 in real life. Hello and thank you everybody for joining this discussion. It would start by introducing yourself for one and a half minutes or so roughly. The floor is yours. We would start with Chris. Chris, the floor is yours. Sorry for the trick. Thank you. So, hello. My name is Chris Keating. I've been a Wikipedia since 2004. I served for a while as chair and as trustee of Wikimedia UK and I think that's given me some good experience that will make me an effective WMF board member. When I took over as chair in 2012, there was essentially a governance crisis going on which I was able to step into. Commission and external governance review sought out those issues and within a year moved us being in a crisis to being one of the best governed organisations in the Wikimedia movement. So, that was then. What's that got to do with now? WMF is going to have some challenges over the next three years. We don't know what they're going to be. We don't know what the future holds. But since I steered one Wikimedia ship through a storm, I think I'd be well placed to help the WMF overcome its next challenges, whatever they are. Also, I've worked a lot in volunteer movements outside of the Wikimedia movement. I think I have a deep understanding of how the relationship between the foundation and the various communities can work. I think I'll be in a good position to shape the WMF board to keep it focused on supporting volunteers and on sustaining a positive relationship between the WMF and the communities. Thank you. Will you show up next? Sorry, Chris. Will you show next? Okay, so I'm Milo Šančić. I'm a Wikimedia since 2003. In 2004, I built the community around the Wikimedia in Serbia language and other community parts of Serbia. From 2005, we organized Wikimedia Serbia as the sixth chapter of the Wikimedia movement. So, I was working on chapter issues for, I don't know, three years then, then again, between 2009 and 2012, and we built the related office and what big stuff. But for the most of the time, for the most of my Wikimedia time, I was actually involved in quite different things. I've been a member since 2008. I was a third from 2007. I was 13. I was a member of a couple of other committees, relations committee, third committee, nominating committee, and so on. I'm not a stone, those are the committees. And that I was doing various things on the projects I put in and working a lot of like with the requirements for provisioning for writing and so on. As a steward and the member of language committee and then a relations committee, I learned our movement. I was interested in our movement in depth, a number of quite complex issues. And the last thing, let's say, the last, but I mean, it is not, it's not possible. It is, it's when everything, but the last thing which I did is, I did not did, but initiated is Afrocrowd, which is basically the initiative led now by Alice Baker and with the aim to incorporate black Americans into the big media movement. But as my last, my last information is that actually the initiative is actually is growing up and it will soon become the initiative to incorporate actually African diaspora media movement. I would finish with that. Thank you very much. Darius, you're up next. Hi, I'm Darius Jermynek. I'm a professor of management from Poland. And I think there are five reasons why I'm good at candidate for the board. First of all, I have experienced from management roles in the movement. I've been an admin, a bureaucrat, a check user. It gave me insight into how my home community, but also I have experienced from the roles of steward and check user. So I was able to understand the nature of certain threats to our content. In my role of an ombudsman, it made me realize how even very high functionaries failed to understand some of our privacy policies. And my role of the FBC member and actually an elected chair for three terms, I understood how various of our athletes operate. I also had experience on the board, the two years on the board helped as well. But the second thing that I think is important for the board member that I bring is the ability to resist pressure. I speak up against the others if I need to. I stand up for the values. The super protect wouldn't happen if people stood up against it. But I'm also able to collaborate. I believe that just being a lone wolf doesn't work. On the board, it's important to be able to cooperate with the others even if we do not agree. I've proven this during our leadership prizes. The fourth thing is I think bringing real expertise. Wikimedia is number one, no source on the internet with top traffic. We need world-class experts on the board. Ideally, in my view, actually all board members should be both deeply negligible about our community and experts. And we dearly need experts from knowledge industries such as universities or libraries. I'm the only full professor among the candidates. I have strong research and publication record from top universities such as Harvard, MIT or Berkeley. I also professionally specialize in knowledge intensive organizations. And finally also bring real experience from being a board member of an organization of this size while the experience of being the WMF board member helps. I think it's even more valuable to bring experience from other NGOs. I've been on the board of the Copernicus Science Center, one of the largest science centers in this region of Europe with more than one million visitors per year for over five years. I've consulted them on strategy development. I've also been hired as a strategy consultant for NGOs before. So I think I'm bringing real experience and expertise to the table. Thank you very much. Back to James, you next. Great. Thank you. So I'm James Heilman. I'm an emergency physician in Wikipedia. I've been an active Wikipedia since 2008. I edit Wikipedia more or less every day. I've made more than 200,000 human-made edits over the last 10 years. I've been involved in many aspects of the movement. My core activity has been editing Wikipedia and involvement with the community. I was also one of the founding members of Wikimedia Canada. I was one of the founding members of Wikiproject Med Foundation, one of our user groups that has more than a couple hundred members now. Other aspects of my work have included collaboration with a lot of outside organizations. I began the efforts at UCSF that have resulted in a medical elective being offered there to medical students that's now in its eighth rotation. I've worked with the World Health Organization to improve Wikipedia's medical content and my efforts there have resulted in a, or did result in a Wikipedia in residence at that institution. One of my favorite collaborations has been with the organization Translators of Borders that has resulted in the translation of more than six million words of text into some of 100 different languages. With respect to other academic work, I have taken a Wikipedia oracle through the formal peer review process and had it published in the academic press. I think, you know, building off Darius' content, one of the important things we need to do as a movement is we need to improve the opinion of Wikipedia among academics. And I think, you know, to do that we need to more involve academia in Wikipedia. With respect to further efforts on the board, I think one of the key aspects of a board member is, you know, we need board members who are willing to make the board accountable to the movement as a whole. One of the issues we face is, or that we have faced over the last couple of years, is, you know, the board is more or less self-perpetuating. You know, while we're running in this election, it's not a true election. You know, one of the things I would like to see is for it to become a true election. Another thing that's key is, you know, we need to involve our wider movement in the Wikimedia Foundation. And to do this, we, you know, the Wikimedia Foundation