 So I want to talk about a project that I would like to do in Bhutan. I've been terribly interested to listen to the last speakers and hear about incubators. I didn't know they were existed, so I started thinking fantastic and by the end of it I'm thinking stay away from those. So I want to talk about this project that I would like to do in Bhutan. And I should explain how I came to have such an interest in Bhutan. My background is as a journalist and in 2008 to 2009 I lived in Bhutan for a year to work as a media consultant, training journalists as part of introducing newspapers to the country because the country was becoming a democracy. And it was understood, the king decided that the country needed a robust media space for democracy to hold the new government to account. So my job was to go there and work on this particular newspaper, an English speaking newspaper, and train the journalists and other media stakeholders in the country. That was in 2008 to 2009 and I've continued to take an interest in how Bhutan as a new modern democracy embrace media in all its forms. It's clear to everybody now that newspapers have been spectacularly unsuccessful in Bhutan and that it's the online media space that is where everything happens. Facebook started to take off in about 2006 and that is their town square, village square that they do everything. That's where the public discussion happens. As an oral culture, the Bhutanese just didn't get the point of newspapers. They leapfrogged over the whole print phase that most other developed and developing countries kind of went through, which is what brings me to Wikipedia and how Bhutan and Wikipedia may fit together. So, just so that you know where it is, it's the tiny little bit, the little blue bit or pink bit between China and India to massively populous countries. So that's what it looks like in terms of area. It's known as the pebble between two boulders. Because of its position, it's had this free flow. It's been like a cultural junction between those two countries. But it's never been colonised, it's always been independent, which is a rarity, particularly in the Himalayas. It's the only kingdom in the Himalayas that maintained its own sovereignty. That's its population. There is a dot between those two. You just can't see it. So, it's small. This is part of what makes Bhutan such a compelling case study for media. It's a small country. Now, culturally, it is completely distinct. Because of its position between these behemoths, China and India, it has developed its own culture and been fiercely protective of it. So, its culture, while it came from Tibet, it's most definitely not Tibetan and is quite distinctive from it. So, the picture is the Shabdron Rinpoche, who in the 17th century followed a legend, followed a raven according to predictions and founded this place, went there and established it, united it as a country, and that was Bhutan. So, he was fleeing Tibet where he was being persecuted, came to Bhutan and when he arrived in Bhutan, it was lots of villages separated by mountainous regions that were fighting with each other, fighting with Mongolians, Indians, Chinese, fighting with everybody all over the place. It was a really volatile country of warring tribes internally. So, he set about uniting all of those disparate tribes into a country, one unified country. And how he did it is really quite extraordinary and I'll speed it a history lesson, but it is relevant because it is how he created, completely constructed a culture. And he was Tibetan. The top picture shows a Tibetan house. He created a whole system of architecture, which is what the second one is. That's a Bhutanese house. And that's the style and he created it. The picture at the bottom is of the fortresses, the Zongs. And he built seven of those. Again, they're different to what a Tibetan fortress might look like. He's a distinctly Bhutanese, built without any nails. He created a whole fashion plate. So, you can see what the Tibetan women wore. You can see his sensibilities, but he set about creating something distinct. He also created these festivals called Seshus that continue to today. And these were the first public media events where people from the disparate tribes would come together in a unifying spectacle. Now, this is where it starts to become more sort of cultural values that underpin the country and the way they approach media and perhaps the way Wikipedia can work. So, the Shabtrung drew on Buddhist nuns and monks' vows to create this system of rules and manners to coordinate the society. So, it's out of these that have arisen the Bhutanese constitution that was written in 2006. And so where the American constitution gives you the right to bear arms and lots of individualistic rights, the Bhutanese constitution actually binds the people to responsibilities to each other. So, it is your responsibility as a Bhutanese citizen to help your neighbour when they're in trouble. It's actually constitutional. And so on. That arose out of these values that the Shabtrung put into place. This is taken from a year 10 textbook. That's how it filters through the value system, it filters through the children and through the society. Now, out of that came this well-known system of gross national happiness. So, this is the fourth king who announced that gross national happiness was more important than gross national product. And it's what