 Hi everybody! Thanks so much for coming out to the Wikimedia Foundation's Heart of Knowledge celebration. Really appreciate those of you who are here on time. Seriously, thank you so much! Little clap for punctuality there. So some of you may already know what Heart of Knowledge is and some of you might be like, what is Heart of Knowledge? And this is the answer. In April, we launched an international arts contest called Heart of Knowledge. I shall also introduce myself. My name is Adoris Vitaak and I'm a communications associate here at the Foundation and we started this contest with a simple question. What does open access to knowledge mean to you? We had a hypothesis which is that it's not just nerds in ivory towers, love you nerds in ivory towers, who care about knowledge or think about its impacts, but it's actually people around the world in all kinds of fields, people who make art, people who write stories and poetry, who think deeply about knowledge and are able to benefit from access to knowledge every single day. So in the spirit of this contest and building connections with other people over the theme of free knowledge and its impacts in our lives, we have a series of questions that you might see on the tables all around you. Some of these questions are pretty easy to answer, like what's something new you learned this week? I'm sure folks can think of a fact. For me it was this morning standing in the kitchen thinking to myself, how come carbonated water doesn't stay carbonated when you heat it up? Which I realize is a question I probably should have been asking 15 years ago, but it was one that I googled today. It might be something much more complex than that for you. In fact I hope it is. That would mean you received a better K through 12 education. But the point is that these are questions we should not be thinking about in isolation. They are questions that can bring us closer to other people. And I would love it if you took a look at a neighbor. Could be somebody you know, somebody you've never met before. And if you're not sitting next to anybody right now, looking at some people, then you can migrate over to a table where folks are sitting. And we'll take just about five or 10 minutes. Please write something down. It could be your answer or a neighbor's. And then when we come back together, we have these extremely exciting stickers. Limited edition Wikipedia stickers designed through an amazing collaboration with an artist in Turkey. These collaborate, these correspond rather to gifts that you can find non-giffy. And if you're brave enough to share your answer, you could receive one of these sticker sets. So please take a moment, talk to your neighbor about knowledge, and we'll be back. Oh my God. Okay. So basically CO2 dissolves when it's heated up, right? Like that's the, it like goes back out into the sky. Wait. It's all right. Undissolved. Yes. Is that, is that the real, that's the scientific answer? Okay. So another quick thing, if I may, before we, before we dissolve ourselves into discussing this question, you know, talking about knowledge or our lack of it sometimes is extremely vulnerability inducing experience, but that too brings people closer and helps forge those bonds of community that we attempted to with this contest. Okay. Please talk to your neighbors. All right, everybody. So just want to give a heads up that in about a minute, I'm going to ask if you have written anything down with your neighbors on those pages, we would love to get them filled out and hear your answers. And remember, we have actually, in addition to the yellow sticker set, we have a blue one. These ones are of a more brain anatomical variety. So please do fill those out and I'll check in in one minute. All right. So now it's time to see who's brave and would like to share some of their answers either to that question or to one of the ones on your table that you maybe discussed with your neighbors. So I know that somebody put a great fact down about wombats. Hi, I'm Aubrey. I know a lot of facts about things. And one of them that I put over there is that wombats are super cute, which is not the fact. The fact is they're capable of crushing their predators' skulls, including human skulls, with the power of their thigh muscles, so they can basically crush skulls with their butts. TIL, wombats, crushing skulls with their butts, don't we all? So for those of you who are just joining us, welcome in. We are discussing questions that are on the tables, like what's something you learned this week and a bunch of other topics that reflect answers to this question of what does open access to knowledge mean to you? Does anybody else want to share? Yes. Hi, I'm Jana. So for has knowledge ever saved your life? I'm going to say yes, because of all the knowledge in the medical community. Just I mean, I don't think I've never had life-threatening ailment. I did have thyroid cancer, which is something that they can treat so well now and so completely because of all the knowledge that has accumulated over the years. My sister has type 1 diabetes and just thinking about in the last century everything that has been learned about not diabetes and the best way to store insulin and all the treatments that keeps her going and how healthy she is. It's really amazing when you think of worldwide how all this medical knowledge we have has built on past knowledge and what it's doing for us today. Thank you for sharing. Let me bring over one of these beautiful sticker sets. And I really appreciate both wombats and medical knowledge coming from very, I don't know what spectrum that's on, but it is a really awesome selection. And the different entries that we have in the Heart of Knowledge contest in this zine really reflect that diversity of experiences with knowledge from the joyful and the whimsical to the ones that literally keep us alive. And I think that's incredibly important to just embrace that wide range. Does anybody else have some stories about knowledge, something they learned this week, something they're an expert on that they would like to share? Yes. I learned a silly thing this week. Thanks to Morial Shotlander, my colleague, I learned this week that giraffes are kosher. And that's because the hooves are split