 Hello, welcome again to Wikimania 2022. My name is Mariana Iskander. I'm the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. What a pleasure to follow that incredible ceremony honoring so many Wikimedians and actually delighted to continue the conversation with some of our awardees in this session. Those of you who have joined, we're gonna talk about making meaning of the strategic direction of our movement strategy. I'm honored to be joined by three and in spirit for amazing Wikimedians. Our time for the session is a bit short. So I will give an overview, introduce our panelists, and then hand off to get us started. I am joined today by my colleague at the Wikimedia Foundation and a long-term Wikipedian himself, Guillaume Pamier. I am joined by Lydia Pinscher of Wikimedia Deutschland, who's the product manager at Wikidata. And without much of an introduction joined by our incredible Wikimedian of the year Olga of Bolivia, we were due to be joined as well by our newcomer of the year, Dr. Nkem. She seems to be having connection difficulties. So I will insert some comments on her behalf that we discussed in a prep session if she's not able to join us. We're gonna run the session by first inviting Guillaume to provide a bit of historical perspective and original intent around the concepts of knowledge as a service and knowledge equity. We'll then turn to Olga and Dr. Nkem in her absence to talk a bit about how knowledge equity looks in practice and in implementation and on the ground. And then we'll come to Lydia to talk about knowledge as a service. Guillaume, I'll hand over to you. Thank you. So a few years ago, back in 2017, the entire movement went through this really intense co-creation process to figure out a strategic direction for the Wikimedia movement. And at the end of that process, we agreed on a common strategic direction of knowledge equity and knowledge as a service. And in my mind, it was really the culmination and the realization that we are a social technical movement and the strategic direction was recognizing both the social aspect of our work and the technical platform and tools. But it's not just a one-to-one match between social and technical and knowledge as a service and knowledge equity. It's really a mix. They're really intertwined. And I'm hoping that our panelists can share more about, you know, how these are mixed together. I think the only other thing I would say in terms of historical context is that the strategic direction was really about opening ourselves up, opening up the platform to connect to more interfaces and more sources of knowledge, but also opening ourselves up to all the people who have been left out. So far. Thank you for that, Yom. We have made an intentional effort at the Wikimedia Foundation to take on these two pillars of the movement strategy and guiding our work through our annual planning process and trying to, as I said, make meaning of how the movement strategy is implemented. 2030 isn't that far away. So let's turn our attention to what knowledge equity looks like on the ground. We have to start by first saying congratulations again to you, Olga, and just so delighted to have your voice continue in this session. The question I think is how you define and see knowledge equity in the work that you do, again, on the ground and practical and tangible, and what are the lessons there for our movement? I seem to have lost Olga from the screen. So I'm gonna shift gears, Lydia, and we're gonna come to you and we'll come back to Olga when we see her again. Let's shift to the second strategic pillar, which is knowledge as a service. This is a phrase I've heard people interpret differently, so it'll be good to hear what it means to you and how you see it showing up in the work of WikiData. Thank you so much. Knowledge as a service is pretty core to the ideas behind WikiData, and I think WikiData is very crucial to getting us to knowledge as a service. And for me, it is all about getting our knowledge out there and empowering others to use all that amazing knowledge that we have that is sometimes locked up in our project so far and finding new ways to give people access to that knowledge and finding new audiences for all that knowledge. And of course, WikiData is a very central piece of that, helps us achieve that. For example, people have very different ideas about how they want to consume our content. Maybe not everyone wants to read a Wikipedia article, but maybe someone prefers playing a game or watching a video and so on. And with the help of WikiData as one really crucial building block to making that possible, to building a new app, to building a new service, to building a game, what have you, I think it's pretty crucial to that. And it also acts as a way to all the content we have in our projects. So we have Wikipedia, but we also have all these other projects with media commons, WikiVoyage, Witchnery to name just a few that have so much interesting and important content that has been overlooked, I think, for way too long. And through WikiData, it's much easier to get to that and to spread it to the people who value it and who need it. And maybe Lydia's a follow-up question. When you look to 2030 and the aspirations of the movement strategy, what is it that you see in 2030 about movement, both movement strategy and knowledge as a sort of, what does it look like? What does the world look like at that point? Right. I think our knowledge is