This is an official letter from the Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil (Grupo de Usuários da Comunidade Wikimedia no Brasil - GUWMBR) concerning the decision of the Affiliations Committee to de-recognize user groups from Brazil.

The Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil brings together active members of the Wikimedia Movement in Brazil. As of today, 34 Wikimedians have subscribed to the group on meta; they come from 13 cities in Brazil  [1]. 24 of the users who have subscribed to the group have held adminship positions in Wikimedia projects in Portuguese and in global projects. These Wikimedians have had appointments at the Ombudsman commission, the Simple Annual Plan Grants Committee, the Project Grants Committee and many other instances of the global community. Many of our group members were featured on the Wikimedia Blog in the past few years as examples of contributors in an emerging community.

The group was formed in 2013 as a means of leveraging the Brazilian Wikimedia community, in the aftermath of the Catalyst Program in Brazil. It was to some extent the continuity of previous efforts in the community to organize a Brazilian Wikimedia affiliate. Since our inception, we have sustained 51 programs, launching some of the largest education programs and GLAM initiatives in the world. We have established ongoing formal partnerships with seven universities and research institutes, nine cultural institutions --including some of the largest museums in Brazil and the Brazilian National Archives-- and have a formal agreement with the Portuguese Chapter to establish a lusophone wide education campaign. In Brazil, formal partnerships are especially relevant as they are generally considered a requirement for establishing programs with public or large institutions.

Outcomes and processes of our programs have been systematically reported to the community [2]. Metrics are available on the Dashboard: so far, these programs have brought to the projects 1,609 editors since 2014, who have contributed 8.65M words and 14.5K files to the projects [3].

All this great activity has been achieved in a context of escalating animosity in the Brazilian community. An assessment of this escalation, from our perspective, would necessarily mean understanding more thoroughly the structural impact the Catalyst Program has had in our community and the systematic communication problems with the Affiliations Committee, particularly in providing inputs when help and advice were officially requested. Nevertheless, we also acknowledge user group members from Brazil bear direct responsibility in the process that has led to the Affiliations Committee's decision to withdraw the recognition of these groups, that was globally communicated on April 8.

The major responsibility we, the friends who have been involved in creating and sustaining the Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil, bear is to have failed to let go. Not all conflicts are worth the fight, as the primary goal of all this we do is to have fun among friends and peers and share knowledge.

We will take our new stand as an opportunity to improve the way we work on our activities and within our community, both as individual editors and as a collective of friends who strongly share a commitment for open knowledge and this movement. We can only hope this will also be an opportunity for other bodies in our movement, especially the Affiliations Committee, to improve how we deal educationally with situations like what has happened in Brazil. Our members are available for being involved in this learning process --as emotionally hard as this process might be.

We can only hope for the best in this context. We are committed Wikimedians, who have worked tirelessly for Wikimedia projects. As we said before, we hope we can learn from this situation and rebuild.

We take this opportunity to request a meeting with the Affiliations Committee to discuss details of the de-recognition process.

Boas edições!

On behalf of the members of the Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil

__ References [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Bras il#Users_interested_in_creating_the_group [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Bras il#Reports_of_activities [3] https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/campaigns/grupo_de_usu%C3%A1r ios_wikimedia_no_brasil/overview