Talk:ESEAP Hub/Meetings/8 August 2021

Apologies

• Sorry, but that's at 3am here, so I can't attend. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 12:34, 3 August 2021 (UTC)
• I'll not be able to attend the meeting cause I'll be on the road. Sorry. Waltercolor (talk) 13:08, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Questions raised during the town hall

1. ESEAP is a region of emerging communities with a lot of potential. How would you, once sitting as Foundation trustee, do differently for the board of trustees to be more inclusive, reaching out to ESEAP and the emerging communities? For context: Some community members see the board of trustees were not visible enough to be seen by the community.
2. Candidate Adam proposed Open Wiki Farm. What's your opinion on this subject matter? Do you agree? Or do you disagree? Why? https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Miraheze_and_WMF's_Foundation_Election
3. Are candidates open to share their social media accounts for friend/ follow requests? E.g. Facebook. By and large, I warmly appreciate the time the BoT candidates have extended to meet with ESEAP.
4. How would the Foundation deal with varying copyright interpretations of community members? For context: Person A of Country A got copyright deletion request from Person B of Country B but Person A argues Person B do not understand law interpretation of Country A.
5. How will you make it possible for victims of harassment, bullying (similar acts) to receive speedy decision or justice given that language gap do exist and resolutions for conflict would usually take a long time?
6. How will you policy wise deal with situations where persons who remain anonymized had their personal, real world works were placed on wikimedia projects by another community member without their expressed consent.
7. How do we deal with con artists in the movement? Con artist, people pretending to be somebody or playing victims but they are actually the bully.

Open Wiki Farm

So, one of the candidates (@Adamw:) proposed an interesting idea  : Open Wiki Farm

Since i'm quite interested with this topic (for context : i am already involved with Open Wiki Farm movement outside Wikimedia), i decided to ask him for futher details. You can see our conversations here. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Adamw

I have question to all of the candidates here : what's your opinion on this subject matter? Do you agree? Or do you disagree? Why?

Here is our response (Open Wiki Farm Movement Community) to Adam's idea.

https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Miraheze_and_WMF's_Foundation_Election

One of the main goal of Open Wiki Farm movement is the experimentation of new Wiki Project. Proposing new Wikimedia Sister Project is quite hard and a long process.

I actually have one project there https://pustaka.miraheze.org : "A group of librarian will contribute to this wiki to share their library's collection. Then, a group of researchers will classify this book collection and use this information for their research. Then, they will share their findings back to this wiki."

I cant believe that this project is quite illegal in Wikimedia. Some books are regarded as "not notable" so they are subject to deletion. Yet uploading book cover is illegal in Commons. That's why i host it on Miraheze instead.

Rtnf (talk) 03:09, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Answers from Pavan Santhosh Surampudi

Here are my answers to the questions:

• ESEAP is a region of emerging communities with a lot of potential. How would you, once sitting as Foundation trustee, do differently for the board of trustees to be more inclusive, reaching out to ESEAP and the emerging communities?
  • I personally and as a person from the Asian community share this concern. One of my top 3 board priorities is to Improve board relations with the community: Building trust and belongingness is an important aspect of collaboration with the community. Community is the main and highly crucial stakeholder in movement and it should have more skin in the game when it comes to key decision making. The board should be easily accessible to community members through various channels.

There are 2 pieces that are very important to achieve it:

1. Creating a clear process to take feedback, involve the community: Until now Foundation's consultations and communications are vastely different for different projects and programs. (Ex: how WMF communicated & consulted about Movement strategy is a lot different than how it did regarding WM Rebranding) There should be a better and improved processes which are aligned with values and be inclusive. We can bring tools and good practices from other similar Non-profits
2. Investing more in leadership & Skill development. I am a strong believer of Leadership development and Skill building. I believe it will also empower community to contribute better to several governance aspects and contribute in building better processes, including this aspect.

• Adam proposed Open Wiki Farm. What's your opinion on this subject matter? Do you agree? Or do you disagree? Why? https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Miraheze_and_WMF's_Foundation_Election
  • If I understand the point from a general level, supporting mission-aligned projects outside Wikimedia and building a network that supports this idea inside the movement to make that happen. This will be very helpful for our movement because there are several projects that help our mission go further and are not in our governance. In principle, I support this idea.

