Universal Code of Conduct/2021 consultations/Roundtable discussions/Summaries/Community meetings

VOTE HERE

There were several Universal Code of Conduct community meetings in multiple languages based on availability of MSG facilitators. This allowed us to hear opinions on the implementation guidelines at various points of time. The discussion mainly covered the content of the enforcement guideline including escalation, proposed U4C committee, and appealing process. This document is a condensed summary of the comments gathered at the meeting for each community.

French[edit]

Dates: 8th, 10th, 15th of September
total of 12 participants attended.

Main focus of this discussion is about how the U4C committee should be run and the escalation process. The meeting was divided into three sessions: EU, African, and America and Caribbean Francophone communities.

General feedbacks

The term ‘Severe systemic issues’ needs to be clarified with some examples.
It is important to document all the reported cases and draw insights to focus on priority areas
Local structures like Admins needs to be restructured to open it to more diversity and to increase their number

Feedbacks about the U4C committee & the open questions

Concerns about the committee will be overflowed with a lot of cases.
It could be better not to have a global committee but probably one per linguistic projects for mostly cultural differences and to reduce the workload for the committee
Complainants may come back to ArbComs in case their case is not processed quickly
What is the interest of having a committee above ArbCom to process cases instead of giving necessary tools to the ArbComs to do it
Should the U4C committee also decide individual cases or process appeals? - comments:
- The committee should handle only appeals. The reporter should first contact local structures.
- The committee should be created at a regional level so that its members can have a good understanding of all the specificities of that region and take them into account while processing/investigating cases. This should also be a way to reduce the workload for the committee.

How will people be chosen for the U4C committee?
- Some participants suggest a mix: a part of experts(selected by the foundation) and another part made of people selected by the community
- It is important that the committee is made of active contributors nominated from different spaces of the community: user groups, chapters, projects, thematic groups making it a kind of assembly that elects an executive responsible to the assembly and who reports to it. May also include some others nominate the foundation.
- Selection criteria could also be used to generate some kind of exclusion.
- The committee should be inclusive and ensure that minorities including women, racialized people, LGBTIQ people must be represented.
- It is important to have a geographical, linguistic representation of the community within the committee.

Should an interim committee be formed while the "U4C" committee is being created?
- Most participants suggest having an interim committee so that it could be used as a test to learn from its works and then prepare a more strong and efficient U4C.
- Some participants suggest an interim committee first. That way, the community can learn from their experience before creating the permanent committee
- Question about What would be the duration of the term of the committee members?

Should global conduct committees, such as the Technical Code of Conduct committee, be merged into the proposed U4C?
- A list of those global committees and their roles are needed
- Participants suggest keeping the existing committees and defining the roles and the scope of each of them. But ensure to have a clear separation of roles of each committee

Others points/questions from the conversation

Does ‘Severe systemic issues’ refer to ‘Structural dysfunctioning of local structures’ or when the report is about members of local structures?
It is important to have a direct contact with external platforms like youtube to report cases if wiki contributors are subject of any kind of bad behaviors
The French translation of this text is written in the universal masculine.
How can the author of reprensible behaviors be identified since it is recommended for users not to have an identifiable username?
Does the UCoC cover leadership conflict in a user group?
Does the UCoC cover cases of legal actions(from a government for example against a contributor?
What will be the relationship between U4C and T&S
How many people will be in the committee?

One participant in the conversation wrote down the summary of her feedback. It is available here.

Spanish[edit]

