 Of course, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, looking fabulous, the one and only, Catherine Mayer! Give her a big hand! Thanks. Thank you. We don't have my slides yet. Okay. Maybe I can show you what our fantastic graphic recorders are, Frida, who is sitting there over in the corner. She is drawing the full three-day event. I noticed that as I walked in. That's incredible. So this is just the panel, and that is from this morning. Very cool. It's super, super cool. And you can actually see here on the screen. Have you guys seen that? You can see on the screen while she is live drawing. Learning for life. Learning for life, yeah. That's goal four, lifelong learning. So I will hand the stage over to you. No, I'll just do a little soft shoe while you wait. Yeah, a little dance. So have you had a great day so far? I have had an incredible day so far. Fantastic. Has everyone here had a good day so far? Yes? I like to refer to these conferences and events where we get together with the global community as my favorite time of the year. It's a little bit like going on holiday, except I'm going on holiday with your family. I go on holiday with 900 of my favorite Wikimedians, half of whom I've never met before. So for me, when I look around, I see old friends and I see new faces. The ability to walk from this venue to the other rooms of the conference is actually, it sort of takes me longer than I expect because of the fact that I'm stopping and saying hello to people and asking them about the projects that they're working on. And I think that's why they call it the hallway track, is because some of the best conversations that you have are often the ones in the middle of the actual sessions you meant to attend. I hope as you look around today in the room and as you've been walking about across the venue, you're having that same experience and hopefully meeting new folks as you go. If it is your first year, I just want to say welcome. Is there any first year folks here in the room? Can I get a big round of applause for the first year folks? Welcome to your very first Wikimania. Thank you for joining us, taking a step into this movement and I hope that we see you for many, many more Wikimanias to come. And if you are in fact here for your 15th year, I just want to say thank you. Jimmy's not listening. Thank you for being here for your 15th year, for everything that you've given and done for the community. As you heard earlier today, we are here from 80 countries, roughly 900 people. And in my mind, this isn't just a conference, it's actually a celebration as well. It's a celebration of community and free knowledge and a celebration of everything that you as Wikimanias have given to the world. It's a moment to look around and appreciate one another for this tremendous gift, which is free knowledge. But it's also a little bit of a call to action because I think every single year that goes by, I view our mission as being more urgent, more clearly defined and more essential, especially in a world in which people aren't sure what information that they can trust or in which so many people and perspectives don't see themselves reflected in conversation about our greatest global challenges. And I think it's a more essential mission because it is also a more inspirational mission as we see so many challenges that seem almost intractable as though we don't know how to surmount them. But when we look at Wikimedia, we see a group of people with so very little in common from so many different languages, cultures, communities, countries, but who have one tremendous thing in common, which is a sense of generosity and faith in one another that when we come together, we can actually build something that changes the world. So I think that this year as Wikimania is actually an opportunity to intentionally seek out and invite more people into our movement, a chance to meet curious, like-minded folks, people who care deeply about building and preserving and collecting and elevating free knowledge for the world. We've heard a lot in the course of the day about the SDGs, of course, and I spent a little bit of time thinking about this before coming in to the conference about what the meaning of the SDGs is for Wikimania. Before I get into that, today the Wikimedia Foundation formally signed and launched a partnership with the UN's Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights. This is something that recognizes, elevates, and extends some incredible work that's been being done by our colleagues at Wikimedia Argentina. I don't know if anyone from Wikimedia Argentina is in the room. There you are. Okay, great. So Wikiderecho Sumanos is a project that the Wikimedia Argentina launched a few years back, which means Wikihuman rights in Spanish. And it's been adopted very widely across Latin America, across the region. At the core, I think that human rights is something that is fundamental to the way that we think about what Wikimedia actually does. We talk about freedom of expression, we talk about the right to access information, we talk about the importance of privacy. And at the core of the SDGs, you see human rights underpinning a lot of the functions, the core components of it, the right to shelter, the right to clean food and water, the right to education. I think we believe, of course, that knowledge is a fundamental right and that there are all these other enabling rights that make free knowledge possible. As I mentioned, those rights that safeguard our ability to think, to be curious, to seek information, and then to be able to receive it without any barriers or blocks. And in the past, when I used to think about what Wikimedia's role was in the SDGs, their Sustainable Development Goals, I automatically