Grants talk:Project/I School Challenge for Countering Online Harassment

Change status to 'proposed' to submit for 8/2/16 Project Grants deadline

Dear Npdoty,

Please note that if you intend to submit this proposal for the August 2 deadline of the current round of Project Grants, you must change the status from draft to proposed. If you have any questions, our final proposal clinic is from 1600-1700 UTC on August 2.

Cheers,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:13, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! That was one of my open questions. (Tried to join the office hours via IRC, but may have missed you.) Npdoty (talk) 20:09, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Comments / Questsions from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hi Npdoty, I'm Jethro, a community organizer. Thanks for preparing your proposal to conduct comprehensive, research-based approach to tackling harassment on Wikimedia projects. I have a couple of suggestions about places to obtain some feedback and recruit volunteers from Wikimedia community who might be interested in assisting with this initiative. If the target project you are seeking to improve is the English Wikipedia, a few good places to make a general announce to get feedback include:

• The wiki-research-l mailing list is all about scientific research regarding project content and their communities, and would be a great place to announce the project, get feedback and look for potential collaborators,
• The village pump is a general space for alerting the community about community-focused proposals. It's common for feedback to be provided locally there-- feel free to link to the discussion if that is the case.
• Try dropping a suggestion about the grant proposal to The Signpost, a semi-weekly newsletter sent to thousands of English Wikipedia contributors.

I've already dropped a line about the proposal in the #wikimedia-research^connect IRC channel dedicated to research discussions and topics as well.

I had a few questions as well:

• The proposal outlines plans to evaluate multiple platforms, including Wikipedia. What other platforms will be evaluated? In total, do you have an estimate of the number of platforms this research is scoped for?
• One component of the project is to develop a portal for research and tools. The Research namespace here on Meta currently contains an space for folks to submit and document research projects and the tools they develop along with them, and can be categorized under a project. Can you describe what sorts of benefits a new portal could have in this project?

Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 01:02, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

Much thanks, I JethroBT (WMF), for both the suggestions and the questions. I'm reaching out with announcements to those lists/fora now. I'll follow up more here later on your two questions; briefly, we have a few platforms in mind to use as background research and comparison, but I'm hopeful that a research conference would expand that list considerably. Npdoty (talk) 23:21, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Regarding these two questions, I JethroBT (WMF):

1. what other platforms?

In order to get useful comparison, it would help to provide some background research on, say, 3-6 platforms prior to a conference. In addition to Wikipedia, we have considered the following:

• Twitter, a large, proprietary, public messaging system where harassment has been cited as a particular concern (at our event in April, we both heard interest from Twitter folks and saw experience with self-help tools directed particularly at Twitter)
• Nextdoor, a geographically-focused, invite-only community in US cities, which has had substantial media coverage regarding issues of race and moderation (CTSP fellows began research on this community over the past year)
• other suggestions have included: Reddit (prominently covered in press), Discourse (general software tool, targeted at community), Facebook (different set of tools, including ones for encouraging resolution of disputes), Metafilter

While we would be looking at a handful of platforms as points of comparison prior to the research conference, the focus of the project is not on conducting all the research directly with grant funds, but in providing some case studies useful to researchers (in academia and in industry), and then providing incentives for development of tools and mechanisms for collaboration in order to encourage sharing of research. To that extent, the work should cover a much wider range of platforms, and also to more basic questions, in areas of social psychology or computer science, for example.

2. how would a Research Commons differ from existing Wikimedia resources regarding collecting research?

Feedback from this Talk page and other venues has pointed me to at least the following set of existing or in-progress pages for collecting research or other resources regarding online harassment:

• Research:Online harassment resource guide, annotated bibliography/literature review
• Research:Detox, a research project for ML-driven detection of toxic comments on Wikipedia
• Research:Modeling Talk Page Abuse/Resources, links to discussions, data sources and Wikipedia-related programming tools

What we have proposed for a "Research Commons" would, I think, tend to be broader, in terms of collecting data, policies, tools, related research and discussion for platforms including but not limited to Wikipedia or other Wikimedia-related ones. That being said, I think a good first phase for this part of the project would be gathering both existing resources and a sense of the needs of researchers -- if it would make more sense for researchers, for example, to add catalogs of policies and data and Talk pages for discussion to the existing Online harassment resource guide bibliography, then we would benefit from pooling effort. If instead it would be easier to use a discussion forum like Discourse for more open-ended discussion of open research areas, then a separate portal might better engage academic and industry researchers.