Bhutan mostly gets referred to. Oh, that happy place. That happy place and G and H actually does have quite a rigorous methodology underneath it. It has its four pillars. We love a pillar. It has core dimensions and the government do go out and regularly survey the people to see where they're meeting their targets. And every new policy or law has to go through these four pillars. If it doesn't meet them, it's not going to be implemented. And that's from tourism to cutting down trees to everything. Now, in terms of languages, there are 23 languages, none of which have a written form, bar one, which was imposed on it. 71.4% literacy. But that literacy figure measures how much a student can pass a written test in English. And it doesn't go anywhere near describing how far literacy permeates into the culture. Because the Bhutanese actually don't like to read. They don't get why you would read for entertainment. So there's a joke in Bhutan that if you want to hide something, put it in a book, no one will read it. It's safe. And they see it as work. So when I was there working on the newspaper and I went to see the head of the organisation, the government department that had been put in as overseers of the media, he complained to me that he didn't read the newspapers. Why would he? He couldn't afford to pay someone to do it for him and he didn't have time. There is an understanding that print means work, either schoolwork or work you pay to do. Otherwise, so there's quite a resistance to it. Offline. Zonka, spoken by half the country naturally, the king decided that as part of unifying the country, the fourth king, that they would create a written form for it. And it's kind of complicated and it came from what the monks were using which was old Tibetan and so on. Anyway, these men got together one weekend in 2002 to create a Zonka dictionary as part of this move towards making it a universal language. Now, democracy. So in 2006, the fourth king announced that he was stepping down from power, that it was time the Bhutanese people voted for themselves. It wasn't a popular decision and the people only did it because he told them to. And there were two parties in the mock elections, one more yellow, which was the king's color. Everybody voted for him. Anyway, it went on. They're about to now hold their third elections next month. So you'll see this is the parliament, current parliament that are about to be dissolved and you'll see they're all wearing different colors. This is this formal hierarchy and codification that the chubbed room put in place. So the king wears yellow. The prime minister wears orange. National council wear blue. Judges wear green. These are these shawls. They have matching shoes and so on. And there's an elaborate way that you bow and use your shawl and blah, blah, blah. So it's etiquette and culture defining every aspect of the way Bhutanese approach everything. So that's to give you some kind of context about their quite unique culture. Now connectivity, it's good. They've rolled out national broadband funded by India. India their best friend who funds a five year plan for them. And what that has done has opened up enormous possibilities that they have been very quick to embrace. So this is 2014 and it's where the government are taking part in discussion with the people via the internet, people in the villages. MPs before they would debate something in parliament would go on their Facebook page and say anything you want me to discuss, anything you want me to bring up. And their constituents would respond on their Facebook page and they would go in and do that. Facebook, the internet, lots of possibilities and they're right onto them. The biggest success in this oral culture is mobile phones, just enormous. The graph at the bottom shows the green one is landlines and blue was the minute that mobile phone technology was available. It went straight through and it's near saturation. Every household at least has access to a mobile phone. And when I was there in 2008 till maybe 2014 the media console and the television station were full of just gorgeous stories about how with the people celebrating how now I can talk to the lama when he's away and I can talk to the farmers and my family and just such a celebration of the mobile telephone. So these are the media milestones to give you the context for Wikipedia. In 1973, BBS Radio was launched and it is still terribly important, particularly in rural areas. In 1986 a newspaper was launched by the government in three languages. It was considered work to read it but if you were in the civil service, you did read it. 1999 it was known as the last country in the world to get television at the same time it got the internet. 