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 and the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, Inc.
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.
In summary, this is the proposal:
- Any online community can participate in this harassment response program. Perhaps in the beginning the Tor and Wikimedia communities can pilot this.
- The online communities partner with a third-party organization which can be trusted to receive confidential complaints about harassment
- 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
- 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.
- The goal of all of this is preventing loss of human resource assets and increasingcommunity health.
- 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