gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.switzerland

WCA - Telco 16. Juni 2013 (english)

Manuel Schneider — 2013-06-17T19:06:26

Dear all,

a short report from the Wikimedia Chapters Association, yesterday we had
a phone conference.
Participants and minutes can be found on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Meetings/2013-24

Here a short summary:

== Working Groups ==
The WCA has some working groups which are quite active around events
(offline meetings) but suffer from a lack of active participants during
the year. This is currently true for all working groups:

=== Chapters Manual ===
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WCA_Chapters_Manual

=== Chapters Exchange ===
Chapters exchange services / help.

*
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Chapters_Exchange

=== Peer Review ===
So far Wikimedia Estonia and Wikimedia Austria have been reviewed.
Reports are still due.

In Hong Kong there should be a workshop on peer review but Fæ won't be
there, so we are looking for a replacement.

* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Peer_review

=== WCA Journal ===
Something like an "international

WCA - Telco 16. Juni 2013

Manuel Schneider — 2013-06-17T18:41:02

Hallo zusammen,

ein kurzer Bericht von der Wikimedia Chapters Association (noch!),
gestern fand eine Telefonkonferenz statt.
Teilnehmer und Protokoll finden sich auf Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Meetings/2013-24

Hier eine kurze Zusammenfassung:

== Arbeitsgruppen ==
Es gibt in der WCA ein paar Arbeitsgruppen die rund um Veranstaltungen
(Offline-Treffen) recht aktiv sind, allerdings ansonsten unter zuwenig
Mitarbeit leiden. Das betrifft derzeit alle Arbeitsgruppen:

=== Chapters Handbuch ===
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WCA_Chapters_Manual

=== Chapters Exchange ===
Vereine tauschen Dienstleistungen / Hilfe aus.

*
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Chapters_Exchange

=== Peer Review ===
Bislang auditiert wurden Wikimedia Estland und Wikimedia Österreich,
Berichte darüber stehen aber noch aus.

Fæ erwähnte, dass das Review von WMAT wohl "excellent" verlaufen sei. In
Hong Kong soll es einen Workshop über Peer Review geben, allerdings

Wikimedia foundation 2013 Election

Charles Andrès — 2013-06-17T12:57:15


Dear Wikimedians in Switzerland!



==FR==

Depuis le 8 juin et jusqu'au 22 juin se tiennent trois élections importantes pour le mouvement Wikimedia.  Les membres de la communauté Wikimedia ont l’opportunité d’élire des candidat(e)s pour trois types de postes :

• Trois candidat(e)s au conseil d’administration pour un mandat de deux ans qui prendra fin en 2015. Le conseil d’administration est la plus haute autorité dirigeante de la Fondation Wikimedia, une organisation à but non lucratif enregistrée selon le statut 501(c)(3) aux États-Unis. La Fondation Wikimedia gère de nombreux projets tels que Wikipédia et Commons. 
• Deux candidat(e)s au Comité de répartition des fonds du conseil pour un mandat de deux ans.
• Un(e) candidat(e) comme médiateur du comité de répartition des fonds pour un mandat de deux ans.

Ces élections sont généralement fortement influencées par les communautés anglophones, il est important de faire aussi entendre la voix des autres communautés lin

PR - Wikipédia in jail

Chantal Ebongué — 2013-06-17T12:24:09

Wikipedia for prisoners  an unexpected partnership between a swiss prison
and Wikimedia CH

Since March 2013, prisoners who request can have an access to Wikipedia
offline (Kiwix project <http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page> ). The idea is
to stimulate or to support the interest for education of prisoners who were,
for a large majority, condemned to long-time sentences.

 

After three months of pilot phasis, the project is successful : Among the 36
prisoners of the Bellevues prison in Gorgier, 18 possess or rent a
computer. All of them requested the upload of Wikipedia offline on their PC.
For security reasons, swiss prisoners have a very restricted access to
internet.

 

More informations in the attached press releases, that was sent today to the
swiss media (ENG, DE, FR, IT)

 

Regards,

 

 

Chantal Ebongué 

Wikimedia CH -  <http://www.wikimedia.ch/> www.wikimedia.ch

Escaliers-du-Marché 2 - 1003 Lausanne - Switzerland  

Office +41 (0)21 340 66 20 - cell phone +41 (0)78 744 21 82

Skype : chan

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Manuel Schneider — 2013-06-11T11:51:06

Dear all,

just a few words. I won't engage in this discussion but I am reading it
all. Thanks for bringing up the topic, I hope it makes people more aware
of their responsibilities towards the data they handle and I am thankful
that through this discussion we found the one case where staff mails
were redirected, this has been fixed in the meantime (that person got
his mail address many years before as a volunteer, so I didn't notice
earlier).

There are some best practices in IT administration which I am following
and which have a sane cost-benefit ratio.

