 Welcome everyone to our panel discussion on the universal code of conduct and the ratification of the enforcement guidelines. Today we have a panel conversation with three folks who are on committee members to share their experiences and insights into the process. I'd love to start off by going around the room for everyone to introduce themselves and share a little bit about your involvement with the movement. Can we start off with a Zoma. Hello. Thank you Sally for having me. My name is Zoma. So I'm a co-founder of the Ebo Wikimedia and use a group. And I was also involved in the UCLC drafting. And also the enforcement guidelines revision committee. Yeah, that's me. I have nothing else to add. Thank you Zoma and Ruby. Okay, thank you so much Sally. My name is Ruby Dameshi Brown from Ghana, and I joined the Wikimedia community since 2019 and since then it's been an awesome journey. I currently support an open foundation West Africa as a senior programs officer and I volunteer for quite a number of things in the community. That includes the Ebo Wikisubs in Africa, which now coordinates and also the UCLC enforcement guideline committee member. And I'm excited to be here to talk to all of you. Yeah. Thank you Ruby. And last but certainly not least Claudia. Hello everyone. I'm Claudia Lo. I am a senior design researcher at the Wikimedia foundation and I do have to say, kind of my exposure to the Wikimedia community movement did largely spring from my position as a staff member. I currently based out of the US I just moved to Chicago, but I grew up in Hong Kong. And in my sort of capacity as a design researcher I mostly support our anti harassment tools team or moderator tools team, and I'm generally focused on working with product teams that focus very strongly on issues of community governance, trying to provide tools for administrators as regular editors to make their experience safer a little bit more pleasant and to allow them to kind of run the communities in the way that they would like them to be run. And for this specifically I was a member of both the UCLC enforcement guidelines committee as well as the revisions committee. Thanks so much Claudia and thank you all for participating in this panel discussion so without further ado, I'm going to get started with some of the questions that we have here for you folks. One is the UCLC was created to define a minimum set of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors as long term members of the movement. Why do you think the existence of the UCLC is important, especially for small and medium communities. I'd love to start off by hearing some of us almost thoughts. So, the existence of the UCLC, I believe, would help the small and medium side, the communities projects, if you put it that way, to help them understand expected behaviors with the understanding of what is expected and unexpected behaviors that the communities can build a healthy community early and also adapt the UCLC based on their lived experiences. The small and medium size, which is, I would say they are fragile and also malleable. They are fragile because they are building an omission stage and they are mostly recruiting and retaining contributors. The issues of unacceptable behaviors can affect and quickly turn their community to an unsafe environment that no one wants to be part of. In the sense of being malleable, because they are at the building stage, it will be easy for small and medium sized communities to adapt and adopt the UCLC, which will guide them towards building a culture that holds every member of the, every member or contributor accountable to their behavior in the wiki space. Which in the long run will result in an atmosphere of trust, inclusivity and a safe environment for everyone to grow. So, simply put, UCLC will help the small wikis grow a sustainable community faster and avoid unacceptable behaviors and their consequences. Consequences that some of the so to say old wikis have faced and maybe some of them have been threatened by, I mean the existence have been threatened by some of these unacceptable or unacceptable behaviors. Yeah. That's, that's it. Thank you so much Yuzoma and I'd also love to hear some thoughts from Ruby on that question and please feel free. If you'd like me to repeat the questions at any point feel free to ask. Yeah, I think is someone has said a lot on this and I really support what she's saying and definitely that's basically what we're looking at. UCLC is a very important tool for our community, and it helps to foster trust, safety and inclusion, making one who comes in the community safe. And so, especially for young smaller communities that are going with we've seen a lot of community spring up in the short space of time this is a very important tool that they can easily adapt because some communities took years to come up with something like that and the work has already been done for you. So all that you need to know is to adapt it and adjust it to your community and, and this is a very great benefit that the UCLC gives to the community and I will say that it also empires small community they'll be able to handle the dilemmas or situational dilemmas that they encounter they don't know how to go about it because young communities are now exploring how to go about certain issues how to handle certain conflicts in the community so this is going to be like a guidance to sort of like help them to or empower them to handle such situations, which is very good useful. Yeah. Thank you and thank you both for sharing some insights, especially for the small and medium communities that we have out there in the benefits of the UCLC. I'm going to jump over to our next question, which is over the last several months, the revisions committee has worked diligently to integrate feedback from the community