would point to SDG4, which is the goal around education and quality education. And in the SDG4, there is a bit about lifelong learning, which to me felt like where Wikimedia sort of most clearly belonged, a little bit perhaps in gender equality, perhaps a little bit as well in partnerships. But coming into this Wikimania focused on the Sustainable Development Goals, I started to really rethink how I view what our role is vis-a-vis the Sustainable Development Goals. I realized that, in fact, we are in all of them because they are actually in all of us, if that makes any sense. So what I mean by that is that when we think about the life underwater, for example, and when we think about learning, which is goal 14, and we think about all of the tremendous articles that we have about our natural world, or when we think about goal 16, which is about peace and justice, and we think about all the incredible articles about systems of governance around the planet, or if we think about goal 7, which is about renewable energy, and the articles that we have on physics and mathematics that help underpin renewable energy, or essential health information, which is goal 3, and you think about the incredible work that the, oh wait, it's not Wikiproject Med anymore, it's actually an affiliate group now. Does anyone know the name of the new affiliate group? No. Wikimedicine. The incredible work that the Wikimedicine community does in making sure that articles about health are high quality and accessible to all. What I realize is that Wikimedia isn't in one of the goals, Wikimedia is actually an essential part of all of the goals, and we have a role to play in supporting and elevating this priority of sustainability. So my question is sort of how do we start? You know, as individuals what can we do to take on such ambitious challenges, and do we really think that we can fulfill all of these over the course of the next 11 years before 2030? And then I remember that this is actually a community and a room full of idealists who have made this entire community and projects possible by coming together and tackling these enormous challenges, often bit by bit, one edit at a time. So I think part of that is because we're not merely individuals, we're all here as part of what is actually a social movement as Wikimedians, a social movement that's characterized by a desire to see change in the world. It's the thing, as I said, that brings us together despite all of these sort of superficial differences that we might have. And whether you founded a Wiki project or spent the last two days at a hackathon building a new tool, or this is your first Wikimedia ever, as we already found out, there are people in the room, that is the thing that pulls us all together around this common vision and ideal, and that's the thing that should regenerate our energy and joy for our projects as we look around at each other and think about what is actually possible. Because Wikimedians are not strangers to this concept that ordinary people can change the world for the better, because we see it every day in the work that we do, with every edit to every article, every edit-a-thon that you run, every new editor that you bring into the projects. The act of finding and digitizing information is fundamentally a truly hopeful one. You can keep going. Because each of these actions actually creates these ripple effects outside of our communities, outside of the immediate movement. It makes it so much more than a collection of websites and words, but the volunteers, contributors, affiliates, we're all committed to this future that's actually an incredibly aspirational and hopeful future. And as a future in which knowledge allows us to live the lives that we want to live, to live in the societies that we want to live in, and to build the communities and future that we aspire to. The communities doing things that have never been done before in service of knowledge for the world, which in many ways is actually a radical rejoinder to the way that the world has always been. We talk about in the movement's strategic direction breaking down the structures of power and privilege that have prevented people from participating in free knowledge. And that's exactly what you're doing every single day. You're questioning these assumptions of what is known and how that knowledge has been created. The work that you're doing is meeting the insatiable curiosity that makes us all human. I think that's an incredibly aspirational and joy-filled thing to do. It actually changes lives. So I talked a little bit earlier. I mentioned that Wikimedia Argentina has been doing this work and we've had this partnership with the, this new partnership with the UN as Office of the Human Rights Commissioner. And I want to speak a little bit more to that because when I talk about changing lives, I really mean that in a very fundamental way. Wikimedia Argentina has established themselves as a leader in this area of protecting human rights in the free knowledge world. Their program, which was originally known as Wikilesa, was an effort to understand the period within Argentina's recent history of being governed by a military junta that was known for widespread human rights abuses. The Wikimedia Argentina community worked with local memory, institutions of memory, to be able to document this and make this information more publicly available on Spanish Wikipedia. And in a region in which many countries have actually suffered from similar periods, painful periods in their histories, the model caught on relatively quickly. And you saw other Wikimedia communities like Wikimedia Uruguay, Wikimedia Chile taking this up and exploring their own paths and their own history through Wikipedia. Again, as focusing