There is no difference in the kind of data we handle, it all gets the
same protection. I am aware that this is never a 100% perfect protection
but quite good depending our investment of money and effort. Hartwig is
also right sying that this will not save us from a government to spy on us.
As we have our own servers and there is plenty of cool open source
software around for all kind of problems I am using this wherever
possible. Also natural we are using

Wikimedia CH is hiring two new staff

Chantal Ebongué — 2013-06-11T09:05:45

Dear all,

 

We are looking for two new staff members :

 

1.       Chief Administrative Officer, 80-100 %, since 1.9.2013

2.       Chief Scientific Officer, 80-100 %, since 1.9.2013

 

Ads are attached, and are also published on www.wikimedia.ch , www.jobs.ch
and www.linkedin.com

 

Applications (or request for information) can be send to me or to
info< at >wikimedia.ch

 

Please inform you network !

 

Regards

 

Chantal Ebongué, CAO

Wikimedia CH -  <http://www.wikimedia.ch/> www.wikimedia.ch

Escaliers-du-Marché 2 - 1003 Lausanne - Switzerland  

Office +41 (0)21 340 66 20 - cell phone +41 (0)78 744 21 82

Skype : chantal.ebongue - chantal.ebongue< at >wikimedia.ch

 

 

_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Ilario Valdelli — 2013-06-11T11:32:33

I take care because I protect my email with a good password, no one has
access to my mailbox and I don't distribute to the mailing lists the mails
addressed directly to me.

Any other question of security is not in my hands.

What I am saying is that I have several other emails and if someone would
write me keeping their emails within Switzerland, it's sufficient to ask me
which is my "private" email.

regards


On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Emmanuel Engelhart <
emmanuel.engelhart< at >wikimedia.ch> wrote:

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Emmanuel Engelhart — 2013-06-11T10:37:51

Le 11/06/2013 12:28, Ilario Valdelli a écrit :

You obviously don't care about the privacy of email exchange: that's
unprofessional.

Emmanuel

_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Ilario Valdelli — 2013-06-11T10:28:18

What is the meaning of "unprofessional"?

If someone writes me his own credit card number in his email, I can use the
maximum of my professionality to protect him for this specific case, but I
cannot be responsible for his privacy at all because he has a strange
behavior and he can send his credit card number to everyone with the same
level of attention.

In Wikipedia it's frequent that people uses mailing lists for some private
data, but few people understand that the mailing lists are *public*. So who
is unprofessional? The WMF's team or the people using the mailing lists?

How much people fight with Google ranking because they discover to have
wrote stupidity in Internet and at the first places there have their
stupidity? Should Google stops to rank websites to be "professional"?

The law is clear. The companies storing data should operate in good faith,
but the people should take care of their own data and where they store
their own data.

If you gives the keys of your home to the first person meets in t

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Emmanuel Engelhart — 2013-06-11T09:57:30

Le 11/06/2013 11:34, Ilario Valdelli a écrit :

This approach is unprofessional, you have to do the necessary to
keep/protect the privacy of your email exchanges.

If you don't care, it's your right ; but at least take in consideration
the privacy concern of people writing to you, to the association. So,
it's not about you, your feelings or convenience.

We have the chance to have an IT infrastructure providing powerful
alternatives, so use it! If you have some difficulties setting up an
email client with different mailboxes, I'm ready to help you.

Emmanuel

_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Ilario Valdelli — 2013-06-11T09:34:44

Having managed for long time a huge mass of data of people, I would use a
Latin sentence: "Est modus in rebus"

To protect all data is a Sisiphus work, the same European law
differentiates between most critical data and they put several levels of
attention. The heath data, for instance, have a specific Swiss law to be
used and there is a stronger protection of them.

In the other hand the data like email address, phones, home address are
considered with a low level of priority.

Probably to protect us we should not use Ipad or Iphone or we should not
use free email account, the advantage to use gmail is that it is free, easy
to use and easy to configure in devices.

Every time we discover that our data are not protected in Internet it's
like to discover that green tee protects from cancer and we start to drink
liters of green tee but we definitively reach the maturity that we are full
of green tee and we start to disagree it. It would be better to drink green
tee but using the correct level.

So don't panic

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Emmanuel Engelhart — 2013-06-11T07:12:08

Le 10/06/2013 23:20, Frédéric Schütz a écrit :

The wiki works now pretty well and Manuel has increased the upload limit
to 32MB. IMO, this is the best place to store files which should be kept
for a long time.

Otherwise, for temporary usage, there are a few open source alternatives
which could be installed on our server to deliver a service similar to
dropbox (if the groupware doesn't already offer that):
http://hilalpost.com/fr/2013/01/24/alternatives-open-source-a-dropbox/

Regards
Emmanuel

_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Hartwig Thomas — 2013-06-11T06:18:37

I understand. So the only "third parties" that receive data from the Swiss Chapter are the organizations that run the servers in the US and therefore the NSA, the CIA, etc.

Hartwig


_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Frédéric Schütz — 2013-06-10T21:20:33


Thanks to Manuel, we have a full set of services available "locally" (on 
the servers he hosts) -- and a privacy policy that has been tailored to 
our situation, too.

Some informal exchanges of files are still done using Dropbox; now is 
probably a good time to get rid of them.