Also an open question, I believe, is whether such a Commons could also be used as a repository not just for researchers, but for users. We have heard interest in more user-friendly resources for those encountering online harassment and for law enforcement in different jurisdictions often not well-educated about the issue. (Those are my personal thoughts, but I'm open to alternative ideas and additions to either of those lists above.)

-- Npdoty (talk) 04:35, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

comments from Thepwnco

@Npdoty: Hello and thanks for this proposal - there are a lot of good details in the project plan and I agree that this is an important and necessary area of research to support if we are to develop robust solutions that address online harassment.

I have a few comments and questions for you as outlined below. Thanks for your time and consideration.

• Are there researchers already working in this space - and specifically with Wikimedia projects - that you have already identified as potential speakers and presenters at the conference?
• You mention the importance of bringing together the findings of researchers from around the world and who are working with various platforms in order to provide a global forum for knowledge exchange as well as account for cultural differences. Given the number of languages and communities across Wikimedia projects, I also see this is as a necessary approach. Can you provide more information on how you will ensure that diverse experiences and perspectives are reflected in conference participation and the literature review/preliminary research gap analysis?
• Is there room in your proposal to tailor some of the analysis and findings to Wikimedia projects? For example, perhaps the most relevant tools, policies, and practices for Wikimedia projects could be highlighted in the conference report and/or made the focus of the iSchool challenge?
• I echo comments made by User:I JethroBT (WMF) - it's not entirely clear to me what the impacts would be of creating a dedicated portal for this area of research, particularly given the other deliverables of the project (literature reviews and a conference report summarizing key findings). Could you further outline your ideas around this? As a sidenote, it might be helpful to think in terms of measures of success (beyond just the launch of the portal), for example, number of researchers subscribed to the portal, number of new discussions, number of new submissions made by researchers, etc.

Cheers, -Thepwnco (talk) 20:25, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Thepwnco, thanks for these comments and questions. (Some brief replies here now, and we'll try to make further edits, either directly on the proposal page or as added material here soon.)

Regarding current Wikimedia-related researchers who might be a fit for the conference, we have reached out to a couple directly (especially those with a direct relation to UC Berkeley), but I think more importantly we've been able to learn more about existing collaborations through mailing lists and other forms of feedback we've received.

Re: different platforms and cultural differences; I think this is likely to be one of the more challenging parts of any research-driven project in this area. We want to be especially open about asking researchers and users of Wikimedia for help in finding the best ways to reach a diverse set of user contexts and perspectives. I expect part of that to be asking individuals we know have worked with different geographic diversity in Wikipedia (e.g. OII's recent project), part would be using mailing lists and surveys for outreach and part would be finding existing organizations/user groups around, for example, Wikipedia in different countries. We have suggested having student researchers here at Berkeley conduct interviews; those may also be limited by language barriers.

I think it's a great idea to tailor some analysis and results to, for example, Wikipedia. While we think part of the value of a conference of this type would be getting experiences and research with different platforms and different contexts to try to share insights, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be valuable to customize some of the outputs to a specific platform. Perhaps we could provide a customized executive summary of the conference report / background research findings for Wikipedia in particular.

We should add more detail here on the functionality of a portal/commons and on how we would measure its success. As I mentioned in responding to I JethroBT (WMF) above, I think additional features could be breadth of collection (data, code, policies as well as research), variety of platforms, and different audiences (not just researchers, but also users and platform developers, say). But I think we should get direct feedback from researchers (and from those other audiences) about what would be useful to drive that decision. I'm hoping to talk with some of those existing researchers shortly, so I can provide updates here.

