Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Iteration 1/Community Health/Safety

Overview

Recommendations

Implementation

Reports

FAQ

This is an archive for draft recommendations. Visit Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations to read the final recommendations.

Safety

Privacy and security for everyone

1. We should invest strongly in partnerships and resources that support the security of participants in movement activities. This would include but not be limited to partnerships with organisations and individuals who would be able to provide
   1. Digital security plans and trainings,  
   2. Public policy and advocacy competencies,
   3. Industry best practices on suicide prevention related to support for vulnerable readers.
   4. Physical security and rapid response capabilities, and
   5. Technological abilities that can be put into the service of improving the privacy and security of people.
2. We strengthen the technology platforms to comply with the international best practices around privacy, security and data collection and storage. This includes but is not limited to
3. Supporting anonymizing technologies like TOR, VPNs for the users that would require the support.
   1. Anonymising of IP addresses in public domain to protect IP contributor privacy.
4. Adopting industry best practices for data management like distributed storage and encryption for long term storage.
5. The strategic direction challenges the movement to serve regions and people previously not at the center of the ecosystem’s attention. As we are embarking on this journey, we have to acknowledge and prepare for circumstances and situations requiring more and better tailored support to fulfill the mission.  
6. We create localised resources and decentralised capacity to support contributors at risk due to their participation in the movement.
7. We adopt best practices while documenting knowledge of marginalised groups.

Rationale

Privacy and security for everyone entails taking a holistic perspective observing the range extending from readers, who interact with the content we provide to the world, to IP editors, who put themselves at risk in contributing to the movement’s mission, to registered editors and other movement roles with complex needs and challenges they face due to their participation.

The annual Freedom of the Net report 2018 detailed the 13. successive year of internet freedoms being curtailed around the world. The working group projects that these concerning trends will continue around the world.

The Wikimedia movement and its ecosystem depend on and are a key pillar of the free open web facing increased pressures around the world.

We currently do not have a systematic approach to support users at risk due to their participation in movement activities and lack the essential local capacity to support users as demonstrated in recent events like the political instability in Venezuela and Turkey. We will continue to face state and state-sponsored censorship efforts impacting the movement and currently do not have publicly available material to support contributors who are affected by such measures.

Working with indigenous communities without understanding the impact of such work on these populations could be dangerous as demonstrated from previous work of other civil society organisations. We currently fund various communities to work with indigenous knowledge but we lack a guideline or best practices safeguarding the agency of communities.