needs a great deal of transparency. Over the last couple of years, I've been a champion for transparency within our movement. You know, during the difficulties we experienced 18 months ago, I led, you know, many of the efforts to increase awareness among them, increase awareness for the wider movement, surrounding issues regarding the knowledge engine. And of course, you know, those were key to many of the changes and many of the improvements that we have seen in the last 18 months. Thank you, James. Hi, everyone. My name is Yuri. And some of you might know me as Yuri. It's actually very hard to speak up to James, whom I support 100%. And if you have to choose between me and James, I would actually choose James. That said, I've been with the movement since 2005. First, tried to contribute a little bit with the text, but then realized that my programming skills might be much more valuable. And so I started writing and running bots, I actually have over two and a half million bot edits, as well as 30,000 plus, 35,000 plus manual edits. I do have a unique perspective among candidates. I've actually been both a volunteer, as well as I've actually been employed by the Foundation as a engineer and later a team lead of interactive team. I was in the middle of the knowledge engine discussion. And I was working for a discovery team at the time. And I did object the search engine direction that WMF was taking based on my community experience. I dream of Wikipedia that engages readers. And it's also fun. It has to be fun for both readers and writers. Actually, I'll just show some of the things I like to talk about on my screen. And it would be much easier to talk about it. So I hope you can see my screen. And I think you do. Okay, so I wrote a while ago this thing called a dream of content, where I outlined how I perceive Wikipedia and other projects to develop. I'm not going to go too deep into it. But the main thing is that it has to engage the readers. It has to be fun. Otherwise, it gets boring. Only text is just... Very few people can be determined enough to go through all just the text without being able to play with content. We, after 16 years since inception on Wikipedia, still do not have maps on every Wiki enabled. The maps are there, but very few Wikis can fully embed them. So you cannot have a map like this where you can drag and drop it and you can look at the different information about the map. For example, like, who is the governor of the state? And you can find that out and you can click on it and see who the person is. But beyond that, we are forced to upload images mostly to tell a story. One thing that I feel that we have had a lot of discussion about data verifiability, fake facts, other aspects. Well, Wikipedia cannot tell a story without being able to store proper data, like large amounts of data to tell a story. Like, this is GDP data by state as a table, something you can already do on comments. But that data has to be represented. Like, for example, this graph takes from that data and able to show you what the GDP of each state is. And you can view it in a historic way. And you can compare it like how it developed in the past six years. Like North Dakota, for example, grew much faster than other states, possibly due to oil. Graphs have to be translatable. It has to very easily translate from one language to another. So you don't have to recreate the graph 500 times, once per language and once per Wiki project. Because if you do something for Wiki News, you don't want to recreate it for Wikipedia or Wikipedia. You have to do it once, as well as translation. Like, for example, this graph, I want to be able to view that same graph in Greek and not need to translate it. The graph has to be automatically translatable. I did a lot of demos for graphing and how it can be done. Like, some of you might know page view API graphs that I did a while ago. There's a lot of little toys that you can do. But this has to go as an organized effort to improve the content and the fun factor of Wikipedia and another one. This is something that a volunteer from Russian Wikipedia and myself did together. This is still work in progress, an ability to view the night sky and view how the stars change. Weather data. Weather data, you should be able to, if you're telling the story about global warming, for example, you should be able to tell how it changed. You should be able to view it in terms of changing for New York City or some other location. I would like to yield the floor at this point. Let's see how do I start sharing. There we go. To other candidates, and hopefully hear some questions as well. Thank you very much. Yurik, Maria, are you next? Thank you. I'm Maria Sefidari. I've been a long time Wikimedian. I've been editing for the last 11 years. I started out on English Wikipedia and I then went to Spanish Wikipedia. I'm an administrator there. I've held a number of roles there. I focus not only on Wiki, but also of Wiki. I believe very strongly that it's incredibly important to join with other people. I believe very strongly on collaboration in order to get things done, things like what we achieve with our projects every day. I have helped create a chapter, Wikimedia Spain. I have helped create a user group, Wikimohedias. My focus has always been about bringing all the voices that we are missing. It's true I had a particular focus both for LGBT and women. I created the LGBT Wikipedia project on Spanish Wikipedia, which was extremely successful. And as for women, I participated in a variety of initiatives. The latest one is helping organize the second edition of Wikimedian that will be happening in a couple of months. Aside from that, I am currently serving on the board of trustees. I am the vice chair. I joined the board arguably at its lowest moment of the crisis. Those were hard times. The board was in total disarray. The community was very worried and very disturbed by what was happening. And so the board had to change its dynamics and we had to go through a part of that group that since then has hired a new executive director and has launched what I believe is the most ambitious movement strategy process for the next 15 years. We're trying something new. We're trying to be incredibly inclusive and bring all the voices that normally we wouldn't hear about. I'm running because I believe I can not only provide a different voice and a different experience to the board, but also because I want to see through this strategy process. Now that we've dealt with the crisis, I want to go further. I want to see exactly what we can do all of us together, not only in terms of thinking about the future, but this is the time when we have hopefully started to reach all the communities that before we weren't able to reach. Now it's when they join the conversation. Now it's when we become a global movement, we get out of our little bubble of the media ecosystem and we start talking with other movements and we start impacting the world because that's what I believe all of us want, including all the other candidates, right? It's to have an impact on the world and to fulfill our mission to make a free knowledge accessible to every single human being in the planet. I believe I bring institutional memory. I believe I bring a ton of experience. I've proven myself I can work within the board. I can get things done. I can help the board be a group that works together where everybody is heard, where we reach consensus and then we move forward. Thank you very much. Thank you, Maria. How about you next? Well, hello everyone. I'm Abad, a 20-year-old from Jordan and a first-year English literature student. I have started my first contributions in Wikipedia from quite a long time actually. It was around 2006. I was still in elementary school, but I haven't initiated my actual account and started as a regular contributor until 2009, so I'm much more late than most people here, I