and they have quads, which are the two requirements I think. And I knew that because I work at a museum. So I was just talking about it and Morial goes, oh no, that means giraffes are kosher and she looks it up and there's a website dedicated to it. So of course it's true. Awesome. Giraffes are kosher. So those of you who have been waiting for permission to, I didn't want to say it. Thank you, Rowan. Do we have, oh, and please take a beautiful sticker. Does anybody else have a knowledge, knowledge answer? I'm just going to, if it's okay, I might, I might pick up one of these. Okay, so what are you the world's number one expert on? Getting lost. Had a difficult time finding the location. Thank you for your persistence in making it over here. What's something you learned this week? Triple Alliance War. Paraguay lost the highest percentage of their population ever in a war. Wow. Okay. That is also new information to me. Does anybody else have, yeah. I've been looking into kind of the history of machine learning because I'm getting into that at my job right now and I learned that between the 1970s and the 90s there was kind of like a, like everyone kind of gave up on machine learning because in the 50s and 60s and in the decades previously people got really, really excited about what machine learning could do and then they overpromised and under delivered because the technology wasn't there yet. So everyone kind of just laid low for two decades or so until the technology caught up with it. So that was interesting. That's awesome. Thanks so much. Let me bring you one of these stickers. Let's see. One over there. Yeah, this week I learned that it's, that Donald Trump isn't the only president to have so-called politicized July 4th. So I learned that Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy also paraded military vehicles at their inaugurations and other presidents have given speeches on July 4th. So I thought it's interesting when we talk of how social media and even things like national public radio can give you this media bubble and a certain diet that you don't really get to see all the other things that are, you know, out there as far as our history. So I thought that was an interesting thing to learn. Thanks. A little bit of history. Does anybody else want to share knowledge that they learned this week or a sticker? Oh, let me grab you. Okay, then with that we can turn to our more official little slides. First of all, I realized that some of you may have never been here before. So raise your hand if this is your first time visiting the foundation. Okay, awesome. Welcome in. I'm so glad that you were able to make it. You might be wondering what is Wikimedia? To which this is the answer. But we're also a lot more than Wikipedia. So this is a huge project that probably most of you have heard of. Has anyone tried to edit Wikipedia here? Oh, I've seen a lot of raised hands. That makes me really happy. So Wikipedia was started in 2001. It's all written by volunteers. It has more than 50 million articles and over 250,000 monthly editors in hundreds of language versions. We are also a lot more than Wikipedia. We have a number of projects, including Wikiquote, Wikimedia Commons. You might not have heard of Wikidata, but I bet your Alexa or your Google Home certainly has because that's what it might pull from when you ask a question. And we're a lot more than a collection of websites. We are a movement for free knowledge. So when you join the Wikimedia projects, when you contribute to Wikipedia or when you classify something on Commons, you are part of a movement that is much larger than a website that you type into your browser. You're really part of this incredible group of people. And here at the Foundation, this is what we are, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, established in 2003, about 300 people around the world. And we're animated by this mission, which is imagining a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's why we're here. That's what we do. And we started with Wikipedia. It grew beyond everybody's wildest expectations. There's a little saying that folks have that Wikipedia works in theory and it shouldn't work in practice, but in truth it works in practice. Yes, but not theory. There we go. And you can see just from how many different languages there are, how this is an idea that has traction around the world with more than a billion unique devices visiting every month. How? More people want to do good than harm. That's the basic idea that underlies a project that is driven by volunteer contributions. The idea is that folks ultimately want to do their part to make sure that knowledge spread around the world is accurate and fair and informative. It's open for anybody to contribute and the people who are contributing make the rules. So by visiting the Foundation, we hope that you are interested in starting this conversation about what it means to be part of a larger free knowledge movement and by participating in the Heart of Knowledge contest as some of the folks in this room have. I think that we're also starting a conversation about what it means to be evangelists for knowledge outside of those traditional spaces we might associate with knowledge like schools and universities. That everybody is in charge of knowledge and everybody has something to contribute, that it belongs to all of us and not to a privileged few. We were interested in what artists and writers and students and journalists and all kinds of people had to say about knowledge and what it meant to them in their work and so we solicited submissions that were poetry, visual arts, nonfiction essays, a bunch of forms that you might not associate with who contributes to Wikipedia for example because we wanted to show that there are a lot of ways to spread the word and to contribute when it comes to knowledge. We received entries from five continents and our youngest entrant was 19 and our oldest was 80. This is all self-reported data so you know on the internet you can be a dog but we assume they are telling the truth. And our judges have pushed boundaries with installation art, founded artist collectives and magazines, taught filmmaking, inspired youth writers in San Francisco, written books, led