On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 10:30 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
As a reminder: IRC is governed by Freenode. Channels can have their own rules, and there are widely varying systems of internal governance for Wikimedia IRC channels. I think it's important to note that WMF and the Wikimedia community are guests on Freenode, and I'm uncomfortable with the proposition to extend a WMF policy into IRC channels without explicit consent from the ops of those channels; it seems to me that the TCC would be a per-channel opt-in on IRC, not a WMF blanket standard.
Speaking more generally, I am wary of WMF encroachment into what I should be fundamentally community-governed spaces. I have not heard a lot of objections from the community to the proposed technical code of conduct, and I've heard some arguments for and against the rationale for having it; my main concern is that I would prefer that the final document be ratified through community-led processes.
I agree that changes here should involve heavy community participation, which is a reason I'm trying to initiate broader discussion.
We have been moderately successful in "outsourcing" real time chat to a third-party (IRC and Freenode) in the past, but it does leave us out of control of what may become a fundamental technology for our platform. Certainly we could simply embed a web-based IRC client in talk pages, for instance. That would continue the status quo. It's certainly one point in the possible solution space, and I'm not foreclosing that. I just think we should discuss discussions holistically. What are the benefits of disclaiming responsibility for real time chat? What are the benefits of the freenode conduct policy? What are the disadvantages?
We could also "more tightly integrate chat" without leaving IRC or Freenode. For the [[en:MIT Mystery Hunt]] many teams build quite elaborate IRC bots that layer additional functionalities on top of IRC. Matt's email mentioned a "central reporting place". We could certainly allow IRC channels to opt-in to a WMF code of conduct and opt-in to running a WMF bot providing a standardized and consistent reporting mechanism/block list/abuse logger. That's another point in the solution space.
My personal dog in the race is "tools". I totally love community-led processes. But I am concerned that WMF is not providing the communities adequate *tools* to make meaningful improvements in their social environments. Twitter rolled out a new suite of anti-abuse features this week (https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/15/twitter-online-abuse-mute-features/) so sadly the WMF platform is now behind twitter in terms of providing a healthy working environment for our contributors. We need to step up our game. As you note, the first step is this discussion involving the community to take a broad look at discussions on our platform and determine some basic social principles as well as architectural planks and commonalities. Hopefully we can then follow that up with an aggressive development effort to deploy some new tools and features. I believe this will be an iterative process: our first tools will fall short, and we'll need to continue "discussing discussions", revisiting assumptions, and building improved tools.
But we can't allow ourselves to stand still. --scott