guess. I also don't think I have never been heard of for most of the people here, because my work is actually very focused on the Arabic Wikipedia and the Arabic-speaking region in general. I have been editing for quite a while. I mostly write long articles on Wikipedia. I have like over a thousand articles, but I also do like have a decent organizational experience. I have been involved in the Wikipedia education program since the sludge in the Middle East in 2012. I have also been involved in Wikilev's monuments for several years, and I have been a co-founder of a user group, as well as a vice director of original conference, Wikia Arabia, passed last year. However, I don't think that my experience can compare to most of the other candidates. I am actually, I have actually thought a lot about it before running for the elections, but I have to say that my main motivation is that compared to my region and the low level of awareness of Wikipedia in general, I think that my contributions are relatively decent for the Arabic and generally Middle Eastern and Asian communities. And I have also been, I have also been a little surprised that almost no people from underrepresented groups were running for elections this year. So that that was a main part of my decision. I have to say that I also have like plenty of ideas that I would like to speak up, but I'm not sure if that exactly verifies as a reason for running for elections. So I don't have much else to say, and good luck to everyone. Thank you very much Abad. We will now start with community questions, which will come through the YouTube channel and IRC, which we have in the background running. People who would like to share their questions, we will be welcoming them now. If you want some specific person to answer them, please don't do that and bring on the questions. And since I prepared one question for myself, I'll start with that. Can you please describe the relationship you think should be between the community and WMF? We will start in the opposite order, so our body would be first for this question. Abad, can you hear us? Oh yes, I can. Sorry, the microphone was muted. So can you repeat please? I'm really sorry. I would like you to share your thoughts about the relationship between the WMF and the community. I have to say that I'm not one of the people who are most involved with the community issues relating to the Community Foundation because I'm basically highly focused on my local community. But I have been following on a general level with the past controversial issues in the last few years, like the visual editor thing and the knowledge search engine. And I really believe that there were many crises over the recent period more than there had been ever before, which was very challenging for the Foundation and for the both particularly since it's made up of volunteers. But these problems had been really declining in the recent months after the appointment of the last Executive Director and the relations between the WMF and the community seems to be improving a lot, which is good. I also think that the recent approach to the strategy process is really unique and is helping so much in bridging the relationships between the WMF and the community because this strategy process has involved the wider movement and the discussion in a way that has never happened before. The basic idea of recruiting strategic coordinators and discussion coordinators to facilitate discussions in languages other than English was very successful and very successful at attracting people who would never been heard of under normal circumstances. So many others presented the groups like for example the Arabic community in my region, the Asian communities in East Asia and even in Latin America and other places had so many statements and so many comments to add to the strategy process even though when the discussion is normally held on meta in English language, they would almost never participate. I see this as a very positive step, especially that this strategy process will define the future of the moment for so much longer than any other strategic plan before and I also think that the foundation is generally taking the right approach to things. However, there's also always a room for improvement, so I don't think it would be bad for like some more communication channels to be opened. I'm mainly concerned that must ways to communicate with the foundation now are kind of limited to those experienced editors who invest so much of their time on meta wiki and such places where like normal users and normal writers or new users on our wiki projects would not exactly know their way around. So you would never find like a normal contributor who has been on Wikipedia for like only a few months or a year or two coming to meta and participating in these community-wide scary discussions that are related to the validation issues. So I think there should be more ways to access these people, these people who do most of the actual work on Wikipedia and on other wiki projects in order to hear their voices and their concerns because I actually think they are so different than the concerns of the experienced editors who have been on wiki projects for seven or eight years or more and who actually make up the majority of the people who participate in most of the sensitive discussions and maybe who talk, who speak up most of the complaints that we constantly hear. This is actually highly influenced by my work with many new wikipedia in the education program at in my university which I have noticed that always have money problems and worries that no one ever speaks up in the community out loud and that's my main point. Thank you very much Abad. Maria you are up next. Thank you. I agree with Abad. I think that things have been improving markedly in the relationship between the communities and the WMF. I think something that has been done very well because we knew that we couldn't reach a lot of people, right? Not everyone is subscribed to wiki media. Not everyone is following Wikipedia weekly on Facebook so we need to get out a little out of the bubble and reach those voices that we knew were not participating but were active and so very active in the local communities. So one thing that happened with the strategy process that we've seen for example was getting community news songs, getting people that worked and edited in those projects and have them do the entire process and interact with the people of their local communities and have a back and forth because I think it's so fine and well to inform communities in their BH camps that you know this is happening like for example the elections, right? Giving the notices that the elections are happening and having them translated is already a big step but there's room for improvement there for example but I think it was last week or two weeks ago the content translation tool stopped working, right? And most people didn't know what was happening and that's an area that for example there could have been more proactive action, right? There could have been a message sent to the communities in the different village camps because most radius had no idea what was happening so I think there is room for improvement there but I think we are in the right direction that WMF definitely knows that it is important to reach all the different communities and that's on Wiki, of Wiki I think we are having marked improvement in the relationship with the affiliates I think there's again a lot of room for improvement I think AFCOM for example the Relations Committee is very good at interacting especially with the new affiliates those that have less formal relationship with the WMF because they don't ask for grants or they don't ask they're not part of the education program or so on so I think that's something that I would like to see WMF take a little bit more of a proactive interaction especially with all the new user groups but