On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 4:02 PM, Brion Vibber bvibber@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