getting to people in many, many new ways. And we don't require people necessarily to come to us to get that knowledge, but to find it where they want to have it and to contribute to it, where they want to contribute to it. And I think another side effect of all this is that we move away from Wikipedia and especially English Wikipedia is this one most important project to lifting up all the projects we have in the movement, which I think is a beautiful thing. Thank you for that, Lydia. We seem to be having ongoing connection challenges with our other two panelists, Olga and Dr. Kim. So I'm just gonna pause. And if they don't reappear, what I can do is share some of their reflections on knowledge equity that Lydia can confirm we discussed in our panel preparatory conversation a few days ago in the context of newcomers and particularly those in Africa. I just want to say that Dr. Kim had some important insights about the role of physical spaces and libraries in particular. I see we've got Olga back, so let's try again. Really ask you, Olga, for your reflections not only on knowledge equity as a concept, but again, practically how does that look for you and the work that you do in your community? I'm just gonna pause and see if Olga heard the question. I see her in the screen, so hoping she's here with us. Okay, I think what we're gonna just do in the interest of both time and giving Olga an opportunity to connect if she can is to share, as I said, a few reflections from our newcomer of the year winner, Dr. Kim, who talked about two aspects of knowledge equity that were important to bring into this session even in her absence as a panelist. One, which is a common theme we've heard, I think, across many knowledge equity conversations, which is about Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects providing an opportunity for all stories to get told and that the need for representation in all of its forms, including historical knowledge and sources, and one being able to see themselves in their own story in free knowledge. The second point was around the agency of being able to tell one's own story and particularly for newcomers joining from all over the world, but in this case, Dr. Kim was talking about newcomers from the African continent and the importance of knowledge equity providing the agency of being able to tell one's own story. I'm gonna try one more time with Olga, who I see back in the feed and see if you can hear me and we can get your reflections as well. We seem to continue to be struggling Olga. I see you, but I can't hear you. Okay, we'll give it a few more seconds. Otherwise, Olga, I will do my best to represent your input on your behalf, which is not ideal, but better than not hearing your reflections in any form. Well, similar to the prior reflections, what I want to convey, and again, we'll keep trying to hear Olga's message in her own voice, was how important knowledge equity means for again, telling untold stories. And if you reflect back on those of you who participated in the prior presentation, the number of contributions from technical contributions to even the media contributions with Annie and our other winners is how much we can provide avenues into the free knowledge projects for volunteers and people. I think as one of the awardees said, can see that these are stories being told by people like them and that knowledge in its entire sum for all of humanity comes from all of those that seem to be able to access not just Wikipedia, I think as Lydia said, but the number of projects that provide entry points in. I'm gonna pause and try to give Olga what may be close to the final word if we're able to hear her and get the Spanish interpretation working. I think, unfortunately, our technical difficulties are gonna continue. So what I'm gonna do in the interest of both time and ensuring those of you who want to join the board of trustees conversation are able to do so on time is to ask for one closing reflection. Lydia, I'm gonna come back to you as our live panelists. I hope that I've done justice to the inputs from the other two and just maybe ask as we close the session and you look forward to the year ahead, particularly for Wikidata, what is it that excites you the most in terms of Wikidata's efforts getting us closer to knowledge as a service? There are a ton of exciting things. And I think I'm especially excited Wikidata acting as the central place where everyone can contribute from many different parts of the movement and everyone else benefiting from it, right? Instead of everyone working in their own projects and silos and getting more of that into our movement, I think will be really, really cool and beneficial for both knowledge as a service and knowledge equity. Fantastic, thank you, Lydia. Well, my apologies, the technical difficulties of all kinds prevented us from being able to have the panel we had hoped. There is a useful suggestion that we might do a recorded session later and post it for those of you who joined expecting to hear from panelists who unfortunately struggled with technical difficulties. We will wrap early so that those of you, again, wanting to attend other sessions or join the session with the Board of Trustees are able to do so on time. Thank you very much for dialing in. Thank you, Lydia. Thank you, Guillaume. And we will regroup in some other format to be able to bring you the voices that couldn't join us live and on camera. Thank you.