[Foundation-l] Call for moderators

Fri Jan 27 13:57:43 UTC 2012

On 27 January 2012 06:38, Philippe Beaudette <philippe at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hi everyone -
>
> Sue has asked me to create a mailing list to discuss advocacy and
> Wikimedia's position in it for the future.  Although I don't yet have the
> list created, I wanted to put out a call for moderators.  If you're
> interested in moderating this mailing list (a bit more of an "active"
> moderation role, nudging people on topic, etc), would you please let me
> know by private email (philippe{{@}}wikimedia.org)?  Depending on how many
> people express interest, I'll figure out how we proceed forward.
>
> Thanks!
> pb
>

When you say " a mailing list to discuss advocacy and Wikimedia's position
in it", do you mean a list dedicated to discussing how/why/whether we
should use Wikimedia's visibility and credibility for political lobbying
purposes - e.g filings in court actions, submissions to various government
policy reviews and of course the recent blackouts?

If so, that sounds like an excellent idea. There are local political issues
that might help or hinder our movement in many countries - Obviously SOPA
in the US, ACTA in Europe right now, the proposed Internet Filter in
Australia... Whilst we certainly shouldn't ever think that political
activities are our primary purpose (and it would be against the rules of
most countries for a Charity to do that anyway), I do think that we've only
just started to flex our muscles in influencing governments to listen to
our perspective. Certainly the encyclopedia contains neutrally-worded
information, but delivering free-knowledge is a highly political and
potentially subversive act!

Once they've got a baseline of organisational capacity, Chapters are
ideally placed to get involved in this kind of advocacy in their
countries/regions and I look forward to the day when, for example, 20+
Chapters can submit coordinated responses to a European Union Copyright
review.

Sincerely,
-Liam