Universal Code of Conduct/Discussions/EDGR South Asia conversation hour, 15 Sep 2021

Overview and agenda

As you may already know, the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) provides a baseline of behaviour for collaboration on Wikimedia projects worldwide. Communities may add to this to develop policies that take account of local and cultural context while maintaining the criteria listed here as a minimum standard. The Wikimedia Foundation Board has ratified the policy in December 2020. The current round of conversations is around how the Universal Code of Conduct should be enforced across different Wikimedia platforms and spaces. This will include training of community members to address harassment, development of technical tools to report harassment, and different levels of handling UCoC violations, among other key areas.

The conversation hour is an opportunity for community members from South Asia to discuss and provide their feedback on the enforcement guidelines, which will be passed on to the drafting committee.

Details

• Date: 16 September 2021
• Timings:

• Bangladesh: 5:30 pm to 7 pm
• India and Sri Lanka: 5 pm to 6:30 pm
• Nepal: 5:45 pm to 6:45 pm

• Meeting link: https://meet.google.com/dnd-qyuq-vnd

Report

• Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/UCOC_EDGR_South_Asia%2C_Sep_2021

Initial comments

• Majority of the participants felt that it is better 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 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 during 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 is short.
• Participants felt that consequences of violation UCoC should also be mentioned.
• Participants opined that the "U4C committee" should share a timeline about handling cases, and often harassment reports of 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 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 be 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 does 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.