Date: September 11, 2021

General comments

One volunteer commented that local chapters will be able to enforce the UCoC, but it seems unclear how it will be applied in online communities where neither the Foundation nor the chapters are considered legitimate spokespersons. Will the Foundation take over and bypass the community?
A volunteer can't imagine what will be the process for reporting harassment in the Spanish Wikipedia. Although it has its perfect things, it would like to see something that exists in other digital platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, where the person reports a content for something severe and in one day the social network bans the account.
One volunteer believes that the burden of proof must be established in the UCoC, if a person places a complaint, it must be proven that harassment is happening, and there is the protection that the accused must have to its moral integrity if it is ultimately being accused of something that is not true.
One volunteer believes that there will not be many spurious reports and if there are, it will be a very low percentage, as it is in cases of rape or family violence. This person also pointed out that when we share this information with our communities, we should avoid generalizing about the burden of proof.
A volunteer commented that there should be a significant amount of participation in how the committee will be integrated; there should be gender diversity. This person believes that there should be a feminist perspective within it, because there is numerous harassment of women in the projects from men.
Regarding accompaniment, a volunteer commented that the issue of reparation of damages must be heard from the victim; there will be people who want to make their case public, but others will not even want it to be known. This person emphasizes that it is also necessary to work in a system in which people have trust, without trust it will not be possible to establish a useful UcoC.

Enforcement draft

On the "U4C Committee", one volunteer argued that they are adopting models and mechanisms very similar to the ones of a social platform without understanding what is also behind those models. Facebook has this committee of 10 experts around the world, which is a bit what we want to generate here, but after that committee of experts, it has 5,000 people behind the implementation guidelines all day long.
A volunteer commented that it would like to know what the procedure will be for filtering bad faith complaints and how bad faith complaints are named within the EDGR. Hopes that patriarchal concepts will not be used to dismiss "bad faith" complaints.
Regarding the glossary and characterization, a volunteer commented that in order to avoid positive discrimination, we should not go as far as to characterize each actor that interacts on the platforms. It is better a generality of all humans interacting on the Wikimedia platform.
On preventive work, one volunteer believes that sysops should have workshops on awareness, bullying, and harassment as part of their training.
Regarding the responsible work, one volunteer considers that it should include accompanying the person who reports, because this can be emotionally very difficult, something that is done to humanize the process a little.

German[edit]

During WikiCon German, There was a Movement Strategy and Governance panel discussion with 100 people in the site, Christel and Dennis were there to talk about UCoC, along with two community members on stage as panelists.

Problematic is the relation to the local rules:
- Where do such rules already exist?
- Concerns about do we have to care about enforcing the UCoC? At what point should the UCoC take effect?
- What if there is no checkuser/arbitration in a community?
- All projects are treated the same: Should be solved locally if possible, but it is not generally specified what falls under it.
- Local vandalism report pages are more transparent than reporting to WMF via UCoC.
- Is the UCoC too vague? Yes and no: does not specify how long a ban will last, but what will be sanctioned. Leeway for local communities remains.

WMDE community meeting

Invited by Wikimedia Deutschland to talk, discuss and answer questions for 30 minutes. 9 volunteers present, 3 WMDE staff members. Short introduction on the basic plan of the EDGR, explaining the basic concept of the U4C and pointing out differences on the involvement of the U4C between small projects and big ones as de-WP. 2 of the present volunteers made use of an invitation to come to the follow-up Functionaries meetup.

South Asia[edit]

Date: 15 September 2021
6 participants

Initial comments

Majority of the participants felt that it is better to use an ArbCom for South Asia, rather than language-specific ones. They opined that smaller communities may not have the capacity to operate their own ArbComs. A participant opined that extensive training and skill development opportunities should be provided to ArbCom members to effectively deal with harassment and violations.
A participant felt that "consensus-building and empathetic communication" should also be part of the training module.

Participants felt that violation in off-wiki/in-person spaces should be emphasized more in draft guidelines. The reason being, response time needs to be very short in such cases, there is often not enough to wait. The guidelines should layout how to effectively deal with violations with the required response time being short.

Participants felt that consequences of violation of UCoC should also be mentioned.
Participants opined that the "U4C committee" should share a timeline about handling cases, and often harassment reports are not heard of what action has been taken, and that should be avoided. Periodically, metrics regarding issues handled/resolved can also be published.
Participants expected guidelines about who is eligible, who is not, and terms of service, for the U4C committee.

Where should the complaints go?

We need to have a first response committee that decides where a certain complaint should go, either U4C, AffCom, T&S or something else. It acts as a sorting and filtering space. Some reports might also be hoaxes, having a first response committee will avoid the time of U4C or other committees from being wasted.

