Universal Code of Conduct/Drafting committee/Phase 1 meeting summaries

This page contains meeting summaries for the Phase 1 Universal Code of Conduct Drafting committee.

Session 1 – July 29

The drafting committee, Wikimedia Foundation staff, and facilitators from the Community Development team came together to create a safe space to build alignment, center priorities, and establish structure to refine a written document for the first draft of a Universal Code of Conduct for the Wikimedia movement.

Community Development facilitators helped prioritize topics in the meeting. A review of the readings and research made available to the Committee was discussed.

Committee agreements were made in order to ensure a welcoming environment of ideas, dialogue and behavioral minimums would carry into the next nine drafting weeks.

In this first drafting session, the committee participated in a conversation of priorities for the UCoC, their fears and concerns and organized the likes and dislikes of conduct policies outside the movement.

The committee agreed that each person will research other policies outside the movement and come back the following week to the second drafting session to discuss what other conduct policies can be useful to model or not model after.

Session 2 – August 5

The second week of the UCoC drafting process, the drafting committee, Wikimedia Foundation staff, and facilitators from the Community Development team gathered to discuss the Code of Conducts of outside organizations to guide the development of an appropriate draft format, language structure and priorities to include. The committee also discussed ideas and themes for the UCoC value statement/preamble/introduction and described examples of what could be considered good and bad behaviors.

The Contributor Covenant was introduced in a workspace document that will serve as an iterative drafting space for committee members to write and dialogue throughout the process.

Due to time constraints, the drafting committee agreed to have 3 committee members summarize each member's value statement draft into one refined value statement to be discussed in session 3. Preparation and a worksheet was presented post-session to start looking at positive and negative behaviors for the next session.

Session 3 – August 12

The UCoC committee held its third drafting session on Wednesday, August 12th, 2020. On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Legal team, General Counsel Amanda Keton, joined at the beginning of the sessions to share her gratitude, appreciation, and support to the drafting committee for their collaboration and hard work on the UCoC.

The drafting committee reviewed the first version of the value statement which was a summary of all of the committee members statements which encapsulated the themes, ideas and thoughts to be included. Discussion followed to further refine the statement to capture the intentions and recommendations from the board mandate as well as the movement strategy recommendations. Committee members spent the majority of the meeting discussing behaviors/ expectations to be included in the UCoC. Three committee members volunteered to write the first full draft to be reviewed and revised by the full committee in session 4.

Session 4 – August 19

The UCoC drafting committee met for its 4th session to discuss and edit the first full draft version. The committee reviewed this draft by assessing it against the main priorities and format discussed in previous sessions. Review was also done in an effort to align with the board and movement strategy directives.

The first draft was assembled by three writers from the committee who incorporated collective committee views and priorities, board mandates and movement strategy recommendations. The committee voted on 8 common themes and terms that are essential for the UCoC document.

The committee revised the document and elaborated on areas that well captured Wikimedia values and behaviors as well as areas that need further development and refinement. The UCoC committee accepted an offer for a two week extension to the initial drafting period. It was unanimously agreed upon that this additional time would give the committee the necessary time to further address the desires of a well thought out draft before the posting for community review.

In preparation for session 5, the committee has been asked to assess the first draft using a rubric developed based on previous conversations and expectations for the draft.

Session 5 – August 26

This 5th drafting session was designed to review the 2nd version of the UCoC draft through thoughtful discussion on sections of the preamble, rationale, expected behaviors, unacceptable behaviors, uncivil behaviors, content vandalism and abuse of the projects.

This 2nd draft version also had a “statement of commitment” which will be edited and reviewed in session 6 due to time constraints. The drafting committee agreed to have the writing group implement the ideas and thoughts around the drafting edits to be summarized in the 3rd draft version for the following week.

The drafting committee will have one last meeting before the draft will be submitted to the Wikimedia community as a review draft. The committee is aiming to have the community review draft ready for translations mid-week (September 3) to prepare for the community review period on Meta (September 7-October 6). During this period, the committee will analyze and discuss the community's comments and ideas to be implemented and reworked into the UCoC for submission to the Board of Trustees.

Session 6 – August 26

The UCoC drafting committee was able to accomplish the final rough draft for the Wikimedia community to review.

The drafting committee went through each section of the UCoC that had been written up and each member of the committee signed off on the finished sections to solidify the final draft. Facilitators helped take notes and edit for the committee in the doc for UCoC committee members could focus on dialogue and contribute to live edits if they wished to participate in the note taking process.

The committee focused on making sure language in English was easily understood and translatable to other languages while contemplating wording/language that could be considered negative or translated to other meanings in other languages that could be misleading. Draft members signed off on the corrections and changes to the final draft before community review and will be translated into 27 languages for the Wikimedia community.

Session 7 – September 9

This week was the UCoC committee’s first review session after the posting of the draft UCoC for review. The committee spent an hour discussing feedback so far, how the group would spend their time in upcoming meetings to best approach the feedback about the UCoC, and how they can review and implement requested revisions. They are very interested in understanding the needs of communities across languages, and we are committed to figuring out how to share out feedback on major issues iteratively as the process continues. Committee members gave opinions on how to best collate and summarize the review comments as they come in. Staff will provide a “digest” of active discussion topics and requests that are recurring across different language discussions, as well as a spreadsheet tracking all comments submitted. We will provide a document of the original draft language with highlighting indicating all areas in the text that have been specifically called out for attention.

Plans were made for the next week’s meeting, where the resources mentioned above will help the committee start agreeing upon specific edits to be made. A change log, similar to the one used by Movement strategy drafting processes, will be published when the committee has finished deliberations.

The topics of a spokesperson role was discussed, and will be continued on the Committee mailing list. Drafting members suggested that video chat meetings in specific languages could be a potential beneficial opportunity for the drafting committee to allow other non-English speakers from the Wikimedia community to get their comments recorded. Grammatical changes and content comprehension can be made easier if such conversations are held in other languages. While we have limited translator access, the Trust & Safety team is interested in hearing if there are other ideas to support multilingual outreach.

Session 8 – September 16

Short meeting, but a few updates. The Committee went over the first digest of summarized requested changes, and agreed on a division of labour to address potential changes for each section. The Committee also agreed to lengthen future meetings, so that more revisions could be approved in real-time, and discussions on difficult items can have more space. The committee is preparing a group statement outlining the revision work they are taking on based on the responses received so far. Look for this soon.

Session 9 – September 23

The focus of this meeting was identifying revisions that needed to be made. Based on community feedback, the committee went through sections in teams of two committee members to identify simple “copy-edit” changes that were straightforward, or more complex items that needed committee discussion.

Facilitators and staff members took notes of the discussion that took place within each section on what needed to be finalized to move forward. Plans were made to complete review of suggested changes in the next week, and start preparing a set of final edits. A letter to the community was also drafted by a committee member to announce that feedback and commentary from the community was well received and taken into consideration – this will be published Monday, Sept. 28, and detail the focus areas for revisions.