non-trivial for WMF's ability to anticipate, mitigate, and respond to threats to individuals as well as policy threats to the movement.
Maggie has written about sensitivities surrounding threats to individuals. Regarding policy threats to the movement, our response to those is not intended to be secret. The policy threats include regulatory and other threats by governments that the WMF has a long history of taking stands against, including censorship (an attack on freedom of expression as a human right) and surveillance (an attack on privacy as a human right). The
Wikimedia Public Policy portal contains information about stances that WMF has taken, and will continue to take. That said, I would like to make an appeal for patience as we ramp up our team and build capacity to engage with the movement, and improve how we communicate about our work.
As many on this list know much better than I do, in 2019
Global Advocacy was made a priority in the
Medium-term plan for implementing the 2030 Movement Strategy ratified by the community. As of August 2021 the WMF Public Policy Team had only three people who were making solid progress on policy analysis, development, and engagement on policy issues such as those listed in the Public Policy portal. However, in order to be able to fulfill our objectives of engaging with the community and other stakeholders on our advocacy work, the team badly needed further staff capacity and strategic leadership. Now the team has grown to seven people, but for most of the past three months we have been swamped with onboarding, hiring more people so that we can actually execute on our goals, responding to time-sensitive policy developments in
Europe,
Asia, and
Latin America, and showing up in various international fora to defend the interests of our community including on copyright, intermediary liability protections, and net neutrality. All of these things affect the community's ability to access and share free knowledge, which is itself a human right. All of the policy positions taken by our global advocacy team are intended to defend the
digital rights (a subset of human rights, per the excellent Wikipedia article on the subject) of our community members.
Frustratingly, our systems for publishing and communicating about our global advocacy work, and building processes for communicating and collaborating with the the broader community, are either stalled or non-existent as of today. But my job, and that of some new colleagues who are even newer me, and others not yet hired, is to change that as soon as humanly feasible with available resources. My priority for the next couple months is to put people and processes in place so that we can start to publish regularly updated information about our work on the website. We need to create a regular newsletter about what we are doing. We need to share more information on Meta, update it regularly and participate in discussions about it there. We need to establish channels and a productive process to figure out how WMF staff and people across the broader movement can all work together to defend our right to share free knowledge and participate in the governance of free knowledge projects without fear. We have a massive amount of work to do. I look forward to rolling up my sleeves in January to improve communication and collaboration with the community on our global advocacy work in general, and on the implementation of our human rights policy in particular.
I hope that some of this context is helpful, even if inevitably incomplete and unsatisfactory. My colleagues and I look forward to many more exchanges and conversations in the coming year.
Best wishes to all for a happy new year.
Rebecca
Rebecca MacKinnon
Vice President, Global Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
Phone/Signal: +1-617-939-3493
Twitter: @rmack
Hi, Nosebagbear.
As I said in my first email on the subject (and I said a lot, so I'm not surprised if it gets missed!), I really can only speak to my part of this - I work with the Human Rights Team that does on the ground interventions. The lead of this team has been a substantial input to this process, but the work in the policy is far more expansive than my part. THAT human rights intervention is where we have a playbook to which I refer, and although we don't talk about how, it's not been intended to be a secret that it exists. I first posted about the team on Meta in 2020 and spoke about it at my second office hour,
here. I believe it has come up in subsequent calls, and I have mentioned it in each office hour announcement (at least that I wrote myself). I don't think we can safely talk about HOW we are handling human rights threats to community members, but it's never been my intention to downplay that we're working on it!
I will let the Global Advocacy and Public Policy teams speak to the policy as a whole. But in terms of the questions you mailed in, I imagine they received others as well and are working to aggregate them.
Best,
Maggie
Hi Maggie,
Could you answer a few things, or at least provide your (and the team's) reasoning:
1) It has now been stated multiple times it was urgent to get a policy like this. But you tell us there's a secret playbook already in play, and I can't imagine that has changed immediately just because there's now a visible policy, and with the break shortly occurring, the WMF other teams can't really decide major things with it in mind either. And it also took some time to (seemingly purely internally) write. So why is it taking so long to explain why we're having to wait until after Christmas break to discuss it? *Why is it retroactive discussion at all?*
2) The policy includes the line " use our influence with partners, the private sector, and governments to advance and uphold respect for human rights." - you say you note the tension from needing to have such a playbook be hidden to remain functional and be a collaborative community.
I don't doubt your reasoning on the playbook, but this line is in effect "the policy team will lobby for better human rights"...but without us knowing the actual execution of methods, specifically raised areas, a complete listing of ongoing areas of focus and so on. There is already a concern that the WMF spends too much time trying to speak for the movement without actually knowing that their specific positions are backed by the movement as a whole. Doing it with this dichotomy in place surely seems even less wise.
3) Back, more generally, to the process issues. I emailed shortly after this went public, at the time, some considerable time before the Christmas break. I just got a message saying they were collating questions and would answer in the new year. But most of my questions were on either "why was this procedure used" or "why was this paragraph included", rather than substantive content change proposals.
If even I know why I included any given thing in a regular old policy that I help draft and can thus answer questions rapidly, why was this not the case here. Surely the reasoning for each bit of content and failure to publicly consult are already known? So why the lag time?
Yours,
Richard (Nosebagbear)
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/UXQONI433PXLVTNG7UCZGR2TJEMJHHV7/
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
--
Maggie Dennis
She/her/hers
Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
--
Maggie Dennis
She/her/hers
Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/7FFVPKXCCSCEBW6GVHKFKE3ISCWNMGLY/
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org