*Hello,*
*
As AffCom, we appreciate the interest in the situation with Wikimedia
Portugal that you have expressed on this thread. Our current focus is on
working to understand and resolve the conflicts and issues related to
Wikimedia Portugal, as well as attend to our other duties. However, we
did want to send a message to this list to clarify some points.
First, we would like to caution readers of this list against making
conclusions regarding this particular situation based solely on the
information that has been shared here. This thread does not present a
complete and accurate picture of the situation in Portugal (or the
situation in Brazil, for that matter). Though not comprehensive, we
would like to provide a brief summary of the situation, based on the
information AffCom has received.
As has mostly been outlined previously in this thread, after WMPT’s
years of inactivity, recently, multiple individuals have become involved
trying to create activity and revitalize the chapter. However, those
individuals have conflicted with each other. Things escalated quickly,
with various accusations and threats being made. Earlier this year,
AffCom was informed of the conflict by the parties and began
communicating with the individuals involved. Despite AffCom's efforts to
de-escalate the situation, certain individual actions have kept
intensifying it. As the conflict was preventing the chapter from being
able to engage in productive activity, AffCom took the step of
suspension, with clear requirements for the chapter to meet to lift the
suspension and avoid de-recognition.
One of the larger issues that WMPT has had to address is the lack of
clear leadership of the chapter following its two previous general
assemblies. As detailed in the suspension notice, there were issues
reported to AffCom related to both IX General Assembly(held on December
14, 2017) as well as X General Assembly (held on April 15, 2018). In
both cases, the best information available to AffCom suggests that the
meetings did not comply with the relevant portions of the Chapter's
bylaws and may not have complied with applicable local laws. Wikimedia
organizations are expected to fulfill all of their legal and
organizational governance requirements. These issues prompted the
requirement that WMPT convene a new assembly and elections process (held
on September 1, 2018), with the goal of holding an assembly which
clearly follows the relevant procedural requirements.
Along with convening the assembly, WMPT has currently met the
requirements based on the timeline set in the suspension notice from
AffCom in July. They submitted their required materials on time, and now
AffCom is reviewing them. However, AffCom has also received other
information relating to the chapter's compliance with particular
governance requirements. AffCom is currently evaluating this information
along with the materials submitted by the chapter. AffCom will be in
touch with the chapter regarding any additional information we need.
We want to emphasize that Wikimedia Portugal is not being held to a
different or higher standard compared to other chapters, but is being
held to the standard expectations for chapter status. While we
understand that monitoring of compliance with those expectations may
have been less consistent in the past, we have been working in recent
years to ensure that all chapters are meeting the same basic standards.
When a chapter is not in compliance, there are several reminders and
opportunities for correction in advance of suspension. We suspend a
chapter only if it does not self-correct in response to the repeated
reminders and/or warnings. Once a chapter is suspended, we strive to
provide a reasonable window for remediation.
Wikimedia Portugal has been on the committee’s radar due to its years of
minimal activity. As further conflict issues have surfaced, concerns
over the group’s capacity have grown. The committee however has no wish
to “kill” the community, but to ensure they are able to operate in a way
that upholds Wikimedia movement values and expectations for affiliate
organizations. A community cannot work effectively if its members are
spending all their energy on an internal conflict. Significant internal
conflict can also reflect poorly on the movement as a whole.
We have responded to this thread because we felt we should weigh in.
However, we cannot commit to continuing to participate in this
conversation on wikimedia-l. The committee needs to focus our time and
energy on trying to find and work toward the outcome in Portugal that is
best for the Wikimedia movement. That said, we will do our best to
monitor responses on this thread and take note of the questions,
concerns, and criticisms expressed here.
We encourage you also to share your thoughts and ideas relating to
questions of movement governance and organization in the relevant
movement strategy conversations:
**
*Regards, Maor*
On Behalf of the Affiliations Committee
*
On 10/10/2018 8:31 p.m., Samuel Klein wrote:
Gonçalo, Goethe, and all: Thank you for your work,
which I appreciate
dearly, and for the public discussion. I can also imagine this was a
very hard letter to write.
Paulo, to your concerns:
for a Foundation-run committee[3] that apparently
wants to kill us
at all costs.
Euh... surely not .v_v.
These troubles can come up in good faith, when two groups work
intently and separately on the same issue, ando d not talk openly to
one another for reasons of imagined duty + propriety. Tossing insults
back and forth just makes it easier for people to shut down
communication.
Somehow I suspect that invocations of The Law and the intervention of
legal anxieties (with their preoccupations with secrecy) has led to
much of the trouble here. So Pine, to your point: /more/ legal
counsel reporting to only one of the parties involved might not help.
On the other hand, we as a movement deciding to share more openly our
internal discussions around legal concerns — even if this means taking
on slightly more legal risk — would reduce some of these evident
social risks.