I think we are in the right path. Thank you very much Maria. You are up next. Hi I'll try to be very brief this time um transparency this is probably the biggest issue the biggest aspect that community could benefit from uh from WMF and the board doing community should always be highly aware of everything that's going on we should not engage in any kind of secret grant dealings um in short community should decide what is needed WMF should implement what community decides is needed and the board should coordinate this process and that's pretty much it thank you. Thank you very much Yuri. Okay next that would be Doc James. Great thank you so our movement has one amazing strength and that is our communities we need to engage and collaborate and we need to collaborate as as equals um that was one of the big issues with SuperProtect it imbalanced the relationship between the wiki media foundation and the communities and this is why that is the reason why it pushed so hard to see SuperProtect removed and it was um our new idea is great uh we however should have hired her in November of uh of 2015 um you know with respect to transparency for for our movements to engage with the wiki media foundation we need a great deal of transparency um by the wiki media foundation uh in October of 2015 when I was on the board of the wiki media foundation and I became aware of um uh the night foundation grant and and the knowledge engine I offered at that point in time to write an overview of what was going on uh from the board's perspective for the signpost you know I think the signpost is a very uh critical um um you know part of our movement and provides important checks and balances and it would be good to see you know the board publishing statements their positions their thoughts in the signpost in a more regular basis and if I'm elected uh I would very uh you know I've offered to take that on or I'll I'll be negotiating that with the signpost so I'll stop there building on what Maria and James said I think it is essential that the community has its very special role satisfied I think the WMF has uh it's not an equal of the community I think the WMF has a supporting role to the community I think the community is basically the main fuel of and the main competitive advantage point of what we do so I think the relations should be ideally should be hand in hand we I had a conversation today I think the WMF mistakes of the past was not communicating early and was not discussing with the community early enough even with very sensible ideas like visual editor I think lots of great ideas can be implemented but they should be announced first discussed with the community and only then introduced into the deployment stage so what I would like to see would be the WMF collaborating with the community hand in hand but really got what Maria said I also think it is very important to have a wider reach than just the English speaking community I think it is essential that we reach out to smaller communities which we currently don't I think the strategy building process is a very good starting point because we started reaching out to other communities but as a board member in the future if you like me I will make sure that we follow up with this job thanks thank you very much Milos you're up next so I want to say that during the past couple of years there could be seen quite let's say significant improvement in relation to the relation between WMF and community however it is still on the lines which are not enough for representation of the for the real representation of the community so for example the strategy process which is definitely the best we had till the present is also involved just quite organized groups uh chapters thematic organizations committees someone is on and user groups of course through user groups we have definitely bigger representation of the community itself but the community itself is on wikis not offline it is online and in relation to that let's say for 15 years more than 15 years mechanisms the is making decisions so mechanisms in the form in the forms of on wiki discussions in the forms of particular in the forms of voting for particular issues cannot be addressed cannot be addressed by media foundation to now there are possible methods how to solve that however the most to do that is definitely to create an assembly of the wikimedia movement through which most of them just editing online to express their opinion and their uh wikimedia and political will that's it the chameleon chris you're the last for this round of questions then i will press on to the next question from the community chris the floor is yours and you're muted and we can't hear you so please unmute yourself over um to protect the height of the letter some of the other more high profile problems between WMF and community uh last year and i was thinking actually lots of these seem familiar because many of the dynamics of the relationship between WMF and chapters or communities are similar to the dynamics that you have between other non-profits that have a bunch of people in a building with a budget and even more people are actually doing more for the impact of the organization as volunteers um so i wrote this essay please do read it if you haven't already it's very good um actually i was asked to send this at a WMF staff session and there's a video of that so if you want another 90 minutes of youtube wikimedia to watch i'll send you the link um essentially there's uh these the kind of recommendations and i will actually if i have to flip this out and take it as a checklist to WMF board meetings to see whether we're confident that we're actually handling things the right way i mean communication is obviously vital uh equally sometimes there isn't the time or space for communication on a particular topic some topics are not that important it's also about being as open to alternative solutions alternative formulations and then when you decide there needs to be a conversation to make sure that there's plenty of time and space for that to be happening so that is the short version um now uh let's switch back to me i think it's also important to think about which board members are going to be able to most effectively advocate on the board for a strong relationship with the community um because in many ways we're all saying some quite similar things here um and i think it's important that voters uh community members also consider who's going to be able to make that voice effective it's quite easy to say i'll be the voice of the community on the board but i think you also need to think about who has the skills and experience to make that voice effective um and that's all i'll say for now thank you very much Chris we will now pass on to the next question from the community the question is what types of resources technical, social, financial or training should the WMF support for the community members that are not being supported now especially Yuri? I feel the most important thing that WMF and the board can do at this point is focus i feel that we have kind of um spread our attention to one too many topics in the last few years and they're very important each one of them but the success of any organization the success of any movement any goal is in the ability to focus on the most important or more importantly more um the most bank for the buck if you will uh if we can spend the very limited resources that the community and uh just donate donations give us um we should address whatever efforts will give us the most results one of the things that i feel speaking as an engineer of course uh that hasn't been as much addressed as i would hope is the ability for the community to more effectively contribute and by that i mean that uh at this point the way we have this we separated between the community and the development in WMF is that WMF does all the development or most 99% of the development and the