on human rights, but focusing on it in a very wiki way, focusing on references to citations, verifiability, and building knowledge in a really neutral way that allows for people to explore their past and the past of the countries around them. I think that's an incredibly powerful thing, and we've actually seen this model continue and be adopted, and already it's beginning to be remixed a little bit, as countries like Mexico and Colombia and Venezuela have also picked this up. Countries with different histories, but also exploring these human rights challenges. So the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights take note of this incredible work that is being done, because they recognize the power of Wikimedia as a platform to help make people aware of the fundamental tenets of human rights. In fact, the representative from the High Commissioner's Office said today that one of the biggest challenges to human rights today is that if you don't know what your rights are, it makes it very difficult for you to claim them. And so what they're excited to do with Wikimedia and excited to partner with our community is to think about how we are able to extend information in additional languages, in contexts that people are seeking this information so that it is more accessible to more people, and they have an understanding of the fundamental rights which we all hold. They're also excited, and I didn't learn this until just very recently, to make their own resources more publicly accessible. I found out just in preparation for the conference that the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which is the sort of founding text that defines the way that many international human rights treaties have been interpreted and ratified over time, up until recently, I believe up until recently is actually under copyright. So you have something that actually belongs to all of humanity, and yet unfortunately is locked away. It's the power of Wikimedians who are able to have conversations with institutions of knowledge and make them aware of what these limitation, limiting factors actually are in the pursuit of their own mission and in the pursuit of ours. And as a build up to this, or as a sort of follow on to this, I'm also excited to let everyone know that Wikimedia Argentina is going to be hosting the very first affiliate organized conference on human rights later this year. So when we talk about changing lives, we are talking about some very fundamental and transformational ways that we change lives, including the way that we understand the rights under which all of us can live. So the next one program that I just want to talk about quickly is one that I think is really kind of, it's very cool. So it's the Equal Edit Program that Wikimedia Sweden, since we are here in Sweden and hosted by our colleagues at Wikimedia Sweden, have undertaken. The Equal Edit Initiative just is, well, hang on one second. So I don't know, does anyone here aware that Sweden has made feminism part of its official foreign policy? Now you know. So in 2014, the Swedish government decided that feminism would be an official plank of its foreign policy, which I think is really cool, right? It is actually embedding equity into the way that Sweden shows up in the world and the values that it advances. And so it's totally appropriate that Wikimedia Sweden would be doing work around Equal Edit. In fact, I think, and I'm not mistaken, Sweden, Wikimedia Sweden was actually a little bit ahead of the Swedish government in placing an emphasis on gender equity in terms of its own work and program. So as usual, you know, Wikimedia is out there paving the way and everybody else, including the government, follow me. No, I'm just kidding. So the Equal Edit Initiative that Wikimedia Sweden has been involved in, just recently, there was an editathon that they did with a magazine here. I'm going to say, I hope I'm going to say this, right? Historiskan? Okay, close enough. Thank you. What I thought took at the whole model of editing for gender equity just another step further. So everyone here is familiar with how we, a lot of editathons that are focused on gender equity focus on writing articles, biographies of living people about notable women who've been left out of history or notable non-binary people who've been left out of history. What this editathon did was it actually looked for notable women who already had biographies in Wikipedia, but instead of adding to those biographies, in addition to adding to those biographies, they actually went back and looked at the articles about the history of Sweden itself and then rewrote those articles including the history of women and women's contributions into the history of Sweden. So it takes the activity of editing gender equity into Wikipedia one step further, not just creating biographies of women that are separate from the rest of history, but integrating them in such a way, literally rewriting history to make it more equitable, but also, of course, more accurate as well, which is part of the whole aspiration of what we do every single day. I love learning about models like this as we continue to remix the great ideas that our community have and they continue to evolve over time and I look forward to seeing similar initiatives inspired by the Equal Edit Initiative. Of course, and that is goal five for those who are keeping track, which is around gender equality. So these are just a few of the examples of some of the incredible work that this community does and I think the common thread between all of these examples is that they take many people in institutions and collaboration to achieve. All right, oops. In the interest of time, I'm going to skip through a little bit. So this year's