Hi all, On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 9:54 PM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > phoebe ayers wrote:
>>I trust our legal team to make decisions about what legal actions to >>participate in. > Whether the Wikimedia Foundation should be engaged in political advocacy, > and if so, who decides when and to what extent, seem like issues where > there should be Wikimedia community, Board, and staff involvement. Since there's been some discussion -- let me expand a little bit on what I meant. For all the specific questions people have asked about whether this particular lawsuit is likely to be effective, what the likely progression through the courts is, whether it would be possible to sue in a foreign court and make a difference, etc. -- I trust our legal team's opinion entirely. That is why we have professional (and in this case, world-class-expert) staff. I *also* trust (and in fact expect, as a trustee) the legal team to surface large-scale risks, threats, and legal issues that affect our community and operating model -- in other words, figuring out *what* to act on. But this surfacing and deciding whether to be active in a broad issue is also something that I agree we *all* have a role in: as MZ says, community, board and staff. I think we have clear community values, but it takes debate and strategic judgement to decide what to focus on out of all of the constant issues (IP laws and copyright, internet restrictions, etc.) that affect us, and it will take all of us to surface all of the things that are going on in our world and what's important. From the board side, here's my thought process about things like this, other than asking about logistics: if I thought that this particular lawsuit was either a) against our community values (rather than reinforcing the near-universal concern and disapproval about mass surveillance that we've heard); or b) likely to significantly distract the WMF from other core work; or c) would significantly blacken our reputation in the US or globally to the extent that it would harm our ability to do other work (rather than reinforcing our current reputation as something of a hero of the internet), I would have raised concerns. But I do not think any of these things are likely to happen. I think the other risks (we lose, it takes a long time, etc.) are manageable, the potential gain is worth the risk, and as I articulated earlier, I think this is a morally important issue that we have a role to play in. (I should also add that the legal team *of course* has thought through all of these concerns as well; their job is to give the board and the organization a thorough analysis of everything that could possibly go wrong, and they do :) ) But here's additional things that I've gotten from this community discussion, both in this thread and privately: what else could we be doing in Wikimedia to support reader/editor privacy? (And yes, these are thorny technical/social issues). What other unfortunate laws are happening elsewhere in the world and how do we track and maybe act on those? And how do we articulate our role as an open educational institution: recognizing, as Yann says, that education and openness can be -- often are -- political issues? I don't have great answers to the above questions. But I think they're worth discussing :) best, Phoebe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