Warmly,
SJ
On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 8:47 AM Paulo Santos Perneta
<paulosperneta(a)gmail.com <mailto:paulosperneta@gmail.com>> wrote:
Some time ago, a Wikimedian friend told me AffCom is like the
physician
that comes to help with the cure when an Affiliate is ill. But that's
really what they were in this WMPT case? This is a very bizarre
situation,
of which I'm personally having a lot of difficulties finding rational
answers to it, let alone any conclusion. All I can offer is a personal
account of the situation, to those who would be kind enough to have an
interest on this case.
Last May we at WMPT were really not expecting seeing AffCom bursting
through the room in an emergency intervention, fixing what didn't
need to
be fixed, and willing to moderate what didn't need any moderation.
As in
the proverbial Monty Phyton scene[1], they quickly became the problem
themselves.
Many of us at WMPT are long-term Wikimedian volunteers, some of us
for more
than a decade already, in perfect good standing in our
communities, where
we hold and held responsibility roles. It includes current and former
bureaucrats, sysops, ArbCom members, very active contributors to a
number
of Wikimedia projects. Most of us are founding members or directly
connected to WMPT since its inception in 2009.
Last March, when we took on ourselves this mission of fix and rebuild
Wikimedia Portugal, who had been dormant for about 5 years, we
were not
expecting to face such a mighty and impenetrable adversary as
AffCom has
proven to be.
For six months already we have been embroiled by AffCom in this
Kafkian
suspension process, where we are generally not told what the
accusations
are, and much less who is accusing us. It has been extremely painful,
exhausting, and frustrating for everyone involved.
We reached our limit. A number of us are now seriously considering
abandoning not only the chapter, but the Wikimedia projects
entirely, if we
continue not being treated with the fairness and transparency we
deserve.
It truly begs the existential question of what are we all doing here,
dedicating countless and very valuable hours of our lives for a
Movement
that lets this happen, for a Foundation-run committee[3] that
apparently
wants to kill us at all costs.
Personally, I'm still confident that we'll successfully pass
through this
probation, and everything will become again the very optimistic
scenario we
all had last April, when we successfully elected a working board, and
started working with great dedication in the many projects we have now
running here in Portugal. I can only imagine how painful it was and is
being for Gonçalo, to came here making this situation public and
sharing it
with everybody. We all have our dignity, nobody at WMPT likes this
at all.
For many months we tried to cope with this discreet and silently. But
everything has a limit.
Regards,
Paulo
[1] -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Inquisition_(Monty_Python)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Inquisition_%28Monty_Python%29>
[2] - As AffCom seems to be, despite what is written in their Meta
page(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee)
GoEthe.wiki <goethe.wiki(a)gmail.com <mailto:goethe.wiki@gmail.com>>
escreveu no dia terça, 9/10/2018 à(s)
11:13:
The original message was rejected due to a filter
rule match,
but you can
access it here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediapt/2018-October/002698.html
I am sending it below without the links. Please
access the link
above for
the full version.
__________
Sorry in advance for the lengthy email – the tl;dr version is:
Wikimedia
Portugal has done all it was asked to do, so the
suspension that
was held
conditional to performing those steps must be
lifted
accordingly. For the
sake of transparency, we are sending this out to
not only the AffCom
mailing list, but also Wikimedia-l and WikimediaPT-l.
_________
Dear members of AffCom,
(cc to the Wikimedia Portugal mailing list, Wikimedia mailing list)
Last 5th October we were again surprised by the content of your
email
(quoted below) in response to us completing the
roadmap we had
agreed upon
in order to remove the suspension of Wikimedia
Portugal. On that
message,
you say you have once more received information
whose
substantiation is not
mentioned, from sources that are not disclosed.
And still you
seem to
accept it as the truth without even providing us
with the
opportunity to
get properly acquainted with it, let alone rebate
or contradict
it. While
you speak of transparency, that message is
unsettlingly opaque,
as have
been multiple such messages relayed to us in the
course of this
whole
process.
As you are well aware, Wikimedia Portugal was faced in March with a
situation where the president of the Board, João Vasconcelos, became
demissionary without any previous warning [1]. It should be
noted that when
Vasconcelos was elected as president of the Board
back in 2015,
he wasn’t
elected based on any background as a Wikimedia
editor, as he has
no history
of contribution to any of the Wikimedia projects,
but rather on
his self
proclaimed merits on organisational and conflict
management (!).
Despite
the best efforts of several people from Wikimedia
Portugal over
the years,
Vasconcelos sadly never really integrated well
neither on Wikimedia
Portugal, nor in the Portuguese Wikimedia community.
