On 10 August 2015 at 03:40, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I'm putting on my admin and IRC channel op hats, and trying to figure out how this proposal makes those jobs easier or different. I think there are reasonable ideas in this proposal, but the second level escalation path should follow inside of the appropriate local scopes.
I'm cautious about explicitly assigning a global ban role to WMF as a part of a community policy; having WMF police the community is a cause of concern after WMF's previous actions like Superprotect. I have heard very mixed signals from WMF on this point which makes me think that WMF has divergent views among the staff.
What? The policy does nothing about explicitly assigning a global ban role to the WMF; it mentions the pre-existing global ban rule, something that exists regardless of how people feel about superprotect.
Generally, I'm not seeing that this proposal in its current form is valuable in the policy sense. It might do better as an essay about social principles and advice about possible escalation paths. I do think this proposal helps us along the road to a global friendly spaces policy in the sense that the general outline is well organized.
Why? What would be necessary to change it?
I like the point someone made in this discussion about the distiction between legislating policy and making social change. I think that what is needed is the latter, and that the latter is a more complex conversation to have. I think that we need to figure out the desired social end state, then work backwards and figure out which tools should be used to enact change; policies are probably a part of the solution, but only a part.
Policies are a massive part of the solution. When we describe 'social change' or 'social standards' what we're talking about is social expectations that everyone implicitly recognises. Because they implicitly recognise those standards, and follow them, wahey! No need for big rules. How do you get to the stage where those standards percolate through and everyone knows about them? That's more complicated. That, actually, often does take rules - because while the end outcome is everyone just doing something because That's How We Do Things, you actually have to /start doing things/ for that to become the gestalt.
But, to be perfectly honest: Pine, this email that I am replying to here disappoints me tremendously. The Wikimedia community is not a special snowflake; it is not unique. The same is true of the technical community. The platform is different, the people are different, but the overarching social environment and goals are the same as any other technical community. And guess what? Other technical communities, almost all of them, have problems with harassment or microaggressions that they are confronting. And in many cases they have been working on those problems for a really long time, and have either dealt with them or are in the process of dealing with them. And they've learned a ton of useful things that they've upstreamed into places like the Geek Feminism wiki or the Contributor Covenant or various other standardised codes of conduct. Many, many smart minds working on these problems for a really long time, have decided that explicit codes of conduct are the way to go.
But we /can't/ have one for Wikimedia, you see, because we need to discuss it more. Yes, it's nice that you've come up with a policy, based on those other policies that have helped in those similar areas - but we need to discuss it more and justify why it should exist. And discuss it and discuss it and discuss it until all hope of getting anything done is lost and tough luck to the people who were marginalised or disenfranchised while we were chatting because the process is far more important than their feelings, even if it's a process consisting entirely of 'debating how much we care about feelings', but the /important/ thing is that rather than adopt a policy that almost every modern community has in some way, shape or form, we discussed whether it was necessary for us.
Discussions about the content of the policy is useful; Fae, for example, has provided some really helpful feedback (imo) about some ambiguities in the wording, and I have Strong Opinions about how we need to make the enforcement mechanism and its processes more explicit so everyone goes into a situation knowing what the path forward looks like. People have been submitting links to other implementations of the same principles that can be incorporated into our draft to make a better document. All of these are useful ways to contribute.
But we are BEYOND "ooh, I don't know whether this is useful ~even in theory~ or not" and the fact that such a discussion is going on is proof positive that we have a problem. Because there are marginalised voices speaking out within our community, and marginalised voices within the wider tech ecosystem, and pretty much all of them agree that yes, this is useful, in theory and in practice. And when we feel the need to debate, yet again, whether it has value, we are dismissing those lived experiences and demonstrating precisely the attitude that makes these environments unpleasant.
This policy is not for you. This policy is not for me. This policy is for the people who are marginalised and shoved aside and lack franchise in our existing processes and ways of interacting. So how about, for a change, we actually defer to those people. We accept that our perspectives are not as valuable in evaluating the health of a community as the perspectives of those people the community is shoving aside. And when those people say "a code of conduct helps" - as Ashe Dryden does, as Skud does, as Sumana does, as many, many others actually impacted by the unconscious biases our style of dialogue and working reinforces, we actually listen to them and start building a better policy and stop debating whether a policy has value.
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