design teams and painted on Ariana Grande. These are their names. They are an incredible group. Sharon, Halima, Kelly, Jillian, Jess, Eliza, Jonathan, Alexa, Kio and Erica all took an incredible amount of time and energy to go through our entries and to devote a lot of thought into what spoke to the prompt of what free knowledge means to you. And so now without further ado I'd like to announce the winners of the Heart of Knowledge Contest 2019, the asterisks to note the grand prize. Those of you who have the zines on your table or might be reading them right now can also see all of the winners laid out there and I have more copies which will be distributed. So in the visual arts category our grand prize went to Nancy Murrow who did an incredible photograph speaking to the experience of Mexican-American students and had a really powerful artist statement about what it means to experience education in the United States as a minority and the work that still needs to be done. Opiyemi Owa in the visual arts category produced these incredible artworks. One of them you can see featured on the cover of the zine. Ashley Ding, who I believe is here, can stand up and wave if you want. This is an artwork about the experience of knowledge in a familial context. Jessica Schilling had this incredible piece that spoke to imagination and you know just you really look at it and feel transported. Julia Whitty, is Julia here? Awesome, Julia. And Julia if you wouldn't mind maybe just telling us a little bit I can bring the mic over to you if you want to stand up feel free to yeah. So do you mind telling us a little bit about what the inspiration was behind these artworks? Well the inspiration is actually inspiration itself and that was what I did and I some of my images I actually originate with a Wikimedia Commons image that I then manipulate until it bears no resemblance to it but it has meaning for me behind it. Oh that's amazing and I know our judges really appreciated that you used images from Wikimedia Commons. Could you tell us a little bit more about that process? Well I'm basically looking for images that have meaning for me and they don't relate to the final thing at all. I mean one of those might have been a goose or something you know but they I know that on some level even though actually I don't even remember what the original image is for either of those but it has meaning for me so I really go for meaning and not even visual not so much even the visual just the meaning. That's wonderful thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Catherine Garner produced this work which I think really speaks to the value of scientific research and how that produces knowledge. Elena Tatianichis produced a poster that shows knowledge as a word cloud dripping into individuals at the bottom. Jose Sender produced an artwork entitled The Doors of Knowledge that shows a series of doors being opened by charming creatures. And in the non-fiction essay category Hino Hussein wrote an essay called Pakistan Love and Jane Eyre using the story of Jane Eyre to describe a personal journey. A. Malikov the grand prize winner in the poetry category produced two poems one entitled Solar Wind and another entitled New Transparency. The first poem used found language from his father's article in the astrophysical journal Innovative Use of Academic Research as well. Hal Wei Zhang produced a poem called Signaled a Noise and in her artist statement she describes using an artificial intelligence program on her corpus of poems to write a counterpoint which you can see in italics. Jonathan Q who I believe is here and wave to everybody wrote a poem called Revelation also very much interested in scientific research and its role in producing knowledge. Wallace Kaufman wrote a poem called Stardom writing about the blazing cosmos with science as a popular theme you can see here exploring astronomy. Taylor McGee engaged with social issues in the poem a fatal loss of control the black disability anthem. Raphael Davis wrote a poem very apt for the theme entitled Knowledge and wrote about the social connections that are also produced here the production of knowledge. Abilash Jayachandra wrote a poem called The Price of Freedom envisioning a future and the ways people behave in the darkness of a chasm without knowledge access. Joshua Chalifor wrote a poem called Relinquish the Tabula Rasa which is a very interesting use of that concept of the blank slate and Sarah Lynn Burnett the grand prize winner in the short fiction category wrote a story called Occasional Moonlight about the experience of growing up as a minority on a tropical island. Hannah Katanock wrote a story called My Room an example of flash fiction or a very short piece of short fiction the experience of browsing the internet and the freedom that can bring. Jennifer Sears wrote the story Pagafagia 1912 which is from the outset a story about going on a vacation but turns into something much more complex and those are the winners of the 2019 heart of knowledge competition. I highly encourage you to take a look through the zine to continue to discuss the questions that are on the table in front of you with your neighbors because at the end of the day I think that art much like knowledge is something that has the power to build social connections and bring us together. We're very used to experiencing knowledge in somewhat limited forms we think of it as something that is maybe time-bounded that we go to school or sit in a classroom to have our heads filled with facts but the truth is that knowledge is about something much more expansive than sets of facts or the coding languages you use at work knowledge is everything from the way we tie our shoes to the whisper networks that protect us and even the things that make us human when we talk to other people so I would encourage you to get to know some of the folks in this room understand how knowledge has shaped the way you live and work and enjoy the wonderful food and beverages that are here thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation and if you have time when you get home tonight check out wikipedia.org and consider hitting that edit button because everybody can make an impact starting with that contribution. Thank you.