So, in light of what looked like an existential threat for WMPT,
I and a
number of other WMPT members have publicly and
transparently
mobilized
ourselves to organize an extraordinary General
Election to elect
the new
Board. Vasconcelos was probably expecting/hoping
that we would
ask him to
stay. But we have seen this sort of behavior
elsewhere [a].We
didn't.
Instead, we handled the situation cooperatively,
as a group, openly.
Vasconcelos never voiced any desire to take part on this collective
solution-building, as evidenced by his silence from the
discussion on the
Wikimedia Portugal mailing list in March [2] and
April [3]. He
was welcome
to do so. His only message to the mailing list
was two days (13
April)
before the 15 April General Assembly, announcing
that he
considered the
planned General Assembly null [4]. Given the lack
of legal
standing for
that claim, we carried on with the General
Assembly (the
transparent,
inclusive, democratic governing body of
associations), summoned
according
to our by-laws. This General Assembly
successfully elected new
governing
bodies, including the Board of Directors.
In May we were surprised by a message from AffCom demanding that
we stop
taking part in a conflict, and "refrain from
representing
ourselves as
representatives of Wikimedia Portugal" (see
quoted message in [5]
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediapt/2018-May/002621.html
).This
was the very first time the Committee contacted Wikimedia
Portugal
about
this case. The message provided no legal
precedent or framework
for this
demand, no indication of what this conflict was,
or why AffCom
thought the
Board was a part of it.
From what we understood, Vasconcelos went to the Wikimedia
Conference in
Berlin, where he seems to have convinced AffCom
that our General
Assembly
of 15 April was legally void.
We have repeatedly provided concrete evidence that t it was not
the case,
including quoting relevant court decisions
backing this [6]
<
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/(https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/priva…
<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/%28https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/private/wikimedia-pt-internal/2018-July/002414.html>
.
In response, AffCom reported having no time to read through
legal texts,
and therefore not being able to assess the
validity of our
declarations,
but that is beyond our control. And yet AffCom
accepted Vasconcelos’
version without question. It is a legal imperative to be held
innocent
until proven guilty, and until it is legally
proven there was some
wrongdoing, General Assemblies are valid and binding.
After the April General Assembly we were working, in addition to our
activities and programs, to put the association in order in terms of
obligations to the Portuguese state and the tax authorities,
providing
access to WMPT’s bank account to the persons
designated on the
15 April GA,
and so on. Things were getting on track...
We were surprised again in July by a message from AffCom temporarily
suspending Wikimedia Portugal’s recognition as a Wikimedia
chapter [7]. In
that message for the first time you laid out a
concrete roadmap
that, if
followed (as we understood), would lead to
lifting the
suspension. The
roadmap set out a list of demands from AffCom
which we diligently
fulfilled, even well ahead of the required deadlines. We
organized and held
a new General Assembly in September, summoned
according to the
interpretation of the Portuguese Civil Code that AffCom relayed
to us (with
the exception of anything we believed would make
the proceeding
illegal,
which was communicated in due time to AffCom).
This General
Assembly had
the same result as before [8]. The Assembly was
normally held,
despite
severe attempts of sabotage from Vasconcelos,
reported in due
time to
AffCom, Legal and the Safety team. In addition to
the minutes
[9], an audio
recording of the assembly is available in Commons
[10] ; video
recording is
also available on request.
We then submitted our overdue Financial Report [11],
demonstrated support
from the community to the continuation of the
chapter [12], and
wrote a
plan for improved chapter capacity [13]. All
should be good now...
Having done all this, despite our disagreement that a new
Assembly was
needed in the first place, we are now again
surprised by the
reception of
the opaque message I mention in the beginning,
sent by AffCom to
my email
(quoted below) affirming that the Committee had
received reports
from
unstated persons with unspecified concerns about
the General
Assembly and
the capacity of Wikimedia Portugal to run as a
chapter. The
message claims
that "there were a number of issues with
lack of transparency
[as well as
with] providing an opportunity to participate in
an open,
organizational
process" while not specifying these issues
at all. Your message
questions
whether we are "prepared as an Affiliate to
prevent disruption
in [our]
organization's collective pursuit of the
movement’s mission",
even though
we have so far been able to handle every attempt
at disruption from
Vasconcelos.
If we rolled up our sleeves to activate the scattered energies
of a stale
organization in order to prepare and execute
April’s General
Assembly, it
was because we were convinced that Wikimedia
Portugal had a
viable future
ahead, and was of value to the Wikimedia
movement. At the time,
the actions
of Vasconcelos were so absurd that the reaction
to them even
spurred some
founders and (by then) inactive members of WMPT
to offer their
help in
reestablishing a functional organization. Along
with the help of
a number
of historic as well as new members who have been
steadily
returning and
joining our ranks, that’s precisely what we are
achieving.
That’s why we’ve been working on fulfilling the AffCom roadmap
requests,
even if we didn’t like or agree with some aspects
of it. All things
considered, it was a clear path to resolving our situation, and
we found
that parts of it could be useful to the chapter.
