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@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