Full disclosure: I am one of the people who have their < at >wikimedia.ch 
email forwarded; in my case, it goes to a Swiss provider (with servers 
located in Switzerland). Everybody's situation is different; for me, 
this is much better (for practical reasons) than a mailbox.

F.

_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Emmanuel Engelhart — 2013-06-10T18:22:47

Hi Manuel

Le 10/06/2013 19:53, Manuel Schneider a écrit :

Your approach of promoting mailboxes vs. redirects makes a lot of sense.
If we achieve to do that for staff/board, we are on the secure side.

Other email addresses are less critical... but we should keep a vigilant
eye on that, we are responsible for our data... also if that could
bother users.


Great!

Good evening
Emmanuel

_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Manuel Schneider — 2013-06-10T17:53:42

Am 10.06.2013 19:31, schrieb Emmanuel Engelhart:

generally all users who have asked for a WMCH mail address are initially
offered an IMAP mailbox and I normally tell people why this is better
than a redirect - just out of practical reasons, put ideological / data
security aside.
Anyway, if it is the whish of the user to get his mail forwarded
instead, who am I to deny it?

Anything else - any restrictions - should be decided by the board.

Just as a summary what we are talking about, after a short look on the
mailserver:
* 6 redirects to gmail (Google) (1 staff)
* 1 redirect to Hotmail (Microsoft) (1 board)
* 2 swiss domains whose MX records point to swiss mailservers (both board)
* 5 addresses redirecting to the WMF

To be honest: I understand and agree with your scepticism towards
private data flowing through third parties which are bound to make
benefit with that data (Google and Hotmail are free, and not because the
are philantroph) even withing countries which are known to spy on their
citizens. Anyway

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Emmanuel Engelhart — 2013-06-10T17:31:19

Le 10/06/2013 18:23, Manuel Schneider a écrit :

Thank you very much for this detailed answer.

Congratulations for making WMCH infrastructure almost not depending of
these type of problematic services (not the same in all chapters).

The only point I see which could be improved is the forwarding to email
boxes at Google/Yahoo/Microsoft accounts.

I understand this is not under our direct control, but I think we should
try to avoid sending internal information to such type of accounts in
favour of companies/legislations which are more respectful of our data.

I propose to invite all concerned users to:
* create a WMCH mailbox for them
* change the target email address to something more acceptable like
email box from the provider or european web mails like GMX.

Would that be feasible?
Does something speaks against such type of restriction?

Kind regards
Emmanuel

_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/ma

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Manuel Schneider — 2013-06-10T16:23:57

Hi Emmanuel,

I can only speak about the processes within WMCH which are know to me or
where I am part of.
So far these processes mainly use self-hosted IT ressources. On our four
server instances we run a variety of services:
* mail (SMTP/IMAP)
* webserver / content management systems / wikis
* shell / file access (ssh / sftp)
* videoconferencing
* groupware / calendars / address books / ActiveSync
* file server / webDAV storage
* backup server
The servers for this are technically and physically under full control
of WMCH (me as a member and contractor of WMCH) and located in a
datacentre in Germany which I am paying for space, access control,
power, a/c and bandwidth. Exceptions are the office and backup servers
which are virtual hosts located on a physical server in our Lausanne office.

External services regularly used are:
* phone / SIP lines via Swisscom
* internet connectivity via Swisscom
* mobile phones via Orange and Swisscom

Other external services we don't use as infrastructure:
* sometimes we u

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Emmanuel Engelhart — 2013-06-10T12:57:27

Le 10/06/2013 14:41, Hartwig Thomas a écrit :

My request is specifically targeted to WMCH, our swiss chapter, not to
any other entity of our movement.

Emmanuel



_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l

Re: Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Hartwig Thomas — 2013-06-10T12:41:41

I believe that such a "precise list" is an illusion.

The servers as well as the legal bodies are in the US and thus are subject to US law.
Therefore the operators of these servers will do anything the law requires them to do, just as an operator ("provider") in Switzerland would have to follow the Swiss laws (BÜPF, Nachrichtendienst-Gesetz, ...). The US law does not - like the Swiss or European privacy laws - require these operators to reveal to the person whose data are stored, how they are used or to whom they are given. Quite the contrary some of these US laws require the operators to keep this kind of information secret. It is unreasonable to believe, that Wikimedia Foundation would break such US laws, just because some Europeans have a different idea of privacy.

Besides the Internet technology is "open". So the operators of these "cloud" servers have absolutely no control over the path any TCP/IP package takes between here and their server. So even if they did give us a "precise list", it would be wo

Do we use (american) cloud solutions at WMCH Q

Emmanuel Engelhart — 2013-06-10T09:42:28

Hi

The last PRISM scandal show us again how the american governement and
web companies don't care about our private data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29

On the other side, our members deserve a total privacy regarding their data.

So, my question is pretty simple and for Manuel, who is certainly the
only one with the right overview: Which precise usage does the
association internally do of (American) cloud solutions (Facebook,
Twitter, Google, Dropbox, Skype...)?

Setting-up a precise list of services with use cases would be IMO
extremely useful to evaluate our current dependance.

Regards
Emmanuel


_______________________________________________
http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website
Wikimediach-l mailing list
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l