on the enforcement guidelines. What are some of the reflections you have, and most importantly, why is the EG important would love to hear from Claudia on this one first. One of the really big principles I remember trying to keep to throughout the revisions process certainly was trying to make sure that we would write the guidelines and such way to provide enough structure so that we don't have a kind of history of sort of dealing with these kinds of situations already set precedent and already set methods on how to deal with them to provide structures for them to kind of take those first steps into how do we settle these disputes, how do we fairly enforce these guidelines across all of our many, many diverse projects, while also respecting existing community processes, understanding that there are a lot of ways in which existing projects handle those in ways that are slightly different from each other, but recognizing that all of them ultimately at the end of the day have that same aim of making sure hey, we're all here to contribute to our projects in a healthy way that encourages and allows participation from people in the way that they want to in the way that the most comfortable. So, I think one of the, one of the strengths of the enforcement guidelines, I would say is that it gives everybody that same baseline to work with. And I think we, we did definitely try and I will say I certainly tried to my involvement in the process to kind of understand the fact that this is just a starting line right we want to set a common starting ground for everybody to get a sense of okay well this is the minimum right of how we would like these guidelines to be enforced. If individual projects have ways of going kind of above and beyond. That's absolutely fine. In fact that should be welcomed if people you know people should be able to take the space line and say okay but we actually think that this should go even further for our project because we believe even more strongly in these principles because they matter to us. Thanks Claudia I really appreciate hearing you know your your insights as being part of the progression of the the uc oc. I would love to hear a little bit also from you Ruby what are some of your thoughts there. Yeah, I must say that it's been a wonderful journey, like reflecting on what we've done. A lot of feedbacks that we've got it in different spaces and different languages that were translated, you know so that to bring us in a common ground, when I'm analyzing this feedback and trying to incorporate it where necessary was very vital as part of the work that we do and I believe that the enforcement guidelines are very important to for the community to help us to know how to go about some of the situations that we face because I mean the universal code of conduct says that if you do this if you do that but how do communities practically implement you know this documents set the space for that to happen like tend to bring people to that. It's sort of like a stepping stone in helping us bring that implement this universal code of conduct into the community and one of some of the interesting thing is that we had to create scenarios and practically solve them like put ourselves in those scenarios to analyze and that help us to better analyze some of these things and we also made sure that that feedbacks like we want to know where the feedback coming from and there was great analysis that we're done to help us understand where these feedback are coming so that we're not just incorporating feedback from one community we're trying to bring equity and another amazing thing that I'll say that the committee also did in designing this enforcement guideline was the fact that we categorize it into topics so if you look at one topic you would see that okay which communities have issues with this topic and how do we make sure that we inclusive as much as possible in in in weighing all these feedbacks that were coming. This concerns that were raised against this topic so a whole lot of things were like reflecting back on what the community has done. It's amazing and the community did amazing work providing us with very useful feedback and suggestions which we now have like a very good of course it's not perfect like Claudia said I mean we cannot have a perfect guidelines to move forward. It would definitely be improved. Yeah. Thank you Ruby and as I see you agreeing and echoing a few points that Claudia and Ruby have made. Do you have any thoughts to share as well in terms of some key reflections that you have in terms of the process or using community feedback to do the revisions. So nothing in particular Claudia and Ruby covered it all. Yeah, reminding ourselves that it is the baseline and it's just the baseline while considering the feedback from people and the comments and all that so yeah that was really something we needed to have at the back of our minds and walk with. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you everyone for for adding to that conversation there. I'll jump over to our next question, which is the ratification for the revised enforcement guidelines has begun on the 17th of January 2023 and will be open for two weeks. So why is it important for communities to vote on the revised enforcement guidelines. Why is it necessary in the UC OC enforcement process. If we could start off with you as on that would be great and I'd love to hear from everybody on this question. Sure. So, what in is one of the ways we make decisions binding in our movement. So, really, if we don't vote, we won't have these enforcement guidelines. So, without the enforcement guidelines, there won't be any form of accountability pathways and processes in our communities to tackle issues of unacceptable behaviors, or even escalate them and when they surface. So, yeah, without