• Can the candidates open their social media to our friend requests? E.g. Facebook. By and large, I warmly appreciate the time the BoT candidates have extended to meet with ESEAP.
  • Thanks for this question. :-) I love to connect with our community members. (Most of my real-life friends are from WM movement)

• How would the Foundation deal with varying copyright interpretations of community members? For context: Person A of Country A got copyright deletion request from Person B of Country B but Person A argues Person B do not understand interprertation of Country A.
  • As a community member, I faced these issues in contributing to Wikisource and share the concern. There is a varied opinions and major disagreement on how strict we can be on Non-URAA and Commons community (and legal) is trying to find a way to go about it.

I believe, following steps can provide some sort of relief to communities in dealing with this issue:

• Understanding the concern, acknowledging, and finding out ways: This is an issue that needed more resources in research, advocacy, etc., I do not want Foundation to step into the shoes of communities, but WMF can definitely support the communities by providing right resources.
• Copyrights training to communities at large: To understand the complexities and find better ways communities require copyrights training. I myself been part of organizing such trainings in India and seen the good result. This should happen more in systematic way.

• How will you make it possible for victims of harassment, bullying (similar acts) to receive speedy decision or justice given that language gap do exist and resolutions for conflict would usually take a long time?
  • I, personally, am facing harassment right now and know how it feels to face it. I know how long or short the hands of WMF's trust and safety's hands are in supporting people who are being harassed.

I included in my statement that addressing harassment is a major concern for Wikimedia movement in going forward. Harassment affecting projects and communities very badly. I wanted to point out few things here:

1. Regional approach and diversity in Trust & Safety: The umbrella term harassment is having several nuances and varieties in it. One can not understand what the issue and how it should be resolved without regional and language knowledge. I believe regional approach and more diversity in Trust & Safety team should help.
2. Training to help people understand various forms of harassment': It is not easy for people to understand and deal with harassment. It is difficult to understand passive aggression happening around us. Many community members don't even know the support systems that exist, this is true especially for communities from global south. Providing trainings to understand and deal with harassment helps communities to a greater extent.

--Pavan Santhosh Surampudi (talk) 04:11, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
P.S.: Apologies for any spelling and grammer errors. --Pavan Santhosh Surampudi (talk) 04:15, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Answers from Pascale Camus-Walter

1. ESEAP is a region of emerging communities with a lot of potential. How would you, once sitting as Foundation trustee, do differently for the board of trustees to be more inclusive, reaching out to ESEAP and the emerging communities? For context: Some community members see the board of trustees were not visible enough to be seen by the community.

It's a fact that there were very few trustees from the community in the Board. Now there will be 8 members and I suggested in my answers to the 11 questions that they create a little subgroup as community representatives and stay in touch with the community collectively rather than individually. There will also be the Global Council, set in 2022 which could change a lot the way the Community and the Foundation communicate together. Concerning ESEAP itself, as a region of emerging communities with a lot of potential, I recommand that parallely to the vertical relationship with the Foundation, ESEAP develops a lot of horizontal relationships and partnerships. It's by creating strong links in the community itself, between it's member, that we get a strong movement.

2. Candidate Adam proposed Open Wiki Farm. What's your opinion on this subject matter? Do you agree? Or do you disagree? Why?

Personnally, I'm not a fond or Open Wiki Farm. Why ? Because it focuses on and reproduces the Xth way to structure a content by a wiki - and will already use wikis - , and in fact, I'm more intereted on how we produce the content itself. That's why I proposed in my answers to the 11 questions a completely different project : peer-reviewed free online publications.

3. Are candidates open to share their social media accounts for friend/ follow requests? E.g. Facebook. By and large, I warmly appreciate the time the BoT candidates have extended to meet with ESEAP.

Yes of course. You can follow me on twitter under @waltercolor.

4. How would the Foundation deal with varying copyright interpretations of community members? For context: Person A of Country A got copyright deletion request from Person B of Country B but Person A argues Person B do not understand law interpretation of Country A.