How far should projects be allowed to enforce the UCoC?

Policy guidelines should be the same in every community; can still take local context; no need to change at document-level.
The policy should be standardized and centralized for everybody; but regional concerns and legitimate grievances must be taken into account, and changes should only be made after mutual agreement by the U4C committee and the community/project.
Participants asked whether there would be grants available for people to translate, create awareness and implement UCoC in their communities.

How should U4C Committee members be elected?

The current list of recommended users is adequate.
Members with double hats: people who are serving in different committees might find it hard to give adequate service since they have other commitments. This is a sensitive role, and it will impact the pace at which reports are violated.

Should other conduct committees (e.g. TCoCC) be merged into U4C structure?

While several community members felt that all the committees should be merged into the U4C structure to avoid confusion among community members and create a single point of entry, a member of the TCoCC opined that the merge should not happen. The reason being TCoCC is already working on technical issues. People without technical backgrounds may struggle to understand TCoCC cases. U4C may not be able to handle such cases. Cases of TCoCC do go to T&S, but T&S often asks the TCoCC to handle it since they don't have the capability to handle technical cases.
- A solution suggested is to make TCoCC a subcommittee about UCoC, keeping its current structure and processes intact.

On appeals

There should be a multi-level approach to appeals, it should be first at the regional level and then forwarded to the global committee.

Africa communities[edit]

West African Communities[edit]

This session was held on Friday 17th September 2021 at 5pm UTC. 34 participants attended this session to give feedback on the Enforcement draft guideline in general and also to brainstorm on the open questions that the drafting committee has presented. We saw representation from the Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Twi and Dagbani language communities.

Escalation process

A multi-level committee should be set up to handle violations of the UCoC. A three-level committee setup was suggested, to ensure a fair and quality process.
There’s a general consensus amongst participants that the reporting and processing of incidents should ideally always start at the local project/community level before graduating into higher levels, based on the need.
It was also mentioned that there should be effective awareness efforts to ensure that users know that they can actually report any harassment problems that they face while volunteering or working within the movement.

Regulation of Appealing process

A process should be in place to ensure that not every case eventually ends up at the higher-level (U4C) committee, as this would defeat the entire purpose of having an escalation/appeal system and would only lead to unnecessary duplicity of work.
Appeals should not be handled by the same committee that is handling initial reports and escalations. A separation of roles and power should exist, to check excesses quickly when they happen.
If at all appeals would be handled by the same committee, the case should be processed by a different team (or group of people) within the committee.

U4C committee

Limiting the membership of this committee to only users with extended rights was strongly opposed, as this would further heighten the existing power imbalance and may promote the abuse of power by these users, as accusations against them may never be handled fairly.
It was advised that this position should be open to normal users as well, to ensure that cases are treated fairly.
A participant suggested that an ideal local committee should have representatives from affiliate groups and administrators; who should then pass their recommendations on cases to a global committee (like the U4C) or Wikimedia Foundation.
It was also suggested by another participant that each community/project should have representation on the U4C committee, to ensure that escalations and appeals are reasonably understood.
Having only volunteer users, admins, checkusers, etc on the enforcement set-up may create the existing problems on Wikimedia projects, with cases taking too long to conclude.
Having only WMF or affiliate staff may lead to local contexts of projects not taken into consideration. Hence, a blended composition was suggested.

How will people be chosen for the U4C committee?

Skills necessary for becoming a member of this committee (and that of the code enforcement officer) need to be clearly defined.
It's important to carefully design a process that will ensure that selecting members onto this committee doesn’t end up biased or skewed.
An election process was suggested (from recommendations/nominations/ applications), but this was also faulted for its potential to easily get cumbersome and skewed.
Another process suggested is an appointment process based on recommendations/nominations/applications, but this may also appear as being unfair.
A hybrid system was also mentioned, which would involve community members reviewing applications/nominations, then the Wikimedia Foundation or a selection group can make final appointments based on the reviews of the community.

Reporting system

Methods and pathways for reporting incidents should be very straightforward, and better designed than the current state of things on the English Wikipedia for instance. This would allow accessibility to newbies especially.