the enforcement guidelines, the UCSC cannot be fully activated. And it won't be effective in our movement. So it's very important for everyone who is eligible to to vote. Also having the opportunity to stand for what you want in the movement gives a sense of commitment and trust in the outcome. Yeah. If somehow people missed out on opportunity to be heard either as an individual representative of a community. This is really a good opportunity to let your votes count. Even if even if you think that the UCSC is, I mean, if you think if you have comments, I mean, if you think that you support, let your votes count if you think that something needs to be updated. Yes, leave a comment and also let it let it be, let it count. I understand some of the small wikis are busy and have commitments in our in daily lives that can hinder them from participating in discussions around enforcement guidelines in the past. Notwithstanding, they revised the guidelines. This is a good opportunity to be heard and stand up for what will determine how safe and civil projects will be in the future. Just to summarize, we can't achieve a safe environment for also to contribute about the enforcement guidelines. And we, we can't have enforcement, the enforcement guidelines, if people don't vote. So, it matters that we vote and that our voices counts. Thank you so much. I really enjoy hearing your thought process there and having your voice be heard. Ruby, what are some of your thoughts and then we'll jump over to Claudia after but what are some of your thoughts on why it's important for communities to vote in the revised enforcement guidelines and why you think it's necessary for the UCSC enforcement process in general. Yeah, so I would say that this is a very important thing that the community itself wanted in the first place. And so this is a revised version of the enforcement guidelines. We had the first version, which community gave us a feedback, and we went back to work several months to make sure that it's a good shape. So, we're here again, urging all community members to come out in your numbers look have a look at the revised version of the enforcement guidelines and come out and cast your vote, because this is very crucial. And I know Zuma had said a lot about it. It's very important to help for us to implement the enforcement guideline because this is what is going to help the UCSC to be valid. I mean, like, to really work well in the community to provide a safe environment that trust that we've always been longing for. And we've always had major concerns when it comes to the small communities, small wiki communities, you know, they're often like, my vote doesn't count but look at, take a look at, we have like many small communities spread across the world, small wiki communities all over the world. If all of these communities come out in your numbers, they might be even powerful than maybe one big community that we've always thought about. So we want to urge you all to come out in your numbers, your voice will be heard, your voice is important, your vote is important. And of course, like you Zuma said, we can be perfect, this is a human society. The reality is going to be, it's going to, we're going to see the reality when we actually even enforce it because then we're going to see how practically some of the solutions that we are even thinking around it can happen because I mean, don't think about it to be perfect before you vote. No, I'd encourage all of you to come out in your numbers to vote. And we can have that community or environment that we've always been looking for. Yeah. Thanks Ruby and would love to hear some of your thoughts Claudia. I'm really just echoing everything that Zuma and Ruby have said already it's important to vote. I think it's important to vote from an individual perspective that this is, I really want to commend the, the, the trust and safety team here in their effort in trying to involve as many communities as possible. So when we're really talking about, you know, we were trying to respect the community's wishes that would not have been possible without the very diligent work of a lot of translators and facilitators working and so, so many languages over such a long time, kind of really, really working around the clock to make sure not only were they relaying these questions holding the sessions to try to gather community feedback and really give people a chance to voice their ideas and their ideas, but also to get all of that translated and then analyzed and sent back to us in a way that would be comprehensible for us that wouldn't force us to all spend 40 plus hours of our time every week to try to digest all of this material which is really important because, you know, aside from, you know, not everyone there is staff a lot of people are volunteers a lot of people have other obligations with their time and so I found that process to be very respectful of our time so thank you very much. All that is to say that I think throughout this process we did try really, really hard to reach out to as many communities as possible, regardless of size, regardless of activity levels regardless of you know maybe how active they have been in maybe earlier stages of the this code of conduct, this whole process, or in other community consultations or sort of global movement wide conversations before. I think that's part of what makes this project really important and very important to kind of get everyone's votes in and to get everyone's voices heard, or at the very least to have your opinion logged through the, through the vote on these enforcement guidelines. And yeah just to reiterate truly it does not matter whether your home wiki is big or small, active inactive whether it's a wikipedia, a wiki source a dictionary, all of that is important all of that