community does some of the little volunteer work and most in the development space and mostly the content work all the content work actually uh i feel that if we spend a little more effort on just bringing in the volunteer development that would help this is not the only thing clearly um we just need to figure out which areas would produce the biggest result and for that i actually want to ask the community to help but deciding this process thanks thank you very much Yuri next question would be maria thank you um i think it's tempting to think that there's one solution that would fit every project and every different community i think the reality is i would like WMF to listen to what the needs are both online and offline it's very possible that for a small project they would love to have a bot that archives top pages because they're doing every that manually and they don't have anyone with they know how or the knowledge to do that and it would save them a lot of time uh and perhaps offline there's a lot of differences between the different affiliates we have small affiliates we have big affiliates we have user groups we have chapters they have they do different work it's uh i would really really not like the WMF to tell everyone what they need or the resources they're going to give to them i would like to have very clear channels of communication in which uh community members and affiliates can actually say this is what we need because we live in a place where we have a very poor internet connection it doesn't make any sense for us to do an edit at all because it's a poor use of our time to get together when we know we don't have that good of a connection so maybe what works best for us is this and then the WMF can come in and provide the support and resources needed um basically i think it's it's a matter of communication and then yes i would like to see the WMF supporting but not by saying this is what you need matane are you with us i believe a ball would be next so i can take over if matane is joining back but i i think it's about time time measurement as well right yeah and i'll ping him off on the side so shall i speak up yeah if you can continue all right so i think there are so many issues that one can argue that the community needs supporting and like especially that the question is so general like it involves technical social financial and event training resources however i would like to take the approach that the most of the experienced editors uh and contributors on the wikimedia movement are already being supported pretty well so if they have any needs they can they can go back to athletes or ask for funds or make or make grant requests they have a lot of tools which they can speak up their concerns and ask for support of several sorts but i i i would like to see or to believe that the majority of the support now needs to go to the editors that we really hear hear of so mostly like the the content tools and the translation tools the the interface of wikimedia projects these are stuff that we must focus on in the upcoming period because it is actually becoming harder and harder for modern internet users who are only used to social media and websites with very fancy interfaces to enter wikipedia and deal with the stuff inside it i have had i have formed this point of view by talking with dozens of university students in my university which we were advocating wikipedia at and it was surprising how hard it is for so many new people to get into our websites so we might think that we need very complicated technical tools and support that uh very long members of the community might ask for but i had rather think that the support needs to go to places where we rarely think they need they need it so i had i had like to focus on improving like technical tools which are uh orientated towards mostly inexperienced contributors and that's my main thank you very much we would now move on to the next person which is chris you are muted chris we can't hear you financial support i think we're kind of there wmf has a very good grants program and it's continually developing and there's a lot of sign that the grants team are investing a lot of time in improving it um training i think is an area that wmf and the community collectively could do the movement collectively could do a lot more i used to run a training program for volunteer campaign managers for one of the uk's political parties um and that was a pretty big deal because in a campaign manager if you get it wrong actually technically you can go to jail um and it struck me uh when i was on the board of wikipedia to uk that actually there was very little support for chapter board members so i mean i helped set some up i um run two workshops various spoke at some of them um people gave them probably good reviews um and the the um there was far more that the movement could be doing to support volunteers whether it's chapter board members uh one wiki function bees um many of bolts um then technical development there's still plenty of scope for wmf to make uh user experience uh better at using technical tools um you already said we need to make wikipedia editing fun i completely agree with that and there's plenty of scope for wmf to develop more power tools for power users and commit wikipedia thank you very much chris what i see uh from various parts of the movement i mean uh not just uh local here in syria uh but any how to say any emerging emerging groups who which are uh starting to or just having the idea to do something uh in reality in uh in relation to the offline not in reality online is also reality is the the burden uh which they have uh by you know uh making the uh making the projects uh fulfilling all of the requirements uh for the project and after that finalizing it into the you know uh again uh bureaucratic form which is uh by the way i completely understand the need for that uh but the point is that uh the groups individuals and so on and so on uh are uh uh often not going uh into the offline projects or uh other types of engagement just because uh of the of that kind of burden which they had so basically uh wikipedia foundation should somewhat more proactive uh in that area and to how to say support the ideas of the people from the community to go to i mean to lead on wiki what who wants to do something and then to approach them to tell them that uh it will uh in relation to the uh bureaucracy which they are not able to that's a fulfill you know and uh but it's how to say it's not just about uh it's not just about uh the i don't know established user groups uh uh individuals or uh very loosely organized groups all over the moment so if uh wikipedia foundation uh steps up and uh help the community in that way that we will have uh uh could say uh the more content uh more content uh wikipedia and wikipedia but also much more ideas what to do and uh much more could say offline results thank you very much that's it um there is your next well i think the question of what resources should be not just to the communities is actually uh very simple it's me wish i'm muting you because you were there was uh back noise so essentially we need to ask the committees what they want the devil emf should actually serve the community in asking them what kind of tools they need however i think we do have uh a couple of deficiencies for example some communities like large communities have tools that the smaller communities don't have the wmf could very easily invest a little bit in developing uh translations and transplants between the communities some tools that work on any wiki are not available in other wikis and i use them on a weekend i miss them elsewhere so this is one thing about the social things that the community the wmf could do for the communities i think for example uh we should develop uh markets of ideas so that the communities can learn from each other because we have wonderful really wonderful