The importance of private reporting and processing (as against public wiki reporting) was further stressed on by a participant. In furtherance to clear reporting pathways, reporting platforms should be centralized to prevent fragmentation of the process and/or confusing and overloading volunteers with too many links. A participant also suggested having a path for confidential reporting, to cater to situations where volunteers don’t even want their reports documented for various reasons. The peer group support network was presented by the facilitator as a probable channel for this to happen.

To what extent should individual Wikimedia projects be allowed to decide how they enforce the UCoC?

Setting up committees or coordinators at the local project level is ideal, to serve as the first point of call during harassment problems. This would only apply to project specific violations, and crosswiki violations may have to go directly to the higher level global committee (U4C perhaps).
Local admins may be allowed to enforce UCoC policies, before escalation to any other committee(s).
UCoC rules for individual projects should also be localized as much as possible, to allow easy handling of violations, as well as, quick and easy resolution at local committee levels.

East and Southern African Communities[edit]

This meeting was taking place on Friday 24th September 2021, About 12 people joined this meeting. There were participants from Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa.

Escalation process

Some people on the call were in support of having local committees that will process complaints first hand. While one person suggested that there should be a committee for each language project to process complaints, another person suggested that a regional committee (something similar to the new grants regional committees) will be much more realistic. He supported his point with the reason that some local language communities are very small with very few active editors. As a result, this could lead to a situation where the same active Wikimedians who review articles will be the ones processing complaints and this could lead to the possibility for decisions taken to be biased. And in the end newcomers may feel reluctant to submit complaints.
Some people also supported the idea of having a global U4C committee. However, they were of the view that it would be better if regional committees process complaints and then special cases are escalated to the global committee because according to them, the problems African communities face are distinct from what first world countries face.
One person suggested that there should be an option available for people to decide which committee they want to process or submit their complaints to; whether the global U4C committee or a local level U4C committee.

On Appeal

One person suggested that appeals should also be processed by the regional committee and special cases should be escalated to the global committee.

What extent should individual Wikimedia projects be allowed to decide how they enforce the UCoC?

Someone suggested that the individual projects should be allowed to decide how they enforce the UCoC based on their local policies although there will be a problem for projects which do not have local policies.

Another person suggested that some autonomy should be given to the individual projects to come up with their own policies but these policies should be built on the baseline of the UCoC.

On Composition of the U4C Committee

One person suggested a periodic change in members of the global committee, stating that there should be, for instance, an annual process to choose the members of the committee. In addition, he suggested that members of the U4C committee should be diverse in terms of regional and gender representation. And this point was supported by some people on the call.
Another person pointed out that U4C committee members should be competent enough to be able to judge a situation whether there has been a violation of the UCoC or not. And according to him, one way to ensure this is by setting in place minimum eligibility requirements for members. He suggested that committee members should have enough knowledge about the Wikimedia movement, the different roles(rights), bye laws and policies that govern the movement.
It was also suggested that intensive training should be given to committee members to enable them to become capable of processing all kinds of complaints and resolving conflicts.

Turkic[edit]

This session was held on 13 September 2021, with 15 participants

The proposals for the creation of a "U4C" committee and the creation of ArbCom's at different levels were considered.
Ideas were proposed for the creation of Arbitration Committees at the local level according to two principles: language and project-based. Specifically: it's possible to create an Arbitration Committee for a specific language, which will serve for the entire language community and projects (for example, the Arbitration Committee for the Tatar language). The second idea is to create an arbitration committee for specific projects, for example, all Wikivoyage language projects will have one central Arbitration Committee. But, for each proposal, there are both positive and negative sides.
- To create an ArbCom at the local level according to language principles seems like an ideal way out of the situation, but here the question arises of how people from different projects will interact with each other.
- Also, there is a problem with the linguistic principle in creating an ArbCom, since some language communities are too small to create their own ArbCom and this may not work.
- More problems are associated with the creation of project-based ArbCom's, since the communities of specific projects differ greatly, including in terms of linguistic, cultural and mentally principles. Different language projects may have different needs and therefore it doesn't seem realistic to create a single Arbitration Committee for all language projects. In addition, this will require a large human resource, which is also an issue.
It was proposed to create a single Arbitration Committee for sister language communities and projects. For example ArbCom for Turkic communities and Wikimedia projects. This will reduce the need for human resources and since these communities are linguistically and culturally close to each other, this will reduce the risk of misunderstanding and interconnection problems in the work of ArbCom.
It was noted that the establishment of a global committee for UCoC enforcement oversight is necessary, therefore the recommendation to establish a committee is welcomed.
It was also noted that it's necessary to create an instance where you can appeal the decisions of both local Arbitration Committees and the "U4C" committee.

