Hi all,
Jorge Vargas, WMF's Sr. Manager for Regional Partnerships here. Wanted to quickly chime in to mention that as several folks on this list know, WMF has been more proactive in the past year or so to build bridges with UN agencies to see how they can better support our movement and have a more coordinated/holistic approach, in addition, and in collaboration with all the amazing local and regional efforts already taking place and being led by affiliates worldwide.
One immediate result (and thanks to work supported by John Cummings and Wikimedia Argentina) we have been working closely with UN Human Rights [1] to support ongoing and future efforts to distribute and create content related to human rights (#WikiForHumanRights, with more info on this post [2] and meta [3]), and now their support to gender-related initiatives like the WIkiGapChallenge [4]). All of this to say that part of that agreement was starting to navigate how to get more UN-copyrighted content on a free license (starting with content from UN Human Rights, but broadening the scope to other agencies).
Part of this work has been understanding the complexity to navigate decision-making within the UN system for things like copyright ownership and licensing of content. From our understanding so far, even if a UN agency (like UN Human Rights or UNICEF) wants to free up content, a decision needs to happen from the UN Publications Office in NY (an exception to this are decentralized agencies, like UNESCO, who can make that call themselves). We have been lobbying with UN Publications Office to better understand where they stand, but as mentioned, when they do use a free license, they include an NC clause by default.
I want to take this opportunity to rally ongoing efforts, approaches, etc being done by folks reading this. Ping me here or off-thread if you'd like to share more of what you've done so far (I'll follow up with you James! Thanks for already taking the lead in contacting WHO before). Ideally, mapping what stakeholders are on the table right now and what past conversations have happened will help us make progress in getting traction as we and the movement at large continue the conversation.
Feel free to reach out anytime if you have any comments or questions.
Thanks! Jorge
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/08/16/wikimedia-and-un-human-right... [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/12/10/wikimedia-foundation-and-un-... [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiForHumanRights [4] https://standup4humanrights.org/en/2020/highlights_04.html
On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 11:44 AM Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Well, we did our share. For both medical and social aspects, we were there.
I was hoping at least to get some guidelines for our affiliates' social media...
Alessandro Il giovedì 12 marzo 2020, 19:35:56 CET, Damon Sicore damon@sicore.com ha scritto:
Not to mention a lost opportunity for the world. On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 1:30 PM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
I have been asking WHO to release COVID19 content (specially videos) under open licenses since since Feb 2020.
I have spoke with Aleksandra Kuzmanovic who has been involved in their collaboration with Facebook and Twitter etc.
They say maybe. But despite a bunch of follow up emails have not seemed too keen. It is really a lost opportunity for both of us :-(
James
On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 9:47 AM Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Some of us sent an email when it was (only apparently) less serious but we got no reply, as far as I know. It was sent by the UG of Washington DC and I contacted WMCH doing that, because they might reach their central office quickly in Geneva if necessary. Changing some licenses was one of the things I hoped to discuss, but in general we knew it was already serious and we were trying to gain some
time.
In the end, WHO changed their attitude only after the last week-end, probably because people started finally to be worried in the USA, but the pandemia should have been declared weeks ago or at least last week, IMHO, when also the data of another "not small" country, that is Spain, started to be quite out of control (if Italy was already not enough after China, Iran and South Korea).
They seem to have taken more slowly than necessary. Let's hope they finally reach out.
Regards. Alessandro
Il giovedì 12 marzo 2020, 16:29:34 CET, Andy Mabbett <andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk> ha scritto:
WHO have a great video on COVID-19 ("Coronavius"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APwq1df6Mw
Now would be a good time for the WMF, local chapters, other affiliates, and individual, to publicly call on them to open licence such material, as I have done, here:
https://twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/1238124060145483777
[much of their published material is under NC restrictions - https://www.who.int/publishing/copyright/en/ ]
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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