Thanks again for these questions and comments; most helpful. -- Npdoty (talk) 08:11, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Feedback

I'm a antopodean librarian with a CompSci PhD and a decade editing en.wiki, which undoubtedly colour my perceptions on this, but here's a couple of points:

• I think idea of a physical conference is great, but effectively limits to attendees, the more online the event, the more global the participation can be expected to be.
• If you want to motivate academics and grad students to do stuff (i.e. research harassment) you need to find incentives. Getting papers published, highlighted and/or cited is a great way to achieve that. I think you could focus more on this, whether it's by finding and summarising existing harassment research elsewhere; funding review articles of what the state of harassment research is in different academic fields; finding a forum to publish the proceedings of your conference; find a peer-reviewed forum for a massively-co-authored conference position paper, etc.
• 'Winter' is not a global descriptor, in particular the global south has winter at a very different time to the USA. Find a time period that doesn't alienate half your target audience.
• Consider a deal with a data repository for researchers to publish their data for free if published three months prior to the conference. This incentives researchers to make public their existing data well in advance so everyone can poke it prior to the conference.
• I think clarification of the concept of 'tools' could be elaborated, since it covers everything from ethical guidelines to iron maidens.

Just my 2c. Stuartyeates (talk) 04:51, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 1 2016

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 1 2016 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during this community comments period.

The committee's formal review for round 1 2016 begins on 24 August 2016, and grants will be announced in October. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:04, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

Comments of Ruslik0

I have some comments/questions:

• Can you clarify the title of your project? ("I School Challenge for Countering Online Harassment"), in particular, what does "I" mean?
• You write: "There is little opportunity for researchers from different parts of the world to exchange research findings or to collaborate on new research on this topic." I would not be so categorical.
• You write: "Collaborative work with academics may lead to an occasional publication" but in the next section I see: "There is a growing body of academic research focused on harassment in the online space". There is a tension between these two statements.
• The measures of success are very vague and non-specific.
• As understand the project aims primarily at research of on-line harassment outside the WMF projects and there is no or little of no connections with the Wikimedia movement in general and its goals. Is this statement true?

Ruslik (talk) 11:48, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Reservations about funding academic conferences

We recognize the significant value of the partnership between WMF and the I School, and we are interested in supporting further collaboration. However, because of the limited funds we have to award through this program and because of the substantial attention directed to Wikipedia by researchers, I have reservations about allocating funds for conferences in support of academic efforts. If we set a programmatic precedent of that nature, we open ourselves up to being flooded with requests that we don't have the resources to support, either through this program or the dedicated Conference program. Consequently, I'm writing to ask how dependent the conference is on the funds requested. If you are not awarded funding through WMF, will the conference proceed in some form? If so, it would be more feasible for us to award supplemental funding for a day of code or hackathon around the conference. Generally, I'm wanting feedback about wiggle room in this proposal's focus that might allow us to zero on funding aspects that are the closest fit for our program.

I also want to advise you (independent of whether this proposal is recommended for funding) of the opportunity for scholarship funding for key researchers to attend Wikimania in Montreal next year and/or the Wikimedia Hackathon. I'd be glad to follow up separately about this opportunity at mjohnson wikimedia  · org.

Cheers,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 22:54, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Feedback from Jonathan Morgan

@Npdoty: I think that the goals of this proposal are laudable, but I have some reservations. Note that although I am a WMF staff member, my opinions are my own. I do not work with the Grants team and I have no say in funding policy generally or in which projects get funded.

• Heads up that the terms of the Wikimedia Foundation Open Access Policy may require that any research materials generated by this project be published free/libre under an open license. Different academic conferences and journals have different policies around copyright and OA licensing, and many require you to pay an extra fee if you want your manuscript to be published open access. UC Berkeley may have policies around how content hosted on their servers is licensed. If your proposal is accepted by the Grants committee, I suggest you set up some time to speak with Mjohnson (WMF) about how to plan and/or budget for this.
• If I'm reading this right, only UC Berkeley students and faculty are eligible for the The I School Challenge program. Which means that WMF is essentially providing $10,000 of unconstrained grant funding to the University of California, which the university will disburse to its own students and faculty. I don't know if our financial policies specifically preclude this, but it seems strange to me that WMF would act as a pass through grantor on an online harassment project, given that we run our own Anti-Harassment Challenge program—one in which anyone can receive funding, regardless of their affiliation.
• How will this project benefit the Wikimedia Movement?

I think this is a worthy project. I'm just not sure WMF is the grantor to fund it. Cheers, Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 20:28, 3 September 2016 (UTC)