Korean[edit]

Date: October 4, 2021
3 participants

Concerns

There was an exchange of opinions about the extent to which individual projects can use UCoC, and concerns about biased decisions were made. Administrators in the Wikimedia movement are volunteers, but in reality they tend to perceive them as “people with power.” That influence seems to have an impact in some communities. A representative example of this concern is the recent incident involving the office action on the Chinese Wikipedia community.
For any subjects related to UCoC, there should be any type of admin peer-evaluation.
It should not proceed as the decision by a single individual. Because through this, there is a possibility of being treated as a decision with an arbitrary direction.
- Conflict between administrators, Concerns about managerial impartiality arising from this.
- It should be possible to fairly apply the enforcement mechanism to administrators and others who enforce the code of conduct.
How about small wiki?
- There are often the specific individual having a big power on small size wiki, or if there is no one to take care of it, so it is neglected.
- It seems that these wikis need to be processed at a higher level rather than within the local community for fairness.

Regarding appealing process

About U4C

Handling the appealing process for the cases involved in home wiki
- Conflict of interest: Not knowing local community well vs fairness (avoiding biased)
  - Users who participated in this session suggested that it is better not to deliberate on things related to their own language.
  - Avoiding COI is possible in most communities, but may not work effectively on English Wikipedia, Meta Wiki, Commons and Wikidata.
It seems that a supporter of connecting between the local community and U4C is needed for each language area through effective operation.

The Appeal process should be processed in the High level of body (U4C).

Needs clear evidence in order to be preceded by a committee.
- Unless they provide clear evidence, do not proceed.
- If appeal is claimed even though the matter has been objectively confirmed, it should be dismissed.
The Appeal process should be carried out only on the parts that are not clearly violated by evidence.

It should be treated as a non-violation even though it appears to be a violation so that an appealing request can be made if there is a problem.

Off-Wiki events and chats

Supportive on current EDGR draft regarding this: It should be noted that violence is clearly a space for “Wikimedia” users on Wikimedia space events.
Favor because violence or spreading false information is too wrong.

Potential to be a “power” play that influences the perception of other users by “bullying” them. I think strong sanctions are needed for that.

Connection with friendly policy -> we need to clarify the relationship between UCOC and friendly space policy.

UCOC on Chats (KakaoTalk and discord): More clarification is needed.

Education of the Universal Code of conduct

Supportive, need to expand this into wider scope.
Provide the support material, and held the session during conferences to educate the Wikimedia community members. (such as Wikimania)

Ukrainian[edit]

On October 2, 2021, a team of MSG facilitators met with the Ukrainian community during the Ukrainian WikiConference. At the conference, facilitators discussed and answered community questions about the Universal Code of Conduct and EDGR.

