UCoC update, emergency@, and T&S behavioral investigations - Wikimedia-l

24 Aug 2020

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.