 Hi, folks. Thank you very much. And thanks for coming. This is a pretty big crowd for 9 o'clock in the morning. So basically, let's see, do I have this right? Yes. This is Valerie Aurora. She is helping us with the conference setup and the unconference piece of this especially and has been incredibly helpful as we've in the last minute scramble to get everything figured out here. So first two days, meetings. Like we all know how much you love sitting there and waiting through a presentation and doing your email during a meeting. So you've got two days for that. So this is how I feel about meetings. I love a good meeting. When I'm done with one, I feel energized and I want to run down the street. And it's kind of embarrassing. And so I've done a lot of work to try to help make the meetings that you have in the next two days make you feel more like this than like this. So I'll be going through a bunch of different little tools that later on after Rob talks some more about other areas. Yeah, so that's the first two days. And then as Rachel said, the third day, everybody is invited to go to the office. And it'll be a little bit of pandemonium, but it'll be fun. So the agenda. Basically, we have been, as everybody here who's been participating in the process knows, it's been kind of a crazy process. But I think we've got a great agenda for you here. And we'll see how it plays out. The way that we did it was we broke things up into, we broke things up into areas. And yes, by the way, we also have the un-conference part of this is a pretty big part of this. So basically, we've got Robertson 1 here and Robertson 2. That is mostly scheduled. And then there are three un-conference rooms. And what you need to do is you need to start editing that now. So we're not going to be offended if you are on your laptops like doing work because if you're scheduling an un-conference session, yes, you're doing the right thing. It's going to be starting here very shortly at 10 o'clock. So that's what's going on in parallel with the two main track sessions. So the two main tracks. Oh, yes, go ahead. So I just want to talk for all of the sessions, both the un-conference and the main track sessions. I really want to emphasize that a lot of people came a long ways here. We burned a lot of pounds of carbon. There's probably less ice at the North Pole. And I really want to encourage you to make the best use of your time here. And so I just have a short story from my time as a Linux kernel developer. Obviously, we're in a very similar situation being all over the world and most of the time only being able to communicate by email or if we're lucky, a phone call or a video conference. So we once had 70 people at the File Systems Summit that I helped organize. And somebody stood up to give a presentation. He worked on this presentation really hard. He was proposing a major change to the VFS system. And he was ready for a fight, because every time he talked about it on the mailing list, someone had some sort of nitpicky thing to say. So he proposed the thing. It got done. And then he was like, all right, bring it on. And everyone just nodded their heads, yes. It was 70 people in that room going, er, er, er, er. And that's invisible on the internet, right? So that's the kind of thing. That's one example of the sort of thing that can happen at an event like this if you're using your time well. I mean, the other thing to do with it is that you have, in this kind of face-to-face discussion, you have a lot more information and you have a lot more back and forth. So you can very quickly clear up differences of opinion or misunderstandings. So if you can, as much as possible, keep things in a discussion format, that's a better use of your time here than sitting and listening to something that you could hear get out of a video session. And I just want to say, we really want to, as part of that, limit the presentation part of any session to no more than 20 minutes. You don't need to have 20 minutes of presentation. You can have zero minutes of presentation, especially for the on-conference sessions. But again, this is about making the most of the time that you have here. OK, now the areas. Yes, and by the way, don't make us embarrass you. Let's really try to stick with this. And I know there's a lot of you that have bigger things put together. But think about what you need to present. So what we did when we were in the process of scheduling all of this is we figured out what the areas of specialization were in the various problems that people were trying to solve with the various conference proposals, and then group them into areas. And we're hoping that what we'll see is a self-organizing group of people around each of those areas. And self-organizing maybe is a little bit strong. I'm going to be nudging very strongly. But I hope that these areas survive past the summit. So just in my brief experience with them, they seem like the right things. So the first area is collaboration. How do we work together? How do we make it so that people can edit the software that we have on our site in the same way that they edit the pros on Wikipedia or edit any of the rest of the site? We want to make it so that we have just as many people in there monkeying around with the site itself. Another area is software engineering. So this is a very similar area to collaboration in that we want to make sure that everything makes sense. But this is about how do we do it? How is it put together? What is the, does this all make sense? Like if somebody comes here and then it's crazy town when they get here, they may want to go someplace else to learn about how to do proper software development. So we want our software to be good. And then user interface presentation. So this is basically the equivalent of the front end standards group. This is how do we make our software really usable and really a joy to use and makes you productive and makes you want to keep using it. And so it's about improving the usability of our software and the user experience of our software. And then content access. This is about actually getting, how do we get data in and out of the system? So it's not about the formats of the data, but it's about just the mechanisms that we use for caching, the mechanisms that we use for backing it up, maybe some of the backup formats would go into the content access and APIs area. And then finally, the content format. This is the foundation of it all. This is where the format that the data itself is in. And that's what we're looking for to, like as people are modifying the content of our website, we want to make sure that it's in a sensible format. It's one that we're able to build great new features and great new software on top of. So discussion. All right, so that's what you'll be talking about. And then I'm going to go over some tips for having a better discussion and enjoying your meetings and coming out of your meetings with a smile on your face. Just very quickly, there's a section that includes all of this stuff on the meeting wiki right there. OK, so there are two major tools to make all of the sessions run better. They're especially important for the on-conference sessions, but they'll make all of the sessions go better. The first one is the session checklist, which it just lays out the basic things to do in each session. I won't go over it here because it's printed out in every room. But it'll just be like, hey, what are we supposed to do? Oh, look at the session checklist. There's four roles that make for a good meeting. You know that I don't know if you've ever had a good meeting. Have you ever had a good meeting? Raise your hand. All right, OK, this is