Hi James,
It makes sense to me to have ground-up development of guidelines, as is happening in at least 3 venues that I know about. However, this also means policy/guideline fragmentation. Also, AFAIK we don't have clear mechanisms for deploying lightweight or limited-scope policies; anything with the word "policy" in its title requires a lot of work to create or change. That's good to a certain extent because consensus and widespread input hopefully will improve the outcome of the policy development. On the other hand, policy development takes time and patience.
Can I ask if there is any particular hurry to deploy a friendly space policy specifically for technical spaces? My personal sense is that the vast majority of technical discussions in most venues are civil, so I'm not sensing a need for an exception for technical spaces that results in a limited-scope policy being applied in advance of developing a global friendly space policy.
Pine
On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:13 PM, James Alexander jalexander@wikimedia.org wrote:
CA and legal are aware. While TOS or other more global polices are certainly an option I'm not actually sure that's the right move 'at the moment'. There is a lot of movement to look at options (which will include wide community discussion) and may lead in a direction like that but, in general, that is not a reason to delay implementation of processes like this which can, in fact, assist with the decision making and the tweaking. Once you've made a giant global policy tweaking it is really hard! Even when everyone agrees it needs it (and therefore the policy ends up being less and less enforced even where it should be). Yes a global policy would have a wide consultation or RfC type discussion before being but that's not the only thing we NEED here in order to get something that works. We need to see it in ACTION and be able to see what works and what doesn't work.
James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 5:50 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Matthew. If you intend this to be binding, I suggest that you
coordinate
this with other work being done by WMF Community Advocacy and Legal. My hope would be to have a uniform Friendly Space Policy that is a TOS amendment and applies to all Wikimedia spaces.
A note on IRC channels: these are generally governed by Freenode with the assistance of volunteers, and not WMF. I imagine that a WMF policy that
has
community consensus would be enforced by IRC ops in Wikimedia-themed channels. In general, I think ops are good at keeping the peace.
Regards,
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