Hi everyone,

Thank you for your replies.

Sam makes some great points and suggestions. Indeed, the Movement’s free knowledge agenda is about freedom *to* which is why the first sentence of the policy says: “The Wikimedia Movement’s vision—of a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge—both relies upon and enables human rights. “ [1]

As I stated in the conversation hour [2], the Foundation urgently needs such a policy in order to meet our responsibility to protect members of our community from real, growing threats in the world. More governments are increasingly aggressive about trying to control and manipulate information spaces, including Wikimedia projects, and to threaten people who act to share knowledge, and govern free knowledge projects independently of their governments’ requirements. At the same time, as the Foundation globalizes and as the Movement works actively to increase participation across the world, a growing percentage of people who we are bringing into the projects are living in places where contributing to free knowledge projects is more difficult or dangerous than it is for people in North America or Western Europe or other places where the projects have the largest number of long-time volunteers. For this among other reasons, we believe it is urgent to have a policy that clearly articulates the Foundation’s responsibility to actively work to understand how our platforms and operations affect the rights of everyone who interacts with the projects, how we will work to mitigate threats and harms to members of the movement, and how we will work with people across the Movement to implement these policies over the coming years. We don’t believe that our responsibility to respect, protect and promote human rights is up for negotiation.

That said, as Ricky and I wrote in the blog post [3], the Foundation is absolutely committed to a long term process, in partnership with volunteers, extending into the coming months and years well beyond this thread, to discuss all the different ways in which the policy should be implemented.

There is a lot to digest in the responses we have received, not just on this thread but also from other volunteers who have reached out in different ways. We are compiling all of the suggestions and questions. We hope that we can find a number of ways to hold both real-time and asynchronous conversations, perhaps broken down by specific topics and concerns. In any case, we look forward to the concrete steps that need to be taken not only to implement the policy but to connect it to many other existing efforts that are all - fundamentally - about different aspects of human rights as Sam rightly points out.

Thanks so much and have a great weekend.
Rebecca

[1] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Human_Rights_Policy
[2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conversation_Hour_for_Human_Rights_Policy_Launch.webm
[3] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/12/09/what-the-wikimedia-foundations-new-human-rights-policy-means-for-our-movement/
_______________________________________________
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/LU5KWRQAGADD3BU5CZFE5OZPOMQ4ZCVC/
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org