good. I recently did a Twitter poll and it was a much smaller percentage of people. So good meetings are not magic. There's actually roles that people take on that make them be great. And they are the gatekeeper, facilitator, the scribe, and the timekeeper. And I'll go over each of those in slightly more detail, but they're also printed on these role cards in each room. So at the beginning of each session, physically pick up the role cards and get people to take a role by taking the card and looking at it. Then it has instructions for what to do on it. The role cards are not about, OK, now there's only one person who can be the facilitator, one person who can take notes. It's just about making someone feel like they're responsible. If that person is speaking or distracted or otherwise unable to do their job, go ahead and jump in. You have are invited to jump in and do it as well. Take over until they can do the job again. So the gatekeeper is, in my opinion, the most important role. It is the person who makes sure everyone gets a chance to be heard and that you're spending your time well. So specifically, the gatekeeper interrupts people who have been speaking too long. At an event like this, it's probably somewhere around two to five minutes is too long. This is very important. They help people who have difficulty speaking get a chance to speak. Often, even someone who doesn't even look like they're trying to speak has something great to say and can completely summarize what's happened and move the meeting forward. It's really fantastic. So sometimes, the interesting thing about being a gatekeeper is you have to be comfortable with interrupting people. This often means the gatekeeper is very comfortable with talking for a long time, too. So if the gatekeeper is speaking for too long, feel free to jump in and be like, hey, maybe someone else should have a get some time. And also, I want to say it's also difficult for the gatekeeper to do this job. So if you're an influential person who has a lot of respect in the community, make it easy for the gatekeeper to do their job. Pay attention to how long you're speaking and try to stop yourself at two to five minutes. Okay, the facilitator. This is the person who's guiding the meeting through its goals. This is more important for the on-conference sessions where it's unclear what the goal is, perhaps, at the beginning. And that's one of the things you need to do is figure out what the goal of that session is, how you're going to get there. So this is also on the wiki, but there's these general types of sessions and you want to be clear about which one you're having. Probably you're going to be having one of the first three which are problem solving, just surveying a bunch of problems. A straw man, which is going into depth on a specific problem or a solution to a problem, or field narrowing, deciding which of the solutions you're going to take further. You're unlikely to have consensus type meetings here where people decide on a thing going forward because that you don't necessarily have the people in the room who need to do that. The other kind is education, which is just giving people information about something that's already been decided. So the facilitator should be the person using the session checklist and making sure all the things on it are getting done. Okay, the scribe. The scribe is also very important. I put S in there because scribes, because often one note taker can't keep up with things. It's great to have multiple note takers. We're using Etherpad, we can do that. So the notes are really important. Having good notes are really important to continuing what we did today into the future. You really want to feel like what you spent your time on here is paying off and is not wasted. And an important way to do that is to create notes. So we've created a notes template that includes the major things you should probably be thinking about, like including the fabricator task that's related to it. It's on the Etherpad and you can copy it into a new Etherpad. And that's on the roll card for the scribe. And just a reminder, Etherpads are public to the world. So don't say mean things about people on them. Okay, Timekeeper. This is also important, especially because we have such wonderful long sessions. It could be easy to get distracted and not realize that you've only talked about the first 20% of what you wanted to talk about in your 80 minute session, right? So the Timekeeper's job is, as the facilitator identifies, hey, we're gonna talk about X, Y and Z. The Timekeeper figures out like, hey, if we want to talk about Z today, we should be done with X in 10 minutes and Z in 20 minutes and then we'll have time. And then you remind people that Time is going by. Like, hey, it's been 10 minutes. Do we wanna move on to the next thing? Do we wanna wrap this up? And paying attention and reminding people when there's only five to 10 minutes left in the session. So those are the four roles that help people have really good meetings. And if you do all of these things and use the roll cards, hopefully you'll have a great meeting and be excited about these two days. So here's some general discussion guidelines that are about how you speak. This was a bunch of stuff about the structure of speaking and this is about like your individual sentences. So I'll start out with a discussion guidelines around talking about gender. The vocabulary to use for people of particular genders is say men, women and or people of all genders. Don't use girls for women over 18 years of age. Don't use females. It's dehumanizing. Don't use guys for mixed gender group. There's a bunch of great words for that. Folks, people, all y'all, everybody. Don't use body parts to refer to specific genders. It doesn't work A and B. It's not that clever. And say trans people for people whose gender is different than that assigned at birth. Coming to race, class and family role. Don't use ethnic or urban to mean people of a particular race. Use people of color to refer to people who aren't white. Don't make generalizations based on race like because a person is of this race, they must have this religion or this food or speak this language, right? Don't use stereotypes about people with specific types of jobs. This often comes up especially in usability discussions. Let's remember there are a lot of people of all different jobs who are editing Wikipedia, things like that. And don't use stereotypes about parents or caretakers so easy your mom could use it. That just needs to never be said again. Okay. Or about whether they're caretakers or their age, things like that. Grandmother is also unacceptable. Okay, and just a reminder for specific to Wikipedia stuff to remember that people might not know all the acronyms that you're using and be willing to quickly explain them if someone asks. This is a good role for the gatekeeper to jump in and ask, hey, does everyone understand that? Okay, summary. Use the roll cards. Use the session checklist. Especially for the unconference session, but for all the sessions, leave or join the sessions at will. It's once you walk into a room, you're not committed. You can be like, whoa, not the session I thought I wanted to be in and leave and go somewhere else. That's totally acceptable. If you're an influential person who has a lot of respect in the community, please self-monitor and try not to dominate the conversation. Remind people of the discussion guidelines if you see them going off track. And just another reminder, report anything that violates the friendly space policy if you feel it's important. So we take that very seriously. All right, and just a reminder, here's the wiki page.