Dear co-founders of the group,

Dear Wikimedia TN User Group members,

I trust my email finds you all in good shape. I'm writing to you on my capacity as Carthagina current President.

I’m addressing this email to the co-founders of the group as the legitimate co-chairs and to the community as well because we are partners in several successful projects (MedinaPedia, GLAM) and contests (WLM, WLA,...). We strongly value this partnership and we would like to maintain it for more joint work (the ongoing GLAM project in the Diocesan Library, the upcoming photo contests, the next MedinaPedia Dougga and Sfax,...).

I would like to report an issue between a member of this community and some members of my team - Carthagina that has gone bigger than expected.

In Carthagina, we value people and we value our team's work and of course our partners. Partner for once, partner forever. We, as well, prioritise the diversity and homogeneity of the team.

Jamel Ben Saidane (a wikimedian and Human Resources Officer - Carthagina) and I received a complaint from Afek Ben Chahed and Zeineb Takouti, two members of Carthagina and active Wikimedians. They reported several times the misbehaviour of the Wikimedian Mounir Touzri. The situation kept escalating to the point of insulting Zeineb and devaluing her work. Harassing Afek and trying to influence her to split Carthagina and Wikimedia TN UG members. Afek reported as well that Mounir has stolen one of her ideas of Wiki University Clubs.

Side conversations took place containing gossiping, shouting on the phone and depreciation toward these members. It became an unhealthy environment to volunteer. It suddenly became a very contagious atmosphere where my teammates felt frustrated and affected in a way to have incidents within the core staff of Carthagina (when Mounir started reaching out to Issam Barhoumi and Samy Mlouhi).

I would like to thank Habib and Yamen who called the members to motivate them in several occasions showing a good model of leadership.

But this is not all. The complaint that I would like to hand to you as a Wikimedian, contains influencing voting. Several members confirmed that Mounir contacted them privately to ask them to vote for a specific person. The way that he acts as the owner of the every new members faith; X person can go to attend Y conference while Z person is not welcome to attend ...

May I remind you that this kind of behaviour made us lose one of the active and enthusiastic wikipedian few year ago (I’m talking here about Wael Ghabara).

I would like to also highlight that myself as well as other wikimedians, have concerns about the grants that Mounir is receiving without letting us know. I recall our Wikimedia TN meeting organised by Mounir himself in Sousse early March, when we all agreed that all grant requests should be known by the community and go through our unique fiscal sponsor CLibre.

From our side in Carthagina, for the first time in our history we activated our policy and decided unanimously to ban definitely Mounir Touzri from all our activities, projects and venue. We declare him as a "Persona non grata". This decision was taken based on our code of conduct and all our members, observer-members and board of trustees voted for it. This is the hardest decision, we took in Carthagina, especially that Mounir was considered part of our community and that he helped us in the WM-Carthagina events. But unfortunately, we cannot allow/accept this kind of behaviour from someone who's supposed to know our policy as well as the Wikimedia friendly space policy.

The Carthagina meeting minutes would be shared with Yamen and Habib and if you would like to hear more concerns from our team about the Wikimedia related issues, my team and I are happy to collaborate.

It saddens me to write this email but the situation needed an action to stop the abuse from growing bigger than it is.

Sadly

Emna