matters because these are going to be guidelines for all of us. So I have a bit of a similar question but it deviates just slightly, and it is, as you may be aware, past elections, board elections, and so forth are usually dominated in representation by larger wikis. Why is it important for smaller communities to particularly participate in the ratification vote, and to get their views interested represented in the vote. Again a bit similar but zoning in on the smaller community specifically Ruby what are some of your thoughts there. So, I would say that for small wiki communities that this is an opportunity for your voice to be heard, because we shouldn't just let always let big communities decide for you. That is the power to also let your voice be heard so that's all I'll say that this is a very great platform that has been provided for you most, most of the times, we're behind and then we're talking behind, like wanting things to change by just being behind and the things don't change that way. You need to bring your voice you need to know that we're here to these things empower every community allows you to let your voice to be heard so this is what I'll say about that I don't know if anyone has anything to say. Thank you so much Ruby and would love to hear from us Omar Claudia if you have anything to add to that I know this was a bit of a conversation we started earlier in the process but if there are other points that you'd love to add who's on my saw that you unmuted what are some of your thoughts. Yeah, so just to add to what Ruby said, it is, I mean, it's a simple process. Once you're eligible, all you need to do is go to the voting page and support or post the advice them enforcement guideline. And if you're opposing, leave a comment while you are. It is not like multi level voting that has a complexities and all that it's just them, voting, a simple voting process. All that is needed is for the vote to be more than 50% I think that's for support that 50% supports votes, more than 50% support for the enforcement guideline to to pass. So, it's a huge advantage for the smaller kids to at this point to take this opportunity and, you know, make the make this something that would help build their community. So, let's make our votes count really. Yeah. Thank you, Claudia I saw that you unmuted. Yeah, I just also wanted to back on with the caveat that a I have not been, I am not as well first in kind of the perspective coming from within the community looking at these votes and I understand that there may be a history of how these votes have gone but I do know that one thing we were aware of and trying really, really hard to counter was the tendency to the easy tendency to fall back on. Oh well because we're all speaking in English let's go to places where English is already being spoken in the movement like I said there was a huge huge push to, you know, have facilitators and as many languages as possible to use both you know machine translation but also rely on human interpreters and human translators both from the movement itself but also you know professional translators from outside just to get just to allow as many people as possible to express their opinions in the language of their choosing. And I think that's really commendable and I think it would be a bit of a shame honestly if all of that outreach results in sort of people not processing in the vote because of perhaps a belief or a fear however well founded that it's not going to count and or it's not going to matter and I want to say that that is absolutely not the case. It certainly I think was one of the things that preoccupied us was like making sure that we were paying enough attention, giving enough time and space to those concerns of smaller wikis medium sized wikis wikis that maybe don't have as like as developed or as extensive a network of kind of this enforcement structures that they themselves may have already made to try to really really look at those perspectives and kind of understand them and understand those challenges and see how we can support them. Just also say please, please come, please vote I understand that the guidelines are a very long document. We're very sorry we already went through several rounds of trying to make it shorter and trying to make sure that the language was you know, as easy to translate as possible while still being really precise with the language that was a huge, huge concern for us I think we all remember those weeks. And yeah, I would absolutely love to see a high vote turnout from all of our communities when it comes to this round of voting. Thank you, Claudia, Uzoma and Ruby for the importance of of all communities coming out to vote and and speaking a bit towards those smaller and medium sized communities. Really appreciate hearing all of your thoughts there can move on to our next question which is, as some of you may be aware, a universal code of conduct coordinating committee, known as the you foresee would be created to work on the enforcement guidelines. Do you think the creation of such a committee is necessary, and Claudia will start back off with you. So I was assured that it is extremely the committee a community movement thing to conclude one committee by announcing we should create a second committee to keep going. But jokes aside, I think I'll say one of the motivating factors I felt that was a really strong argument for creating. I know yet another community committee was that the us the people in charge of writing the enforcement guidelines should not be in charge of changing it that it was really important to have a fresh set of eyes and a fresh sort of set of participants with different experiences different backgrounds, different understandings of this problem and how to best solve it should be allowed to take that next set of