My two cents.
I agree with the sentiments in the statement/report.
I don't feel comfortable seeing them from the WMF. I would not be comfortable seeing
them from a PBS mission statement or report, a Humane Society report, the Red Cross, ...
ok, the ACLU has about said as much. But I feel that the Foundation let "We are good
people, these are good ideas" get a bit out of hand.
It's not political context. It stands out a bit more but that's not the nature of
the problem.
I don't want the WMF as ACLU-lite, or advocating for health like Medcin Sans
Frontieres or the Red Cross, or doing everything for internet freedom the EFF does.
These things become contextually controversial, and attract negative attention. Each one
may individually be morally or mission justifiable, but you end up with a pattern
generating controversy and attacks that are totally off axis to WMF's actual point of
existence. As Pine and others mentioned, it's ultimately not mission aligned, and
that does add up and hurt us.
When we take mission aligned stances we have to and should and we are owning that value
and any criticism that comes back. That's our point. That's our community fight
and point of existence. But we don't own human rights or immigration policy. We may
consensus agree on a good moral platform but we don't own the problem or solutions.
I understand that the planning process for this may have been open and public (have not
looked myself yet but believe you). But WP and WMF are *immense* and have more corners
with stuff going on than any human can comprehend and follow even dedicated to it full
time, which frankly most can't be. Many unfortunate things are done in the open but
practically escaping wide enough audience to get the peer review they really needed. This
is a community problem mostly but hit the Foundation here.
-george
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 2, 2017, at 12:00 AM, Anna Stillwell
<astillwell(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Pine,
You and I have a call scheduled and we can begin to think together on this
issue. Thank you.
/a
On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 11:58 PM, Pine W
<wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Anna,
Thanks for chiming in.
As someone who is personally feeling a lot of strain between myself and WMF
-- and I think I'm not the only one -- I would like to figure out how to do
something so that all of us can get on with mission-aligned work instead of
having conversations about what's wrong for the nth time.
I think that problem will take some effort to solve, and it probably won't
be solved in this thread. It's certainly a ripe issue for discussion, and
I'd like to see that happen.
I'd like to hear suggestions about how to make that happen. I can't
continue to participate here tonight, but perhaps others will. When I loop
back here -- hopefully tomorrow, and certainly within a few days -- I'd
like to hear suggestions about how to get better alignment between WMF and
the community. This has been a problem for a long time, and I find it
really frustrating. I know we can do better, and I'm glad you're giving
some thought to this.
Thanks,
Pine
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