ideas and i've seen this as the fdc chair for three years really wonderful ideas in chapters and affiliates and yet many of those are really forgotten and people do not know that they are even happening so wmf should serve as a hub of ideas and a facilitator of dissemination uh also i think the wmf has a very important role in distinguishing between large organizations like like we can meet at eushland and very small affiliates and i think that both need resources both need fostering and i think the wmf's role is to wisely distinguish between what a large organization can do and what a small chapter can't so i think it is the wmf role to introduce reasonable differentiation in resource allocation and also in reporting requirements these are the three that come from the top of my head thank you very much doyush last one for this question would be doc james great thank you so uh so what types of resources should the wikimedia foundation primarily support you know i think right now the wikimedia foundation does a pretty decent job supporting social aspects within our within our movement we have wikimania we you know they fund other get-togethers they also do quite well with um um you know with respect to the financial aspects through the fdc etc with respect to training you know my opinion is many of the other movement partners are better positioned you know if we want to do outreach to specific topic area ngo this is better done by by other organizations other than the wikimedia foundation where the wikimedia foundation shines however is in providing technical support for our communities um you know the community tech team has been a huge step forward over the last couple of years it has been a very effective group within the within the wikimedia foundation and i'd love to see it grow further you know they did an amazing community survey to determine what direction they should go you know that team has been very responsive to our wider movement's input and some of the things you know that have been that that were asked for improvement have been you know improving cross-language templates improving cross-language gadgets improving cross-language tools you know our communities want these things um we just need to make sure that we're funding the tech resources to build uh what the community is is requesting and i'll end there thank you very much james the next question uh that came from the community would be um it's a question from sar faras that maria will take what types of wmf spending are most effective and what types are not maria the floor is yours thank you um it would be good to see the context of the question because i am aware that there are very varied opinions about the kinds of spending i am going to assume that it's uh the question is about a spending as it relates to the community because of what i've seen but um i'm gonna go with that okay so what the wmf has been doing in the in the last uh few years is um basically uh grants fdc apg etc um we do have 13 cups uh for example with the fdc there's a six million uh us dollar cup uh that has never quite been reached uh i see that the question means uh what is more effective and what is not which takes us to the question of impact right by berbach which i believe was jr peter who mentioned it um i don't think that the we have been uh inefficient with how we've been uh demanding uh transparency and accountability from either community members or affiliates in terms of how the the money from the from the movement has been spent and how it has been given so it could be um used by community members by affiliates uh to carry on initiatives both uh of wiki and i know there's a line of thought of uh a line of thought that uh carries the idea that or anything that is done off wiki has little to no value i disagree i think it's another way to create community that's how we attract people and they come uh to the projects it's less tangible and i i like this shift from the wmf uh from what is uh called hard metrics to also take into account qualitative aspects and uh without knowing a little bit more about the details of the the the question uh honestly i think you would have to go case by case basis seeing all the early requests but overall i think uh is doing a good job and i think uh community members and affiliates do a very uh good job with their initiatives and they and how public and how transparent everything is on meta where everyone can actually see both their requests and the initiatives and their reports and comment on thank you thank you very much maria the next to take this question would be abad um so i think that um spending is generally has been going well for the past few years with uh most of the grants that are being granted for the individuals and for the affiliates but i had i had guessed that the current strategy process will reveal much of what the community thinks about the focuses that we need to have in the upcoming few years and hence uh where we should be much mostly spending our money i had personally believe if the question is personal that the the main focus um must be regarding the technical side of the wikimedia websites uh as well as supporting the emerging communities i had really think that there are some problems in spending on like people and small communities because sometimes large grants are uh ineffective and will produce other results for these communities but if some effort was put into offering them um like a fast and flexible uh grant system which they can apply to in their own language without having to go on meta and write in english uh that kind of little uh of little support might make it much easier for them to ask for little grants that might make a very big difference for them a difference that might be much more effective than uh grants that goes for large conferences in underrepresented areas for example in some countries i also think that uh technical tools need a lot of improvement and unfortunately uh they need a very big amount of resources in order to be improved especially um of few issues that i have addressed when i was answering the previous question regarding the interface and the easiness of contributing to wikimedia websites for new users i also think that uh in relation to this investing a little bit and research might be crucial in order to know what is the kind of problems we are facing right now and how do we want to approach them and that's all thank you very much about the next take this question will be chris hello again am i on okay yes you are good stuff um yeah i don't have too much to add on the specifics um of this question than some other people who have already answered it um it's kind of an interesting question to ask a board member because really the role of a board member here is to um ask exactly this question to you at the to the executive director and then see what their answer is and then try and take it apart and then see really how robust it is um one of the thoughts while i'm here i'm gonna i'm gonna screenshot it again um if i can find my button you can see how good i am with with technology um so um one of the issues we have as a movement is that we don't have a particularly good understanding of what our impact is i mean we know there's loads of cool stuff um and it's amazing and it's amazing in many different ways we don't particularly have a good understanding of of what those different ways are i mean there's the amount of articles amount of content there's the beach of the um of how many people how many people we're getting to there's also the quality of what we're saying and the diversity of the content we have so i this is another essay of mine on meta which i really recommend um you read because it's quite good that goes into a bit of detail about my thought process on this essentially i'd like to see if the womf come up with um some kind of uh like to see the womf come up with some kind of more balanced