Q: There was a question about whether or not there was a facilitator specifically for the Ukrainian community for UCoC.
- A: Unfortunately, there was no such facilitator, and at the moment there is no such facilitator.
Q: How UCoC will affect me as an administrator.
- A: In large Wikimedia projects such as Russian, Polish, English, etc. have developed their own local codes of conduct that work well and the community adheres to them. Administrators and other functionaries can continue to adhere to them, as the UCoC itself was developed based on such local rules. So, there will be no big changes here, although the community itself can make adjustments to these rules based on UCoC. Small communities where there are no such rules and guidelines can develop their own local rules referring to the UCoC. Administrators and other functionaries of these projects must adhere to the UCoC.
Q: There is a clause in EDGR where it's written that admins and other functionaries with extended rights will have to declare their respect and commitment to UCoC. Does this apply to all admins of all language wikis?
- A: UCoC covers all Wikimedia projects and spaces, both online and offline, and this means that this applies to all users with both extended rights and anyone.
Q: In what form should the functionaries declare that they are committed to the UCoC and will comply with it. If it's in writing and if some don't want to disclose their identity, will their rights be taken away from them?
- A: So far, there are discussions about this and there are no specific decisions on this.
Q: Where will T&S be in this new structure with all these new committees?
- A: Prior to this, all important issues related to behavior and safety were considered by T&S, but now there will be new structures for this. T&S had a limited human resource to deal with all issues in a timely manner, which led to long delays, but new committees will fix this problem. T&S will also work closely with all committees and will functionally assist all of them.

Arabic[edit]

15 - 16 September
7 participants

Meeting summary

Need to find a solution to frivolous complaints. The current policy is full of issues. For example, the target of a complaint is not given the true reason for the complaint or the name of the complainant in many cases. The investigation is secret, thus reducing its credibility. The committee looking into complaints is also not always aware of cultural norms that could affect the outcome of the investigation. Additionally, some people are experts at using keywords in their complaints that attract the interest of the committee. The main issue with this is that this can be a way to push active volunteers away from volunteering either through outright bans or by losing the motivation in an unhealthy environment.
Suggestion about creating an executive committee (with elected and appointed members) to receive complaints, and a third higher committee for appeals.
What recourse does the target of a complaint have to appeal or escalate? For example if a frivolous complaint is raised that was not looked into. Also, before investigating an issue, there should be an attempt to minimize the number of complaints, and to find a way to prevent two people with personal conflict from complaining about one another.
Who should handle investigations?
- People from the region of the defendant, or neutral people, or elected members. More importantly is that there are region-specific rules agreed upon by groups in that region.
- The Committee members should not have user privileges and roles in their communities, for example admins in Wikipedia.
- One participant agreed with the idea of an elected arbitration committee that can make binding decisions and which works with the U4C as a “constitutional court”, to ensure the decisions conform with the CoC and that the procedures are sound.

Polish[edit]

The Polish community meeting 15th and 16th of October, there are total of 10 participants attended.

There is no explicit indication in the guidelines that the local supervision of the UCoC enforcement, including the application of sanctions, will be entrusted to i.a. the admins - there is only a vague footnote to the summary; it should be explicitly stated in the guidelines, indicating what powers cause the above-mentioned entrustment due to the above mentioned delegation of powers (and responsibilities) to enforce UCoC. It is possible that some admins may resign (what to do when this happens, especially on the smaller projects?)
In relation to the above, the meeting participants agreed that it is worth to come back to the ministrator idea - for those admins who could waive their rights related to imposing sanctions
The issue of declarations of commitment to the UCoC- apart from special cases (i.e. written declarations) there must be a general solution for all active Wikimedia participants (i.e. not only admins) in the form of an appropriate text and a link to the rules placed on each page below the text about the license, which will be like an agreement to abide by the UCoC
There is no indication at all in the guidelines that overseeing the application of the UCoC, including the application of sanctions, and as a local appeal body, can (not necessarily) be delegated under the UCoC in an agreed form by the foundation to a local arb-com- where it exists and is positively assessed in the context of the UCoC, and this should be clearly and openly stated in the guidelines; it is very important in the context of one (among other) conclusions from our discussion from the beginning of the year
The issue of UCoC jurisdiction: in general, the meeting participants agreed that;
- In connection with actions in the Wikimedia space and affiliate organizations, sanctions are applied throughout the Wikimedia space,
- For actions outside the Wikimedia space, sanctions can be applied throughout the Wikimedia space,
- Affiliates in their own spaces (e.g conferences) should have the flexibility to adapt the UCoC to their own dedicated needs (e.g., allow temporary participation by sanctioned individuals or set up dedicated participation rules).