The copyright rules are the inner rules of the projects. So this has to be handled by the projects themselves. The Foundation can help by bringing legal advice, providing training. But it's clear that copyright problems are shared by nearly all the internet platforms. It is not and will never be an easy question.

5. How will you make it possible for victims of harassment, bullying (similar acts) to receive speedy decision or justice given that language gap do exist and resolutions for conflict would usually take a long time?

The UCoC is going to be implemented and the new rules will help a lot to prevent and sanction harassement. It was so easy to harass before, guess it will be more complicated for the perpetrators to act now !

6. How will you policy wise deal with situations where persons who remain anonymized had their personal, real world works were placed on wikimedia projects by another community member without their expressed consent.

This too is covered by the UCoC and it will be possible to complain and explain what happened. Cases will be documented and treated.

7. How do we deal with con artists in the movement? Con artist, people pretending to be somebody or playing victims but they are actually the bully.

Another point that will be covered by the new policies of the UCoC, I guess. It will be less easy in the next time for perpetrators to play such ugly games, believe me !

Waltercolor (talk) 14:51, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Answers from Mike Peel

ESEAP is a region of emerging communities with a lot of potential. How would you, once sitting as Foundation trustee, do differently for the board of trustees to be more inclusive, reaching out to ESEAP and the emerging communities? For context: Some community members see the board of trustees were not visible enough to be seen by the community.

I think affiliates are really important here: things can't be US-centric, they're always better when local people lead local initiatives. I'd like to see much more support to affiliates, particularly new ones, to increase their impact. I'd also listen a lot more: I'd be active on the Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard, and I'm always open to questions on my talk page.

Candidate Adam proposed Open Wiki Farm. What's your opinion on this subject matter? Do you agree? Or do you disagree? Why? https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Miraheze_and_WMF's_Foundation_Election

This seems very similar to Wikispore - I'd ask for input from @Pharos: here! In general don't think we can, or should, support all wikis just because it seems like a good idea - but I would definitely be open to more Wikimedia projects if there's a community behind the proposal that is willing to get it going, and technical support available for any development work that is needed. Mostly though, at the moment, I would focus on the existing sister projects - since they've been lacking technical support for over a decade now, which really isn't a good situation!

Are candidates open to share their social media accounts for friend/ follow requests? E.g. Facebook. By and large, I warmly appreciate the time the BoT candidates have extended to meet with ESEAP.

I'm sorry I couldn't join the meeting. My social media is generally open - links are at Michael Peel (Q26207216) - although I only tend to accept friend requests from people I've met in person or on-wiki (if you haven't, or there's not an obvious link between your on-wiki username and Facebook ID, send me a message first!).

How would the Foundation deal with varying copyright interpretations of community members? For context: Person A of Country A got copyright deletion request from Person B of Country B but Person A argues Person B do not understand law interpretation of Country A.

Unfortunately, law isn't always clear-cut, and different interpretations are often possible. The community has done really well at thinking through such issues, and documenting them accordingly, in deletion debates. If this was escalated to the WMF (which should be rare!), then this would clearly be a question for the legal department.

How will you make it possible for victims of harassment, bullying (similar acts) to receive speedy decision or justice given that language gap do exist and resolutions for conflict would usually take a long time?

This really isn't the role of the WMF Board. The Trust and Safety team have been doing well with this in general, and I would support their activities and necessary growth to speed up responses. I would also support the work of local arbitration committees, or their equivalent, to sort things out on-wiki.

How will you policy wise deal with situations where persons who remain anonymized had their personal, real world works were placed on wikimedia projects by another community member without their expressed consent.

This is very similar to the previous question - again, it's down to local arbitration committees, and Trust and Safety, this isn't a WMF Board issue. Speaking personally, for the wikis that I have admin access to, I'd delete such information on sight pending review from others - but that's not something that a Board member would do in their role as a Trustee.

How do we deal with con artists in the movement? Con artist, people pretending to be somebody or playing victims but they are actually the bully.

I think this is mostly done well by the community already - by users identifying the issue, raising it on the relevant noticeboards, and handling it with local committees. If it becomes a severe issue, then again it's over to Trust and Safety.

Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:06, 9 August 2021 (UTC)