Dear New York Wikimedians,
I am writing to propose your comments for a plan for collaboration in
addressing the harassment issues faced by the Wikimedia community and the
Tor community, and with potential collaboration with the organizations
Civilination <http://www.civilination.org/> and the Cyber Civil Rights
Initiative, Inc. <http://www.cybercivilrights.org/>
Lane Raspberry and I have been discussing this proposal for quite some, and
have drafted a proposal addressing the issue of harassment of community
members, and the lack of formal procedure for mediating complaints about
Wikipedia both online and offline at Wikipedia Edit-a-thons and other
events.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Fund_a_community_human_resou…
In summary, this is the proposal:
1. Any online community can participate in this harassment response
program. Perhaps in the beginning the Tor and Wikimedia communities can
pilot this.
2. The online communities partner with a third-party organization which
can be trusted to receive confidential complaints about harassment
3. In the beginning, the third-party organization only collects
complaints about harassment and is not necessarily equipped to provide
relief in response to complaints. At least this organization can be trusted
to receive the complaints, de-identify them, and somehow make data about
complaints available for research
4. In the longer term depending on community demand, funding, perceived
need, and the nature of complaints received, this third-party organization
can manage some response to complaints. Initial responses would be modeled
after responses provided by brick-and-mortar organizations in comparable
situations.
5. The goal of all of this is preventing loss of human resource assets
and increasingcommunity health.
6. A premise behind this model is that online community health concerns
are common in various kinds of online communities, and that online
communities can find value in combining their responses to online
harassment.
Many things are currently being discussed including how a collaboration
between Tor, Cybercivil Rights, and Civilination might look in terms of
supervising this grant, hiring an appropriate, trained person, and creating
the necessary procedures for this role.
If this were a viable model for increasing satisfaction among people who
complain of harassment and reducing incidence of harassment complaints,
then other online communitiesmay wish to join this project and make support
services available to their own communities. Potential partners could
include any online community which has developed a "code of conduct" for
online behavior among its community members.
At this time, we are seeking community feedback and initial support of this
project, and so I wanted to share the proposal with you. Please let us
know, on or off Wiki, if you have any questions or comments related to this
proposal.
Thanks so much for taking a look,
All the best,
Dorothy Howard