Wikimania, as I mentioned, is a place to bring in new partners. It's a place to bring in new voices and it's a place to think about what our future, in terms of sustainability, looks like and just because I promised I would get up and recap and that's why my slides relate, what happened today? I mean, we heard from some really inspirational speakers on the stage listening to different ways in which the SDGs are related to our work. So Professor Somby was talking a little bit about Indigenous languages and in fact, the role in Indigenous language in preserving culture and specifically here in Sweden and in the Nordic countries in general, the role and the importance of the Indigenous language of the Sami people and what the documentation of their work and their culture and their lives does in order to... Sorry, what's that? Sorry, and the acknowledgement and integration and focus on this can mean in terms of preserving really important parts of Indigenous cultures here. Secretary Anika Söder highlighted that the Swedish government has come together as I said, mentioned talking about gender equality but very specifically through the WikiGap project which has been something that has taken place now in 60 different countries or nearly 60 different countries around the world which is again an effort to edit Wikipedia around gender equity and equality so that takes that biography of living people process of editing for women who've been left out of history but it's been supported as part of that feminist foreign policy by the Swedish government in partnership and embassies and other centers around the world. Tyler Radford's talk from Open Street Maps focused on the role and importance of open geodata in crisis environments and in the open mapping community as a whole and how that plays into questions of equity of access to resources and response in terms of crisis and explained I think a little bit to us about why it's really important to have this dynamic knowledge that's available in ways and types of knowledge that are not just about necessarily article spaces but also knowledge that can be used in that geospatial context. So if we think that SDGs are a guidepost for our community which I really do believe that they are and that Wikimedia is a leader in the open movement I think that shows to us what we can do together if we can go a little further Greg, sorry. What we can do together in terms of improving and advancing sustainability in the world but I actually want to ask ourselves as we are here over the course of this weekend one of the things that I've learned at every Wikimedia that I've been to is that the themes at individual Wikimanias tend to resonate in our community for many years to come so conversations at Wikimedia last year were all about bridging knowledge gaps and today as we were talking about before I actually started my talk more broadly knowledge gaps are often conversations around diversity and inclusion and who is involved in the movement and who is creating knowledge. As you heard we had a diversity conference in Stockholm with you years back and I don't know when the next diversity conference is but I think that's a good thing because it actually means that diversity has been something that is very much interwoven into so much of the work the community is doing today so that's a theme from a Wikimania that has continued to resonate across our communities and inform our work so sustainability is the theme of this year's conference one of the questions I'm interested in is what kind of future are we building knowledge for and what kind of role can we play in the Wikimedia movement in terms of our own sustainability the reason I ask that is I don't know the answer to that you know the Wikimedia Foundation in 2017 the Board of Trustees voted to approve a resolution calling on the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia movement to really consider its environmental impact and understand the footprint that we leave in the world in terms of carbon and other carbon emissions and other challenges to sustainability this year the Wikimedia Foundation completed a report on our overall movement's impact and found that we actually produce about 2.1 kilotons of carbon dioxide emissions every single year that's I don't know how actually quite to visualize that I did try to look that up to try to find slides on how do you visualize a kiloton of carbon it's a lot I mean it's not a lot compared I think to the impact that we have in the world but nonetheless if we're talking about a sustainable future and this is a really important part of thinking about the sustainability of our projects for the sustainability of our world so members of the Wikimedia Foundation are going to present more about the impact of this report on Sunday and I encourage you to attend that talk if that's something that's interesting to you but I want to ask the question to people in the room to think about as you go into the day and into conversations and into the year to come is what can we as a movement do to address questions of climate sustainability what can we as a movement do to think about our own footprint and our own impact and how we can how we can elevate this critical issue for our planet as a whole after all we want our movement to endure well into the future and in order to endure we really want it to endure in the kind of world that we want to live in so oh we're gonna go forward a little bit sorry yeah I think so okay keep going yep sorry I'm sorry yep keep going oh wait wait a little bit more so I'm gonna encourage you to attend a few talks that I'm really excited about the first of which is go go up a little bit sorry I just want to get the sessions right nope other direction okay the first of