scorecard of what it's actually measuring because currently we have um the womf looks at its page views and its readers and it's downtime but it has a much less sophisticated understanding of what it's measuring and why than some of the larger affiliates do thank you very much good we'll skip notice because even of the time and keep the recognition sorry about that first of all uh we do have sort of balanced scorecard reporting for the board but it's a detail regarding of what kind of spending is uh too much what is too little some people say for example that we Kimania is uh money wasted i don't share this view i think that investing in community motivation is important i think that this money comes back to us twice fold uh basically if we think about community fostering this is essentially yes yes okay i apologize for that today or she will join us again in a few seconds i hope and we would hop on quickly to james to take on this question perfect thanks so with respect what type of spending by the wiki media foundation is most effective well you know first of all the wiki media foundation needs to keep the lights on of course uh you know we need to keep the server fronts going we need to pay for the bandwidth um you know that is is the bare um um essentials and always must be um we should also work on making wikipedia faster not just faster for those in the developed world but also faster for those in the developing world and a third thing is the wikipedia media foundation needs to improve the reach of wikipedia not everybody can access wikipedia online you know take a look at the issues that are happening in turkey right now we need to um uh make wikipedia work better offline you know there's still a huge portion of the world who do not have uh a reliable access to the internet i was in the philippines a little while ago um i was happy to pay whatever it cost for internet and no matter how much i was willing to pay it only worked for about an hour a day um so so offline is really key i've been doing work with the wikipedia foundation on on developing offline capability for the android app i'm also working with wikipedia switzerland to develop offline potential as well um but you know the big thing that the wikipedia foundation itself should be spending money on outside of course providing grants to to our our many um uh movement partners is on uh working to develop tech collaboratively between community and staff uh this is the most effective way that i've seen for developing uh developing tech so um perfect i'll stop uh i'll stop there and hand it on to whoever's next darish looks like he's back thank you very much james darish if you are with us they would love to hear the continuing of what you're starting to say and if not we can always stay at a black screen that's very pretty as well give you another second and if not we'll move on to yuri oh and here he is darish are you with us yes i am can i come back to the answer sure uh i think there's a lot of things that we are doing good i think wikipedia wikipedia spending for example is not a huge problem i think some people believe it is i think you know of our communities is important and it comes back as a lower burnout later however i also think there's a number of things we should do to be frugal i think we need to keep certain cappings on spending for example no more than 20 of the budget growth for large organizations on this extraordinary circumstances occur i think it should apply to the wmf as well also i think that we should initiate a movement-wide initiative to try to look for savings for example we could just ask the wmf stuff where we can save the money and i think many of wmf stuff could help us i know for a fact for example that we could possibly save some money by advance advance travel bookings if we know wikimania is happening somewhere exact dates we should make travel arrangements fast and early and we could save there but there are many other examples and i'm sure our stuff and athletes can come up with they just need to be encouraged to look for them okay thank you darious i will tackle you directly by the next question the next question being what do you think the role of the board is and what should it be my fooby my fibi iris well i think i've been i've been on a number of boards before so i think i have a intuitive understanding of how it works elsewhere but i think in our movement the role of the board is much bigger i think it's not only overseeing the ed it's not only reacting with problem when problems occur problems with hr with leadership with strategy but it's also providing good communication channel for the staff for the affiliates and for the community i think it is important that the board has certain additional oversight privileges and oversight responsibilities than a regular supervisory board would i believe that the board's role is mainly to listen to advise and intervene when the times needed so i believe that for good times we literally need the board that will be acting all the time but when things happen when something bad happens i think we need the board that will be able to act quickly and act decisively thank you darious i am i want to apologize to yuri for skipping it for the previous question yuri i'm sorry the board is all yours now why did i get extra time for this um i would like to support what a number of other candidates have said um we do need to be frugal um as far as the budget goes um we also need to address the simplicity of editing and uh ability to contribute be very important thing we do not have 500 wikipedia or wikis we have one wiki with multiple projects and multiple languages and we should treat it as such and we should orient our goals towards uniting the community efforts so the community efforts are not duplicated anyway thank you thank you very much yuri let's go back to the question that was presented to darious with now james taking it you need me i can also we can't hear you just a moment please now we can perfect there we go so you know the most important job of the board is to hire an excellent ed provide guidance to an ed who is struggling um and remove an ed who is not a good fit for the movement um you know further activities beyond that uh you know we are a very fascinating movement uh the ed i mean the the board needs to sort of liaison between the many different communities we have and the wiki media foundation um you know the board needs to sort of act as a bit of a check and balance on on both sides of that equation to help make sure that the relationship between the different parts of our movement um is is um is working well so i thought i have to be in that question thank you very much james the next one to take this question will be yuri um just as i said before i think the board's role hello wait we'll drop sorry okay sorry yeah please the floor is yours yeah i was saying that uh i believe the floor the wmf the board's role is to coordinate the interaction between community and uh wmf and that community should decide what's needed and the board should guide the wmf into implementing that okay that was short and precise the next one to take this is maria with 35 seconds on the clock maria please do thank you so i think um the role of the board is no mystery i mean uh we have to hire and supervise the executive director we have to provide direction for the organization the board has a strategic function in providing um that what the goals of the organization are going to be which are then determining combination with the ed we also establish a policy-based governance system right it is the responsibility of the board to develop a governance system for how it's going to work and how the organization is going to work um obviously there is a fiduciary duty to protect the organization to protect a wmf and its assets what board members have to do is keep informed make an effort to know what's happening on the