Sumana Harihareswara
CC-BY Guillaume Paumier

Back when I worked at the Wikimedia Foundation, I used the Ada Initiative’s anti-harassment policy as a template and turned it into the Friendly Space Policy covering tech events run by WMF. I offer you this case study because I think reading about the social and logistical work involved might be inspiring and edifying, and to ask you to please donate to the Ada Initiative today.

I was working for Wikimedia Foundation for ~8 months before I broached the topic of a conference anti-harassment policy with the higher-ups – my boss & my boss’s boss, both of whom liked the idea and backed me 100%. (I did not actually ask HR, although in retrospect I could have.) My bosses both knew that Not So Great things happen at conferences and they saw why I wanted this. They said they’d have my back if I got any flak.

So I borrowed the Ada Initiative’s policy and modified it a little for our needs, and placed my draft on a subpage of my user page on our wiki. Then I briefly announced it to the mailing list where my open source community, MediaWiki, talks. I specifically framed this as not a big deal and something that lots of conferences were doing, and said I wanted to get it in place in time for the hackathon later that month. Approximately everyone in our dev community said “sure” or “could this be even broader?” or “this is a great idea”, as you can see in that thread and in the wiki page’s history and the talk page.

I usually telecommuted to WMF, but I happened to be in San Francisco in preparation for the hackathon, and was able to speak to colleagues in person. My colleague Dana Isokawa pointed out that the phrasing “Anti-harassment policy” was offputting. I agreed with her that I’d prefer something more positive, and I asked some colleagues for suggestions on renaming it. My colleague Heather Walls suggested “Friendly Space Policy”. In a pre-hackathon prep meeting, I mentioned the new policy and asked whether people liked the name “Friendly Space Policy,” and everyone liked it.

So I made it an official Policy; I announced it to our developer community and I put it on wikimediafoundation.org.

This might have been the end of it. But a day later, I saw a question from one community member on the more general community-wide mailing list that includes other Wikimedia contributors (editors/uploaders/etc.). That person, who had seen but not commented on the discussion on the wiki or on the developers’ list, wanted to slow down adoption and proposed some red tape: a requirement that this policy be passed by a resolution of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees (so, basically, the ultimate authority on the topic).

But approximately everyone on the community-wide list also thought the policy was fine — both volunteers and paid WMF staffers. For instance, one colleague said:

“If a policy makes good sense, we clearly need it, and feedback about the text is mostly positive, then we should adopt it. Rejecting a good idea because of process wonkery is stupid.

Sumana is not declaring that she gets to force arbitrary rules on everyone whenever she wants. She is solving a problem for us.”

My boss’s boss also defended the policy, as did a member of the Board of Trustees.

“Perhaps you misread the width of this policy. Staff can and generally do set policies affecting WMF-run processes and events.”

I didn’t even have to respond on-list since all these other guys (yes, nearly all or all guys) did my work for me.

I was so happy to receive deep and wide support, and to help strengthen the legitimacy of this particular kind of governance decision: consensus, including volunteers, led by a particular WMF staffer. And, even though I had only proposed it for a particularly limited set of events (Wikimedia-sponsored face-to-face technical events), the idea spread to other affiliated organizations (such as Wikimedia UK) and offline events (Wikimania, our flagship conference — thank you, Sarah Stierch, for your work on that!). And the next year, a volunteer led a session at Wikimania to discuss a potential online Friendly Space Policy:

“Explore what elements are essential for you in such a policy and what we can do collectively to adopt such a policy for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia websites.”

So perhaps someday, all Wikipedia editors and other Wikimedia contributors will enjoy a safer environment, online as well as offline! I feel warm and joyous that the discussion I launched had, and is having, ripple effects. I felt like I took a gamble, and I looked back to see why it worked. A few reasons:

• The Ada Initiative’s template. I cannot imagine writing something that good from scratch. Having that template to customize for our needs made this gamble possible at all.
• I started the discussion in January 2012; I had joined Wikimedia Foundation (part-time) in March 2011. So I had already built up a bunch of community cred and social capital.
• In early 2012, open source citizens saw more and more reports of hostile behavior at conferences; people saw the need for a policy.
• I added “or preferred Creative Commons license” to the big list of attributes (gender, disability, etc.), which gave the document a touch of Wikimedia-specific wit right at the start of the policy.
• I balanced decisiveness and leadership with openness to others’ ideas.
• Honestly, I narrowly focused the policy to an area where my opinion carried weight and I held some legitimate authority (both earned and given), phrased my announcement nonchalantly and confidently, and ran the consensus process pretty transparently. I believe it was hard to disagree without looking like a jerk. ;-)

(If you can privately talk with decisionmakers who have have top-down authority to implement a code of conduct, then you can use another unfortunate tool: point to past incidents that feel close, because they happened to your org or to ones like it.)

By implementing our Friendly Space Policy, I created what I think of as a tidepool:

“…places where certain people can sort of rest and vent and collaborate, and ask the questions they feel afraid of asking in public, so they can gain the strength and confidence to go further out, into the invite-only spaces or the very public spaces….spaces where everybody coming in agrees to follow the same rules so it’s a place where you feel safer — these are like tidepools, places where certain kinds of people and certain kinds of behavior can be nurtured and grown so that it’s ready to go out into the wider ocean.”

With the help of the Ada Initiative’s policy adoption resources, you can make a place like that too — and if you feel that you don’t have top-down authority, perhaps that no one in your community does, then take heart from my story. If you have a few allies, you don’t have to change the ocean. You can make a tidepool, and that’s a start.