We are hoping for broad participation, too, Lila! More input, and wide input, gives us a better chance at coming up with strong ideas that can improve our techniques and tools to address harassment across the board.
In the four + years I've been at the Wikimedia Foundation, I've been involved in more than a few incidents involving harassment. Some of what I've seen has been utterly appalling. It is an issue that I believe can impact anyone, female or male, from any project. One of the driving factors in our team's desire to do this work is the recognition of the impact that the issue can have on people and the real difficulty in addressing it.
As people are likely aware, we have recently wrapped the survey part https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Harassment_survey_2015 of our consultation. We will be compiling data from it over the next several weeks and releasing it publicly as soon as that work is complete to help give us a clearer idea of the scope of the issue on our projects. The current consultation phase https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_consultation_2015 is a thought-gathering exercise. We're hoping to collect all kinds of ideas about the problem - what it is, how it can be addressed, what's working in other places, what's working for us, and what it isn't working for us.
We don't imagine that this is a "one consultation solves the problem" situation. Our goal is to, with ongoing conversations, work with communities to start creating actionable resources to assist with harassment. My personal hope is that we will wind up with solutions that can be implemented at all levels - by the WMF, by the communities. (Probably too much to hope for immediate external change, like better legislation, but I can dream!) But the purpose of the conversation at this stage is to make sure that we hear many ideas and different ideas and that we consider them together. Because there may be and probably is somebody out there with an unexpected and insightful perspective or a unique idea. For that reason, we are calling to everyone we can to participate in this conversation. Our survey was sent to a subset of active editors on every project, and we invite participation from absolutely anyone in this consultation.
Just for clarity with regards to what we're doing on child protection, I want to be sure people realize that, although child protection is one of our priorities, it’s not necessarily the focus of the harassment consultations and our wider harassment project. :) It’s something we are working on separately. Child protection has been part of our workflow since before I came aboard in 2011. What's new here is our ability to focus. We have been working to strengthen our policies and practices and have created a trust & safety team with the intent to strengthen our trust & safety practices.[1] While all of CA assists in trust & safety work and the trust & safety team assists in other areas of CA work, the team helps ensure our focus remains on this important work and also builds a frame for an increasingly robust trust & safety response in future.
Best,
Maggie
[1] Trust & safety, for those unfamiliar with the term, includes child protection and general protection of the public and our communities from threats.
On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 2:05 AM, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Patrick,
Thank you for posting this.I am really hoping a lot of people will participate. Anti-harassment and child protection is something that we took on only about a year ago and I am very grateful to see the team pushing ahead with this. Your work on this is one of the most important new initiatives to support more inclusive, diverse and gender-balanced communities.
Since this is ongoing, it would be great if you could share what we are hoping will be the result of this phase and what is upcoming.
What are we doing for outreach, especially to female Wikimedians?
Lila
On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Patrick Earley pearley@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thanks Lodewijk. We didn't mean "ideas" to limit contributions to full proposals or solutions. It could just be "Random thoughts from
Lodewijk" -
it's meant to be very open. You can also start a conversation about another idea by clicking on it to find its discussion, or take part in an ongoing one. I'll talk to my team to see if we can improve the language
to
make it clear all levels of participation are welcome.
Best,
On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 2:43 PM, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
Thanks for addressing the theme. While looking at the page, I'm having
a
hard time getting my head around it though. You seem to ask for
'thoughts'
on a number of issues, but then you only allow a field for 'ideas'
(which
sounds like 'solutions' to me). Maybe this is a language issue, but
would
there be a lower threshold pathway to contribute to the conversation
than
putting an 'idea' out there which suggests that it is good all by
itself?
I hope you can clarify the page a bit. But then, maybe it's just me.
Best, Lodewijk
On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 2:30 AM, Anna Stillwell <
astillwell@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
I've heard about the hard work that this team has done to launch this
and
the kind of transformation you're seeking. Well done.
Congratulations.
/a
On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 4:44 PM, Patrick Earley <
pearley@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Hello all,
Community Advocacy at the WMF is running a month-long discussion on
the
topic of harassment on our projects. This will be the first in a
series
as it is the initial discussion, we are keeping it open and broad
to
encourage brainstorming and creativity.
It is currently live on Meta, and will be open until at least Dec.
16:
We encourage all to participate, share ideas, and provide feedback
on
the
ideas of others. Online harassment is a complex, pervasive issue,
and
we
can't make progress without exploring the best ways forward.
Thanks,
Patrick Earley Community Advocate Wikimedia Foundation pearley@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
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