On 28 July 2018 at 03:19, Gregory Varnum gvarnum@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thank you to everyone that has provided thoughtful and constructive input on this discussion, and to the volunteers who are investigating the possible policy violations. We have some additional information on this vendor relationship and on steps being taken that we believe will be helpful to this discussion.
[...]
As we are now aware of the vendor's possible violations and feel they
should have shared this information with us during discussions, we will not be pursuing any future working relationship with Go Fish Digital and will be requesting that they honor our contractual agreement by not discussing their past relationship with us for promotional purposes. Additionally, we are reviewing the way that this vendor was selected in an effort to see if we can identify what led to this issue and better identify these types of concerns when identifying future vendors and executing agreements with them.
Thank you, it sounds like some lessons have/are being learnt.
On 28 July 2018 at 03:19, Gregory Varnum gvarnum@wikimedia.org wrote:
they did not request or receive access to any Wikimedia user data. The contract concluded last month.
This is interesting, considering they asked for and received some data according to: * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T194287 - this one didn't happen but shows they requested some data * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193052 - where they received the above data, I'm assuming that Googlebot etc. bots are not being considered Wikimedia Users under your definition. * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T192893 - they have some access until Wednesday (while the contract ended last month)? That console apparently includes some PII, which may include 'actual users'? Are they 'Google users' instead of 'Wikimedia users' at that point? Some clarification on this might be a good idea.
On 28 July 2018 at 03:19, Gregory Varnum gvarnum@wikimedia.org wrote:
Again, we appreciate the attention provided to this by the functionaries and others who raised these concerns.
There's two more interesting things I noticed from looking at the SPI page: * The article on SurveyMonkey is listed in the current case. I believe that's another company/site that has been used by Wikimedia in the past. ** I'm not sure if it's still in use. ** I haven't looked into who made what edit, and the 'LinkedIn search' comment next to it doesn't tell me much. * In the history, Deskana (the volunteer account of an Audiences department PM involved in the Go Fish Digital engagement based on the above phab links, who is also a CU) was one of the people to have closed a case on this SPI page the past, for inactivity in December (a few months before the engagement): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/BurritoSlayer& diff=815611486&oldid=805166806&diffmode=source ** I'm not aware of any Go Fish Digital connection being known at that point in time so hopefully this was entirely normal and not of any concern. ** When did Go Fish Digital in particular first get proposed within the foundation exactly? ** Who has been included in the functionaries' discussion on this subject?