Hello all,
We are writing to invite you to take part in a new project that the
Wikimedia Foundation Trust & Safety Team is creating. This project aims to
maintain and expand peer-support networks within the Wikimedia communities,
improve the working atmosphere on our projects, and aid in the fight
against harassment.
In the Foundation, we believe that your participation and opinion is
important as it will enable us to gain diverse perspectives and new
information.This Peer Support Project endeavors to connect volunteers in a
way where they can support each other, and your knowledge, skills and
experience would be highly appreciated. For more information on the
project, please visit our Meta page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Peer_Support_Networks_within_the_Wikimedia_Movement>
.
If you'd like to lend your expertise here, we are organizing Focus group
meetings as a next step. In those meetings, we hope to learn about already
existing networks, ideas on how volunteers could connect more and better,
and what support they would need to do so. These meetings will cover three
different time zones, and each meeting will last two hours. Feel free to
sign up for the meeting that is most comfortable for you!
Focus group meetings will be held on Google Meet on the days and times
listed below:
1 October 2021, 7:30 - 9:30 UTC
15 October 2021, 15:00 - 17:00 UTC
22 October 2021, 19:00 - 21:00 UTC
Please feel free to encourage more members of your community or other
wikifriends to reach out to us if you believe that this project will be of
interest to them.
Do let us know if you are available to participate in one of those meetings
listed above and we will send out calendar invites to you. If you are
interested, but are unavailable in the time slots listed above, let us
know and we will look for ways to connect.
Please be aware that Trust & Safety will also reach out soon with a similar
offer to talk about training around the UCoC. Feel free to concentrate on
the issue that is most important to you, but of course you are also very
welcome to take part in both discussions. We are aware that capacity is
limited and will highly value any kind of participation!
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Christel Steigenberger (she/her)
Senior Trust and Safety Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>