steps towards going. Okay, how do we kind of nuts and bolts oversee the day to day. How do we kind of translate these principles and these guidelines into day to day action and how it would function on an everyday basis across the community and so importantly, how do we build a mechanism that allows us to reflect on these guidelines and to change them if necessary in the future. And I think and I agree that it would not have been proper I think for the revisions committee members to kind of have that job as well as having created it originally. I understand the frustration at making a committee after this committee but I do think that there are good reasons for it. Thanks so much Claudia and what are some of your thoughts to that is Alma. Like Claudia said, you need a neutral body or more like a final authority to handle the UCSU matters on a global scale, ensuring that the code, the code of conduct is enforced and reviewed to apply to peculiar issues that come up in the movement. Yeah. So, I agree with Claudia and. Yeah, you can't, you can't just, you need a neutral body to help with revisions and also ensure that the UCSU is being implemented and everything is working according to plan and well adjusted to current situations or leave the experiences. Yeah. Thank you Zoma and to dive into this question a little bit more and to stick with the you foresee. What are some of the ways the committee can work collaboratively with existing local art comms or admins and I'd love to open this question up to everybody in the room. So yeah so diving in a bit more to the you foresee what are some of the ways the committee can work collaboratively with existing local art comms or admins. And maybe we could start off with Ruby and then we can go around the room. This is a very important question that you asked, and it's very important that the committee, the certain you foresee for me to work collaboratively with the community to ensure that all these issues that come up as a movement as we have already been seeing around at Resolve and make up me, people get to understand the right way to go about some of the issues because community needs also needs support, you know, so two heads is better than one. So coming together is very important, working together helping each other to understand the different situations because without collaboration we will not be able to understand some of the scenarios or situations that we come across. For instance working as a committee we came together with different backgrounds different perspective and this is what makes this document very rich because we are coming with different perspectives trying to make bring meaning to the things that were documented some of the things I wouldn't understand because it's coming the way that it was said, but because we have committee members from other regions were able to understand what the situation is like or what the person is saying. So it's very important that collaboration works in this situation to help us amicably resolve some of the situations that we find ourselves all we encounter. And that's what I'll say about it. Yeah. Thank you Ruby and any thoughts from from Claudia or Zoma and in terms of some ways that the committee can work collaboratively with exists, existing local ARB comms or admins Claudia. Yeah, one of the kind of areas, one of the areas of opportunity I really see for the U4C is kind of facilitating inter wiki communication, especially where language barriers might be a problem. So one of the issues I think we've seen previously is that, you know machine translation being widely available is really great, but it can only handle so much, and especially for cases like sensitive cases of abuse of harassment, especially you know where cases where a lot of nuance or understanding of context and history is really necessary. I hope that the U4C can be a useful bridge and kind of allowing global community to work collaboratively with each other to find solutions. And to also maybe, you know, figure out previous previous attempts to solve similar issues and kind of understand, you know what worked well, what didn't work so well in the hopes that communities don't have to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch every time. In these kinds of situations, especially as these cases might be time sensitive or be very complex and complicated. Yeah, I really hope that the U4C can help with some of this inter project communication and collaboration, whether that's through providing language support, whether that's through giving a pathway for people to understand kind of the context behind solutions or, you know, being a third party mediator or observer in these processes. I think all of those things would be a positive development. Thanks Claudia for adding to that question. Usama any thoughts to add to what these folks have said. So the outcomes and needs faced with some of these unacceptable behaviors more like they're always on the front line with some of these issues. So, they'll be the best people to collaborate with the U4C. And one of the things they can really do is to suggest or surface particular issues they encounter to the U4C for consideration during scheduled revisions of the UCOC. Because as time goes on, things come up and situations arise and all that so there will be the best people to work with the U4C to suggest some of the newly encountered issues and also provide context to understand how to go about incorporating these things to the revised UCOC at the appropriate time. Yeah. Thank you Usama, Ruby and Claudia for answering that question we're coming up to our last question. And I'm going to open this question up for everybody on the panel as well. The next question is the enforcement guidelines drafting committee recommends that the Wikimedia Foundation develop