Hi, Nathan.
I appreciate your recommendations; they are both very good. :)
In a situation that comes through the usual processes, the investigative
team would usually direct the person contacting them to a policy page on
the local project or to a specific functionary group. So, Oversight, for
instance, in case of leaked personal data. In this case, I suspect
would have suited the situation better.
Unfortunately, we didn’t anticipate redirecting somebody with a dispute of
this sort via the emergency@ channel. As I mentioned above, staff are
directed not to handle other matters through that channel. When off-topic
requests (for the channel) come in, people are usually asked to mail ca@
and to expect a response within two business days. In this case, given the
level of distress, the emergency responder wanted to offer something more
rapid without being herself deeply familiar with the English Wikipedia
approaches. I’m very supportive of her desire to help, and we are going to
make sure that emergency@ responders have better support in where to direct
these issues while still maintaining our strict protocol of not using that
channel to handle any issues other than threats of physical harm. Nobody
wants to try to help somebody only to increase their distress. :(
I also agree that she should have mentioned ca@ in the email. She actually
included that channel in her response as a cc, but because of the
personally tailored answer seems to have inadvertently omitted mentioning
the fact of the cc. I do want to note that the individual in this case had
already been asked to correspond with ca@ if there were issues that didn’t
merit consideration for escalation to law enforcement. I certainly
understand that he may have overlooked that in his distress, and it should
have been repeated. I myself am very capable of overlooking things even
when NOT distressed, and we should make the processes we DO have as smooth
and painless as possible for people.
We are learning from this. We’ll make the process better.
Best regards,
Maggie
On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 2:54 PM Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Maggie,
First, thank you for the update and for the additional background
information. How does T&S determine *which* local processes to refer users
to? In the particular case here, it might have been better if the user had
been offered a mix of private or public methods to address the problem. It
seems as though the only advice given was to a noticeboard, but as others
have noted communicating privately with an administrator or with the
functionaries list or other private means may have been more effective.
That could be true for future inquiries as well, so perhaps reviewing what
advice regarding local processes is offered would be a good idea.
The emergency@ response also did not offer or suggest sending the inquiry
to ca@, which might have been helpful.
~Nathan
On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 2:38 PM Maggie Dennis <mdennis(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hello, all.
Yesterday some questions were raised in this channel about Trust &
Safety’s
response to an issue of harassment reported via
our emergency email
address. The director of that team reports to me, as I am the Vice
President of Community Resilience & Sustainability, so I wanted to speak
to
that, to clarify our approaches in the hopes of
avoiding unnecessary
confusion and distress to individuals in the future. I also wanted to
give
you an update on the Universal Code of Conduct
(UCoC) drafting committee.
:)
Apologies in advance for the length of this!
Let’s start with the UCoC.[1] As a brief recap, there is a drafting
committee working on a global policy that will set basic minimum
standards
for conduct in the Wikimedia movement. The
committee is making good
progress, but time challenges in part around the current global health
crisis has led them to ask for two more weeks to prepare this draft for
the
month-long community review period on Meta. This
means we will be asking
for community comment from September 7 to October 6, which will push the
delivery of the policy to the Board from September 30 to October 13. The
full timeline is on the main Meta page.
In terms of the Foundation’s Trust & Safety team and how and when to
reach
out to them, Trust & Safety’s team handles
several key workflows with
different addresses according to urgency.[2]
Our emergency@ channel is set up to deal with threats of physical harm -
ranging from terrorism to suicide - which the team triages and escalates
as
appropriate to law enforcement and other
emergency services for them to
handle. (“As appropriate” is under an escalation protocol defined for the
Foundation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who helped build this
multinational crisis line.) The team’s sole role here is to act as a
switchboard putting these threats into the hands of professionals trained
to handle them, around the world. This channel is staffed 24 hours a
day, 7
days a week, and the team has strong direction
not to handle other
matters
through this channel. In order for it to function
effectively, it deals
with nothing else. (See the Meta page on this process - [3].) Other
matters, including behavioral investigation requests, should be sent to
Trust & Safety via the email address ca(a)wikimedia.org.
I’d like to acknowledge that it is not unusual for the Trust & Safety
team
to encounter problems caused by lack of clarity
as to what constitutes
harassment and what to do about it when it is encountered. There are
differences in how different projects define and handle issues, including
how many resources they have to dedicate to investigating and responding
to
these and where and when concerns should be
raised. This is one of the
reasons that the Movement Strategy working groups recommended the
Universal
Code of Conduct to begin with, with clear
escalation mechanisms. We are
working with communities on this, with an expectation that over the next
few months international conversations will help everyone better
understand
what behavior is acceptable in the movement and
better navigate and
choose
where to report their concerns to find effective
help.
How the Foundation will support communities in these governance issues is
important, with an essential balance of giving targets of harassment the
care they need while also respecting that communities are better
positioned
to self-govern. Our role is and should remain to
assist with issues that
are beyond the capacity of communities to handle. Our goal should be to
empower communities to handle as much as they can.
The Trust & Safety team has a small division of people who review
behavioral investigation requests they receive. Their first task is to
assess whether the issue is for some reason not solvable through
community
self-governance mechanisms. This is most often
because the situation
crosses a threshold of legal responsibility, but sometimes because it
falls
into an area where community self-governance
processes are lacking:
sometimes this is cross-wiki abuse; other times this is because the
projects where the issues are happening lack robust self-governance;
sometimes this is because the situations reported may involve the
individuals usually tasked with self-governance. If they determine a case
does not require Foundation involvement but is instead better suited for
self-governance, they will direct the individual to local processes. We
have committed not to intervene in cases that community self-governance
can
reasonably handle. Sometimes even when a case
does rise to the level of
Foundation involvement, they will advise the person who reached out of
appropriate community self-governance processes as a more rapid solution
while they complete their investigation, including the essential legal
review, before they are able to take sanctions. This is important because
those investigations and legal reviews are generally not quick. It’s not
uncommon for the Foundation to issue sanctions against a person who has
been locally blocked, and we regard this as a healthy functioning of the
system, at least until the Universal Code of Conduct can be created to
potentially streamline the process.
I would like to encourage people to take part in the Universal Code of
Conduct conversations as they happen. The distress conflict causes people
in our movement is real. Helping to find the best way to minimize this
distress and to guide conflict in healthy directions will serve us all.
Best regards,
Maggie
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trust_and_Safety
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Threats_of_harm
--
Maggie Dennis
Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
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