2003 mobile telephones they've never looked back. 2006 which is when I was there, new newspapers to be independent, Facebook just became the platform that everything happened on. 2006 also blogs started. Now in 2008 a Canadian man Chris Finn did launch the Wikipedia in Zonka. This was, he was hopeful for it, it hasn't taken off, it's there, it's dormant. In 2010 the Bhutan Wiki Project launched, it has 11 members and none of them are active. In 2013 a man called Kuchin Zimja, or that's his username, joined and then quit in 2015 and he became a bit of a legend. So I want to try and show you that but I don't know if I can. Anyway, here's the Zonka edition of Wikipedia. That's what it looks like. It has 227 pages. I was in Bhutan two weeks ago and spoke to various people to talk to them about Wikipedia and how it might be useful for them and people didn't know there was a Zonka edition and when I told them it was up for deletion they were horrified and intending to immediately use it. There were so many possibilities that they could see and they were excited by that. Now this, I'm not sure if this is going to work but I'll try, oh there you go. Is there any audio? Okay, doesn't matter. So this young man, presumably, uploaded audio of himself reading the front page of the Bhutanese passport and he read it as an audio file and uploaded it and he said it sounded something like the bearer of this passport should be given and so on in this kind of funny voice and he'd either put it through a synthesizer or it was being funny. Anyway, he uploaded it and it started, it sat there for a while, unnoticed and then in 2015 it got noticed and started to, someone wanted to pull it down, editing more, it spilled over onto YouTube and eventually the decision was to pull it down. There was a big discussion about whether it was racist. How could it be racist? This is his accent, this is his voice. Big discussions went on and if you Google Bhutanese passport you'll see a whole lot of links. It was discussed across a wide range of media and there is a page about the discussion on Wikipedia. Anyway, the end result was it was pulled and another audio was made of a man with a strong European accent also reading the front page of the Bhutanese passport. Strange logic but that's where it ended up. Now this pissed him off and he quit. This is part of the discussion where he's being told that he's in danger of losing his privileges and that's when he quit and discussed. It's just an odd little hiccup over in the corner. I'm not entirely sure that he was Bhutanese, certainly the Bhutanese that I spoke to couldn't recognise him and said that the zonka that was written there was babble and didn't make sense. So who knows who he was, where he was from whatever but I thought that he had a good idea with the way that he was trying to use Wikipedia by uploading audio. I could see his logic and why that would make sense culturally and I thought also that there were some opportunities there. So bringing us to Wikipedia. So at the moment on the English Wikipedia there are pages on Bhutan, not a huge amount and the Bhutan Wiki project certainly lists a whole lot that could be written but the ones that are written there are not written by Bhutanese and there are mistakes in them. They do have a particular viewpoint that doesn't reflect Bhutanese sensibilities and I saw that as a problem. So when I went to Bhutan a couple of weeks ago I went to see key people that I had worked with and have worked with over the past ten years about media and told them about why don't you use Wikipedia and many of them use it as a general reference but the idea of publishing on it is just that much too hard. So I put it to... I found key people in the society because it's a small society there are key people that just make things happen and if you're careful and you can find your way through then you can do things. It can be easy to get bogged down otherwise. So I went to see some key people. Now this guy, Pasu, was a high school teacher and he recognised the possibilities of the internet for his students some years ago and he convinced the high school office to let him have an extension cord that would come out through the window on weekends. From that he sent the kids, set them a competition of building shelters where they could work on their laptops during the weekend which is what they did and he also organised Internet Connection and then he got local businesses to donate wood and nails and whatever and he set up this kind of learning online village for the kids to come on the weekends. He then left that, went back to high school teaching he's currently trying to make the whole of Bhutan toilet friendly which is why he's sitting on a toilet and he used Facebook to do it. He kind of tried to shame everybody into better hygiene practices around public toilets and it has worked. In this small community that's how things happen. He's also head of the bloggers association of Bhutan and when I talked to him about how Wikipedia worked what it offered to Bhutan how it could be used by students and I talked about some of the projects that Wikipedia does and then that Bhutanese are not on there writing about their own culture he got very excited. So he's on board. This man Kama Dundup did try to publish on Wikipedia and he got jumped on and had a bad experience and it was at the time that the king was being crowned in 2008 and because he could see around him all this pomp and ceremony he got terribly excited and thought the world needs to see this and he used Wikipedia so he went on there to try and write about this and he could see it happening anyway, as you know, no original material he didn't know the protocols and he got jumped on so he just bailed out but what he does is he's a software engineer and he trains students to make film, animations and about coding and at the moment he's passionate about Bhutanese history and particularly about a particular battle and he wants to, so he's getting his students to recreate that battle as part of their learning, which is great and we talked about