But AffCom’s
validation of
Vasconcelos’ actions and claims, even if
unintentional, have real
consequences for the mental state and safety of our members.
Back in March, when Vasconcelos claimed he had requested our
bank to lock
the chapter’s bank account, started a process at
the Public
Prosecution
Service, and he had talked with an attorney on
that subject, can you
imagine what André, our treasurer, felt waiting in line in the
bank until
he found what really happened? In the end, the
bank account had
not been
locked because of any court order or legal reason
as Vasconcelos
implied,
but rather because someone had tried to access
the bank account
without the
proper credentials, and the system automatically
locked the account.
Before the General Assembly in September, Vasconcelos sent out legal
threats and even menaces of police intervention to anyone
participating. We
still went through with it, but can you imagine
how we felt, the
pressure
that was under some of us? It was all a bluff in
the end, but
this is what
you put us through.
Notwithstanding, WMPT activities were happening in parallel.
They are
listed on our activities plan for anyone to see
[14], and more
are planned.
After several years of inactivity, we are happy
to be on a
sustainable
growth path, gradually building capacity and
doing the best we
can with the
resources available to us. We’ve also been using
our personal
contacts with
other movements in order to increase our
organization’s
capacity. Ana,
newly appointed to the Board, has just returned
from Wiki Takes
Zamora,
where she was learning from Wikimedia Spain,
relaunching the
collaboration
between both chapters. Two of the events we have
planned for
November are
using this paradigm. We’ll celebrate Wikidata’s
sixth
anniversary with a
local group of data enthusiasts in Porto, and
near Lisbon we’re
helping
with the organization and will participate in a
FOSS event, so
in both
cases we’ll also acquire event organization
skills. This growth
path is in
peril if you continue to undermine our efforts.
Over the last half year we’ve been attacked, offended, insulted,
received
multiple threats of judicial action by
Vasconcelos, and even an
actual
intimidatory letter from a lawyer working for him
(but
purportedly on
behalf of WMPT); and during this entire time
we’ve tried not to
escalate
the situation, not to engage with such attempts
at direct
confrontation,
nor make them public. You force us now to
disclose this in order
to clear
our name and set the record straight. With the
help and support
of the
legal and security departments of the Wikimedia
Foundation, we
have dealt
with the actions of Vasconcelos so far. And we
will follow the
disciplinary
procedures foreseen for these situations in our
bylaws which may
result in
his removal from the chapter.
We’ve repeatedly complied in unusually strict terms with legal
requirements, and with AffCom’s roadmap, while dealing with
Vasconcelos’
actions as privately as we could in order not to
affect the
public image of
the Wikimedia movement, nor its community – but
honestly, we’re
reaching
the point of exhaustion in light of AffCom’s
puzzling behavior
along this
process. We understand that AffCom may have
reserves regarding
our future,
but the way it is dealing with the situation is
clearly
counterproductive.
How can AffCom keep making new accusations
without at least
asking us for
information or confirmations?
Currently, our major source of disruption, distress and anxiety
is each new
message we receive from AffCom, as they
repeatedly defy our
expectations of
a partner claiming to be attempting to help us
getting back on
our feet. We
are actually wary that the next address could be
an announcement
that
Wikimedia Portugal has been de-recognized, even
after we have
passed our
“road of trials”, due to the ever moving
goalposts. Several of
our key
people have reported insomnia, including myself,
after receiving
your
communications. We’re reaching our physical,
psychological, and
motivational limit, in great part due to AffCom’s actions and
inexplicable
lack of support and transparency.
It is time to stop this! Despite what we still believe were your
best
intentions, AffCom has inadvertently caused
significant
destabilization for
Wikimedia Portugal.
Please honor your part of the compromise, lift this suspension
and let us
proceed in the productive pursuit of our
collective mission.
Regards,
Gonçalo
Gonçalo Themudo
*Presidente*
*Wikimedia Portugal*
*Email: *goethe.wiki(a)gmail.com <mailto:goethe.wiki@gmail.com>
*Website: *http://pt.wikimedia.org
<https://sites.google.com/view/themudo>
*Imagine um mundo onde cada ser humano pode
partilhar livremente
a soma de
todo o conhecimento, na sua própria língua.*
_______________________________________________
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--
Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
_______________________________________________
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--
*"Jülüjain wane mmakat ein kapülain tü alijunakalirua jee wayuukanairua
junain ekerolaa alümüin supüshuwayale etijaanaka. Ayatashi waya junain."*
Maor Malul
Socio, A.C. Wikimedia Venezuela | RIF J-40129321-2 |
Member, Wikimedia Foundation Affiliations Committee
Phone: +972-52-4869915
Twitter: @maor_x
---
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