Opening the Wiki

From AFSWiki

In April of 2009 the National Council discussed “whether or not the majority of wiki pages should remain password protected or whether (in an effort to allow easier access to all volunteers) we should allow open read/print only access to the majority of pages.” The National Council unanimously approved a motion to open the Wiki. This action was confirmed in September when the National Council approved the method of making pages public or private and delegated this determination to the IT Advisory Group. However, there are still some concerns about this decision and at their November meeting the NC voted to delay the date for such action until following their face-to-face meeting in late January 2010. The purpose of this page is to list and allow for discussion of this topic.

Contents 1 Decision policy on what will be open and what will be private 2 Procedures to be implemented 3 Technical details 4 Issues with the above that cause concern

Decision policy on what will be open and what will be private

These privacy rules will be posted on a new Wiki privacy policy page.

• Personal information about volunteers/staff (address, phone number, email address) – these are restricted to the user: pages and may be linked to, but not listed in the public pages. Staff work phone numbers are ok to list.
• Information about participants is limited to that which is ok according to CSIET/State Department guidelines, i.e. first name and country, but not last name, city, etc. These types of references are usually in newsletters, copies of which are kept in the Wiki.
• School information – contact information, policies, etc. – even if much of this information is publically available, making it easy for others to find here is not a good practice. (Note that we have information about 90 schools in 4 states at this point. This information will be moved to Global Link in the future, but for the time being it is here since the school information in OPUS is not accessible by volunteers.)
• Internal operations – such articles as summary results of audits, decisions on hosting/sending numbers or finances, strategies, etc. – anything that might cast a negative light on AFS or expose our future strategies to our competitors or other who are critical of the exchange student industry.
• Generic UserIDs and/or passwords to outside services (e.g. Culturegrams) where use is restricted by contract to our registered volunteers.

Procedures to be implemented

• The current verbage on the create/edit screen states "Before submitting an edit which is considered confidential, or intended for internal readers only, please ensure that this page is not listed on the AFSWiki Anonymously Readable Whitelist." This would be replaced with verbage stating, "The default for information on this Wiki is that all except user: and private: pages will be open to the general public. If the contents of this page are considered confidential or intended for internal readers only, please refer to the procedures for making information private." The latter part of this phrase will be a link to a page containing the above decision policy as well as the procedure for making the page private, i.e. by putting "private:" before the page name.
• Enforcement of the policy would be done by having the system administrators and perhaps some other volunteers viewing the "most recently changed" pages on a daily basis to ensure that private information is not posted on public pages and that private pages are not used for public information according to the above decision policy.
• Since the majority of the current Wiki updates are submitted by a relatively small number of people, many of whom are AFS staff, the staff will be given some training on the decision rules for private v. public pages in the Wiki (all of the recent violations of public/private rules have been by staff).
• This training will also note that attached documents should be in a non-editable form, i.e. a .pdf, so that other cannot download them and make modifications to them.

Technical details

• Anonymous readers, i.e. those who do not logon to the Wiki with a logonID and password, would not be able to use the edit or history tabs of any page.
• Anonymous readers would not be able to view or link to any page in the user: or private: namespace.
• The ability to have certain pages marked for read-only would be maintained and would be used for things which volunteers should not be able to edit such as CSIET policies. Flagging these pages is a function reserved for only the system administrators.
• The MediaWiki software does not allow protection of attached documents by putting them in a different namespace. However, since locating of attached documents is nearly impossible without being able to find the link to these documents in an associated article, this protection is done by only putting a link to such a document on a private: page.

Issues with the above that cause concern

• US copyright law is generally not followed outside of the US, so AFS-developed materials such as manuals could easily be copied and used by others.

1. A possible solution to this is to add manuals such as orientation materials to the private: namespace
2. The reality of copyrighted material is that it is to deter honest people and is only effective for those willing to spend the time and lawyer fees to fight an infringement in court.
3. AFS produces thousands of press printed manuals each year - at what cost - that are freely distributed. Any of these manuals or documents could be reproduced electronically by means of an OCR (Optical Character Reader) software which is readily available. If someone wanted to steal our documents they probably already have.
4. Any documents of concern could / should be distributed as an Acrobat (pdf) document which can be password locked against viewing, printing, editing and any combination of the above.

• Some people view our manuals as important documents which should not be made available to the general public.

1. Public awareness of our meticulous procedures and detailed handling of participants can only be good publicity.
2. Sensitive materials have already been privatize on the Wiki.
   1. Those making a decision on this issue should familiarize themselves with the documents that have already been privatized.
   2. If additional documents need to be privatized they should be named specifically to the Wiki Admin Team for action and not treated in generalities.

• Some think that since the Wiki is becoming such a vital part of AFS-USA that we should automatically give a logonID and password to every volunteer.

1. This would require a new system of communicating new registrations from the Volunteer Development Staff to the Wiki group.
2. If this new standard is implemented and the current volunteer team managing the Wiki is not available are you willing to impose the maintenance of the Wiki on Staff to comply with the standard?
3. Under the new open proposal the only benefit of registering on the Wiki would be to read private documents and to edit article pages.
   1. Of the 20 NC members 11 have never edited their own Wiki user page.
4. Comments to the Wiki team from volunteers has been “I have no interest in the Wiki, I only need to file my support report.”