the possibilities of what a Wikipedia page might look like that had all the details about the battle that had the video, whichever was the best one that the students had done and so on and he thought that was fantastic, he's in Dorje Penju studied in Australia and he's part of a massively important cultural institution called the Centre for Bhutan Studies they are really the one that I would like to partner with so working towards that when I went and sat and talked to him about Wikipedia he said yes, my professor in Australia told me don't go near Wikipedia, that's not credible but that day he had also been talking to an American woman who had said to him your Gross National Happiness Commission you have a fabulous website you spend a lot of time on it explaining the rigor of gross national happiness for the world no one goes there people in Bhutan and outside Bhutan they want to know about gross national happiness they Google it, they get Wikipedia you need to engage more broadly you need to recognise you don't have control over how people come to you how people perceive that there's other platforms that are going to beat you every time so he understood the power and the reach of Wikipedia and was yes, what can we do, how can I help Doctor Karma Punso is an Oxford scholar he was a trained abbot within the monastery system first to say the man's clever is just not to do the beginnings of justice and he's just written this massive tome the history of Bhutan as have which is part of this new kind of publishing books that they have so many the printed resources are starting to appear this is the Bhutan Observer staff, journalists I'm just showing you these people because these are key people that can make this happen there is a hunger in Bhutan to tell Bhutanese stories to record Bhutanese history for its own citizens as well as for outside but really just more for its own citizens there is an absolute hunger for this this is two Facebook pages where two individuals just go out there constantly finding these artefacts, photos and stories and they disseminate them on Facebook Karma Punso has 2,000 hours of recorded interviews of oral histories that he's been collecting and in trying to disseminate it because of the interest he has is using WeChat which is just not working for him clearly it could work for him better Wikipedia could anyway, I'll get straight to the point here, my premise is that Wikipedia is a media technology reflects the sensibilities of an oral culture now I know Wikipedia has come out of print culture but the way that it can be updated the way that it is never fixed all of that reflects oral culture so there is media scholarship at the moment that is really exciting around how the way that oral cultures use information and the flow of communication in oral cultures is similar to how digital cultures work online cultures and that in many ways we're returning to that way of communicating within society we are the period where print has been privileged is fading and this this is where we're ending up and this is where Bhutan is so interesting because it has always been an oral culture even as it's going online even as it's doing that it's still doing it with an oral sensibility that's my premise, my questions are how might these two work together how might Bhutanese work in this space what might they produce how might they use it and I need help from the Wikimedia community to do it because what I would like in my ideal world would be friendly editors to work with who can help me protect while they learn and come online a line of command for disputes other possibilities but I wanted some advice on a couple of things I wanted to know what happens when you pay people and it hasn't come up in this conference so far does it change the dynamics I've heard giving coffee and food but what happens if you actually pay people initially I know it's been done and I just haven't heard anything about it how thick can a page be the way I was kind of conceiving it was that one page could have so much it could have oral from the local villages audio, pictures, video is that possible, is there a limit what's the tensions around that and clearly if we're starting from grand zero which we are we can build in gender parity but what else should I be looking for thank you they're not rhetorical questions the problem on the English Wikipedia is that people are being paid to put stuff on that we don't want if they paid to put stuff on that we do want we would have no problem with it what's happened is that the people who most of the people who edit Wikipedia that are against paid editing are against it because the people who are paying others to edit Wikipedia or paying them to edit stuff that shouldn't be on Wikipedia if if you are paid to edit and you declare that you're being paid to edit or produce a particular kind of material and it's encyclopedic and the content is appropriate we're happy to have it so if the same sort of thing happened here no one would have a problem with it I think my concern was that it was establishing a culture where you weren't volunteering and it was setting up a different dynamic from day one that was my concern whereas everybody's volunteers and there's different rewards to make it financial might not be the right way that depends on the wiki I think if you have a system where writing is work you may well have to pay people to work