Hi everyone,

I'm Ziski from the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Advocacy team. I’m writing with an update about how the Foundation and a group of Wikimedia affiliates have engaged with the Global Digital Compact, which is an effort of UN Member States to develop a shared set of principles that aim to support an “open, free, and secure digital future for all.”

The Global Digital Compact is similar to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in that it will become the blueprint for how UN Member States shape their internet policies and develop regulation at the country level. Those policies and regulations will impact Wikimedia projects and will define what the internet will look like for decades to come.

That's why today, twelve affiliates and the Foundation published an open letter advocating for UN Member States to include three critical points in the Compact. We believe that the inclusion of these commitments will help protect community-governed, public interest projects like the Wikimedia projects into the future, both at an international as well as a national level. The open letter builds on efforts over the past two years from affiliates and the Foundation to help shape the Compact. The three principles we emphasize in the letter are:

• Protect and empower communities to govern online public interest projects. 

• Promote and protect digital public goods by supporting a robust digital commons from which everyone, everywhere can benefit.

• Build and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support and empower, not replace, people who create content and make decisions in the public interest.