[Foundation-l] Changes to the identification policies and procedures

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 9:59 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> phoebe ayers wrote:
>> It seems to me that a good-faith interpretation is that not announcing
>> changes right this second was the right thing to do -- since there was
>> so much controversy among OTRS agents the staff may choose to change
>> or modify the original plan, in which case it's not clear to me what
>> would be announced.
>
> In my discussions with people about these recent decisions, some people have
> tried to pivot the conversation with statements such as "but Wikimedia is
> allowed to do this" and "the non-public data access policy is determined by
> staff." I don't disagree.
>
> My issue is that this was presumably discussed for weeks prior to the
> announcement to the OTRS list, without any community notification. Even a
> courtesy heads-up ("we're currently re-evaluating whether certain volunteers
> need to identify") would have been good, especially as it brings forth a lot
> of questions from the community that Wikimedia apparently had not
> considered. (This is pretty clearly evident from the discussion on the OTRS
> mailing list.)

Fair enough! In a general context -- not related to this specific
issue -- I would love to see some better best practices for how to
conduct these kinds of discussions in a fair and appropriate way. Some
general principles that I wish everyone would keep in mind all the
time:

1. everyone should assume good faith of everyone else. It doesn't help
on that front when messages are accusative or otherwise bite-y.
Remember that we're all newbies in some situations; everyone has stuff
to bring to the table and everyone (in my experience) tries really
hard to do the right thing. We are all (staff and volunteers)
"Wikimedia community members".

2. the staff does many things that the community is not aware of, and
has concerns and policies to follow that are not always widely known;
they may also have certain areas of expertise that are not widely
known.

3. the community does many things the staff is not aware of, and has
concerns and policies to follow that are not always widely known; they
may also have certain areas of expertise that are not widely known.

4. not all community members are in "the same place"; e.g. not all the
stewards read the OTRS list, we all know that not everyone reads
foundation-l, etc. People who have similar concerns may be in widely
dispersed areas, not to mention the language-barrier issue.

5. as a corollary to 2, 3 & 4, it is probably best to have an open
discussion about issues that affect work that is done both by
community members and staff members.

6. as we have seen in all discussions since time immemorial, when you
have a big group of people discussing an issue some people have
expertise and points of view that they can add to the discussion that
are novel and useful (e.g. the community member who spoke up about
this on the OTRS list who is a security expert IRL); and some people
don't. There will also always be people who don't read the discussion
or have another ax to grind. It is also generally difficult to
determine consensus in this situation if there are many competing
ideas.

7. because of 4 and 6, there is a challenge in making big discussions
inclusive, productive and non-whiny, and in drawing conclusions from
them. It is however possible, and has been done before.

8. principle 7 is further complicated by the fact that sometimes there
are other mandates that affect the situation, e.g. from the board or
from "on high" (sorry, we can't change tax law). Most of the time,
however, this is not the case; we have a very wide latitude in
determining the best course of action to take in how to successfully
run the projects and foundation, which actually makes things harder a
lot of the time. We run the show, but we have to figure out how to do
it.

9. we are doing something that is complicated, novel, and unlike any
other situation -- a community running what is now the 5th largest
website in the world. People will and have made mistakes. Many best
practices from other situations, like businesses hiring employees, are
not applicable. However, we do have an internal body of best practices
that have been honed over time (like not voting and open discussions)
that actually prove useful much of the time.

10. Wikimedians love to give their 0.02 {local currency here} and tend
to get seriously annoyed when they don't get the chance to do so.

Now, how do we take this situation and have a productive conversation
that results in, for instance, the best damn strategy for volunteers
accessing private data that the world has ever seen?

-- phoebe, speaking as a community member only