which is the difficulties of wikipedia is in languages that are not taught in school so there is an amazing statistic or one that really to struck me when I first learned it that if you are in an education in education system and you are trying to learn in a language that is not your native language it's not the one that's spoken at home you actually only absorb about 50% of the information that's taught to you so in learning in general we know that we only absorb a percentage of any information that I'm presenting to you or that an educator a teacher is presenting now imagine that being twice as hard if you're learning in a secondary language so on Saturday morning there's going to be a session talking about what does it mean to actually think about providing knowledge in wikipedia is in which languages are not actually taught in school I think it's gonna be really interesting I want to encourage everyone to go later in the after that same afternoon there's a session so tomorrow a session on encouraging the spirit of new editors this I think is something as we've been talking as a global movement about increased diversity and growing our movement in places that it doesn't exist today what does it feel like to be an editor for the first time what would it mean to view this movement through fresh eyes many people in the room here today have been editors for a very long time contributors to our community and you've seen this movement change and grow but you may remember what it felt like when you first started I'd ask the question what does it look like now to enter into a movement like this and how do we make sure it's as welcoming as possible for new folks and then of course this wouldn't be a talk for me if I didn't mention movement strategy the movement strategy team is running tracks all throughout the conference that are looking at recommendations for the future of our movement for movement structures and governance questions around diversity and community health I encourage you to attend all of those and also there's evening at 9 p.m. if you're still awake if you're a night owl we'll be hosting a conversation at the Clarion Hotel with a member of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees Lisa Lewin talking a little bit about what can we learn from the future what can we see into our future when it comes to movement strategy I hope that you'll be able to attend and I promise I won't have slides it'll be a really informal conversation and I think it'll make it a lot easier so that's it I think what I want to close on to saying is that if you look around this room you know we are talking about the SDGs they're incredibly large audacious challenges for our world and I think if you look at all of them as a collective it's hard to necessarily know where to start and I think tend to think that Wikimedians think of themselves as very practical people people who are doers people who are focused on what is it that I can contribute at this moment in time in order to make Wikipedia better what can I do to edit this article what can I do to improve the citation how do I make this a stronger argument etc etc these tend to be sort of these are very discreet tangible activities that we take but I think that that spirit of tinkering actually hides a tremendous idealism because people who are tinkerers people who are always looking to improve around the edges are actually people who are tremendous optimists they're people who believe that things can iteratively get better over time and it's not just about that one great big idea it's about taking the systems in the world in which we live in today and trying to actually make them better in really practical ways so as we're looking at the SDGs which as I said I believe Wikimedia isn't all of them and they in fact are literally in all of the work that we do in all of the edits and articles that we write what does it mean to take them on in a tinkerers way what does it mean to take them on in a wikipedia's way collaboratively improving them bit by bit knowing that they're always subject to revision knowing that we can continue to add and be additive that we can bring new partners in that each of those incremental changes made by so many people perhaps millions perhaps billions of people over time can actually build the world that we want to be in you know I don't think it's a sunny surprise or any secret I'll close on not a secret sorry it's definitely not a secret I don't think it's a coincidence is what I meant to say that the SDGs aspire to 2030 and that the Wikimedia movement strategy has also chosen 2030 as a goal when you try to think 10 years out into the future it asks you to think far beyond the circumstances of the day to day it gives you freedom and space to imagine a world that looks different from the one that we're in but it's still close enough that it has the same contours and it seems familiar that's what we asked the Wikimedia movement and communities to do looking at our future for 2030 a more diverse Wikimedia community a more global Wikimedia community world in which more people have access to access to knowledge and the SDGs are asking us to do the same thing look that little bit out into the future 10 years away close enough that it feels familiar far enough that it feels like we have time to affect meaningful change as we think about that world that we want to build that tinkerer spirit I hope that you'll bring that to the challenges that we have in front of us literally in front of us and think about how we can take them on and the work to come so again I'm so sorry about the sort of awkward nature of the presentation but I appreciate you bearing with me for it and thanks all for coming and I hope you have a wonderful Wikimedia