organization monitor and a control function in the sense of you know the board is in charge of the auditing process the board hires the auditors it's in charge of making sure for example that the audit is done in a timely manner each year there's it's it's not a mystery at all what the role of a successful board is you need a board that does the hard work that keeps informed and doesn't lose track of the big picture and then can catch any problems and fix those in a timely manner before prices explode and then provide a strategic direction it's it's very very simple and those are my 75 seconds thank you very much thank you very much maria we'll go up next to Abad for this question he also has very few seconds left but the flow is yours all right the board is the bridge between the community and the foundation and it's crucial because it is it's basically a representative of the community's opinion and should behave on based on this regard so it might be the most crucial task for the board is to be able to communicate with the community properly and convey its its wishes and its complaints and its general point of view to the foundation and this role is is very important because if the board can't communicate properly with the with the community then it is not going to be able to present what our movement actually thinks and that is a very main challenge thank you very much Abad the next one for this question would be Chris if he would unmute himself it would be nice thanks for this question basically the goal of the board is to make sure that the WMF is doing everything it possibly can to make sure that as a movement we're achieving our goals and fulfilling our mission it's important to remember that it's sometimes issues between the board and for the staff and the community are expressed as which is more important the WMF for all the community well actually the WMF doesn't have any purpose except to fulfill our mission what people are actually talking about in those circumstances it's differences of opinion differences of priorities about the WMF ED thinks we should do it that way and some community members think we should do it a different way so part of the real value that I think that the community selected plus these on the board can add is to is to challenge and shape the dialogue among that with the ED and among the WMF senior staff to make sure that they are keeping they're keeping the relationship with the community at the forefront of their minds and make sure that whenever something happens particularly whenever something goes wrong that they are learning from them what's happening and thinking about how the WMF can improve in future. I've got a fair bit of experience of this I was involved in recruiting three EDs for Wikimedia UK two permanent one into them and in this area like many other areas of the WMF's governance I really think I am a strong candidate because I don't really know the principles of doing this I've seen problems happen in real life and I've seen boards work to resolve them and as a result I have the confidence and credibility to make sure the WMF board tackles things in the right way in future. Thank you very much Chris the next one to take this question will be there you should already took it if I'm not mistaken and I think Dr James has dropped so the next one would be Yuri which has like half a minute to take this question so Yuri yes but I already answered the previous question have you answered this question it would be interesting oh yeah you were very brief I'm sorry great so now we have only a few minutes left like five minutes left so we can do something very quick and nice each and every one of you will it's going to go to one question and answer it in 30 seconds and I will be timing you are you ready the question being drum roll please why should just someone care to vote in this election this is the question why should someone care to vote in this election it would start from Chris and end by a bud by order each and every one each and every candidate is equally expected to answer in 30 seconds please do okay so I start yeah please 30 seconds so actually 10 seven years ago I would have asked exactly the same question I was just thinking what's the Wikimedia Foundation got to do with my goals about how to how to provide good articles on battleships on English Wikipedia um actually the WMF has a huge amount it can offer um and it's really important that we have uh board members with very strong experience of the community and also were very strong experience of affecting positive change on boards which is exactly what I have which is why I'm standing so please vote for me thank you next one would be Miloš if he's still with us are you Miloš? yes yes I will be cutting you short just a moment uh so uh uh why anybody should vote uh I mean this is Wikimedia Foundation elections I mean for the world the most important uh internet elections that exist uh because thank you Miloš yeah okay I appreciate that um Dorjus 30 seconds for you you should vote because it can make a difference I think if we have board members who are able to stand up are able to give a strategic direction to the ED and the foundation this can really make wonders and we are in a really decisive moment in our movement new technologies new the augmented reality the virtual reality all competitions that are coming in both edits artificial intelligence all this means that we are in a very strict moment and we need to really choose people who are able have expertise and can do what they need to do on the board thank you Dorjus James is not with us so we skip directly to Yuri uh Dorjus said it very well actually um as someone in the community once said this is the most important election on the internet no matter how uh finding that may sound and judging by the numbers published by WMS so far it is already attracting one of the most number of votes ever more than previous years um it is important because we are the ones who will represent you thank you very much Maria thank you um why should you vote I think an extension of this would be why should I engage with the wider movement right why should be interested about what's happening away from my own project look it matters it matters we need your voice we need your participation we need you to engage if you do not participate we have no idea of your experience we have no idea of your background if you do not engage um your voice is lost your vote is lost and then we are releasing something important so participate thank you Maria Abad it's your turn it's actually hard to answer this in 30 seconds but I believe it's interesting how large our movement is and these elections are the way to reflect uh wukimedia's influence on the world and to choose the representatives that are going to shape the future of this moment movement as large as it is so I believe that it is it really matters for every individual to leave his mark on this uh on this future of our movement thank you very much Abad let's go back to James for the last to respond in case he's with us okay so um you know the question is why should you vote and you know my opinion is our democratic processes are important uh voting is one of the ways you uphold these democratic processes um this is a way to you know support a candidate who you believe you know supports the direction you with to see the wukimedia foundation go in so yeah you know get out and vote thank you very much and with this we will wrap up I will thank each and everyone of you for showing up tonight with a very short notice and being so delightful and into us I hope each and every one of you enjoys the process and the election and to whatever wins it's our delight and our gratitude that we have each and every one of you standing up for this election and being part of our movement thank you and have a good night day or whatever it's time's on for you see ya see you bye and thank you bye