and implementing training for community members with guidance from local communities and affiliates. Can you tell me more about the thinking behind having the foundation, take the lead on this work, and we'll start off with Ruby for this question. So my Sally. Yeah, this is a very interesting question that community sometimes acts over and over again and I will put myself as a scenario, or maybe other volunteers that we work with volunteer have, most of volunteers have the full time commitment and the volunteer for the movement as well. And when you come to staff, affiliate staff and all of those groups, we also have work that we're doing. So a lot of things is happening in the movement, and we want to make sure that volunteers make use of your time to the best that they can, to the things that really matters to them, I mean, like, things that you're committed to so that you're not burdened. Okay, the foundation have resources that are existing they have staff already that are working on these things and so this is a great opportunity to leverage on these staff to facilitate and coordinate and that's what we've seen with Sally and her team doing amazing work because I can't imagine sending all those emails, like, trying to bring everyone together trying to schedule meetings this is a lot of work I've done that before and I must say a lot of work we cannot underestimate that and take it upon itself again so it makes our work easy because all that we need to do is just get the update on the email, like know where we are meeting, where we are supposed to do this and it's well organized and it helps us to contribute because we all come here to get as volunteers on this community, but what's making us move on and making us contribute well organized is because we have this team that is supporting us, facilitating all of these conversations, imagine we can't even gather all the feedbacks from all of the countries. I can imagine that the foundation has the tool to do that to translate all this conversation in the way that we can understand and make our contribution while analyzing this enforcement guideline so I think we cannot do without the support of the foundation which is very important and we cannot underestimate the support in this situation, that's all I can see, yeah. Thank you so much Ruby, we'll go Uzoma and then we'll finish with Claudia, Uzoma what are some of your thoughts? Yeah Ruby, Ruby really had so much to say about this, so just to summarize or just to you know echo what Ruby said, the foundation has time, more time, resources and money and expertise. So, with all these ones burdened the volunteers so much on being as their time is so valuable and it's not that the UCRC is not important to them or the UCRC matter is not important to them but I mean their time is valuable and it will be best channeled into other things not that they're not involved but channeling into other things more and allowing the foundation to take lead and do what they know how to do best. Yeah, so that's what I'll say, the foundation still remains the, I mean the expertise to carry on with the work. Thank you Uzoma and would again love to hear from Claudia as well some of your thoughts around the thinking behind having the foundation take the lead on this work here of the training, yeah. Yeah, very similar to what Uzoma and Ruby said, part of that was resourcing, not only in terms of who, and I think I should say that like a lot of the reason why that sentence is written like that is that the idea is that the, what the training is on should not solely be dictated by the foundation, but the foundation has the obligation to take ideas coming from the community and turn that into a full training module, because it's one thing to say we should pick an example. We should train administrators in digital security, you know, in case their accounts get hacked, and in case you know that poses a really big threat to their project. Right, that's a great idea. What digital security means and looks like for different people in different situations looks really really different. And I think it's really important to understand that. I think that the foundation being in charge of developing those training processes those modules, hopefully means that there is a better likelihood of them being supported into the long term. So, hopefully that if somebody says hey let's develop a training on this topic, not only does that it would not only will that be given the resources needed to make it happen. That it will persist and the year after it first runs we can do it again and the year after that we can do it again and that it can kind of have a permanent home. So I think it's a good group of people in charge of making sure it stays up and that it stays up to date to receive feedback and to refine and keep it going so hard of what you know like the direction doesn't necessarily come from the foundation, but the boring unglamorous legwork of making sure that those materials stay up stay relevant and stay accessible has a clear group of people that are responsible for doing so. And I would rather have that burden placed on the foundation than to shunt it to volunteers who we already asked to do a lot frankly. Thanks so much Claudia and yeah I'm definitely hearing a lot of distribution of labor and a lot of great insights from folks there. Thank you all so very much for participating in this panel for taking the time to share your thoughts and experiences. And for all the folks that are listening voting started January 17, 2013. So please listen to what these folks have told have spoke about have shared their experiences with. Again, a big thank you to Claudia, Zoma and Ruby for sharing those insights. I hope you all have a great rest of your day. And we will be seeing you all soon. Thank you. Please vote.