 Great. Well, hello everyone. Welcome to this month's Wikimedia Monthly Activities meeting. Good afternoon and good evening to those who are not with us. We're coming to you live and direct from San Francisco, as well as many other locations across the world. I will be your host today. I'm Koikini and Jui. I'm the Vice President for Communications for the Foundation. So that's my welcome. And some best practice rules for you to abide by. Please, if you're not talking, put yourself on mute if you are joining us via one of the live links. And if you're in the room, we have an RSE channel open so if you can ask questions or you can come up to the mic. So today we have a great agenda for us. We are going to have a short movement update. And then we're going to have three presentations. One will be around heuristics, principles, and methods. Oh my. That's Jess's. Oh my. I'm not sure what that is. I'm looking forward to find out what that is. And then we'll have a Wikimedia update on the plans for the strategy. And then we'll have an update from our Executive Director Catherine Ma. We'll then open up questions and discussion and then it will be time for Wikilove, that tradition that we all love. So I'm just going to walk you through a few of the highlights from the last month. Wikibase, NYC, the conference happened and we explored the frontier of linked open data infrastructure. We brought together Wikimedians, art curators, and scientists. And they gathered a new museum for a three-day workshop about Wikibase and linked data. And five years of art and feminism, that's fantastic. Fantastic news, especially after the month when we saw a lot of focus on us around gender and equality. We've had five years of art and feminism, five years of combating gender inequality, using Wikipedia as a tool for correcting the original record on cis and trans women. We also collaborated with Mozilla and we're teaching open source around developer advocacy program, where we collaborated on two open source initiatives to strengthen the open source ecosystem. Glam activity kicked off in Indonesia with digitizing museum collections. And that took place through initiative by Wikimedia Indonesia, as well as the Indonesian Arts Coalition. And they arranged a visit to Dr. Oembe Hinakopita Museum in, wow, in a lovely place in Indonesia, to begin digitizing their collection. Fun fact, this month is actually Wikipedia Asian Month, so they're doing a lot of our collecting content in that part of the world. George Soros also made a two million gift to the Wikimedia Endowment. This, of course, follows the one that was made by Amazon the month before. And you can trial content translation. It's in version 2.0 right now. So get early access to version 2.0, the content translation tool, which simplifies the process of translating Wikipedia articles. Coming up, we're truly in conference season, just coming off the heels of the one in North America. We have Glam Wiki, that's going to be happening in Israel. It's going to be an amazing event, looking to be shaping up to a really great event. We'll have Catherine represent us there. And we're going to have Wikindaba in Abuja. The Orgas in Nigeria are going to be organizing that regional conference for Africans both within and in the diaspora. And then we have our usual big summit in Germany, and that's the Wikimedia Summit, formerly known as the Wikimedia Conference, which will focus on our movement strategy process and movement governance for the organized part of the movement in general. And that brings me to the end of the updates, and I'll hand over to Jess Klein to tell us all about this, oh my. Hi, thanks. I'm going to share you my screen, right? Yeah. Yes. Okay, so I'm switching over to my screen. You should all see the same thing now, right? Hi, my name is Jess Klein. Back in August, I joined the foundation. I simultaneously joined two teams at Wikimedia, the design team and the editing team. So as you can probably imagine, I had a lot of onboarding to do, and I went to meetings about the mission and values of the organization. But simultaneously, I was trying to get up to speed with the current state of like mobile web contributions so that I could begin to think about how to make the visual editor editing experience simpler on the mobile web. So this quarter, the editing team is focusing on exploring. So you can see this is kind of a flow of the entire design process. There's a discovery phase where you sort of figure out what the problem is that you're solving, and then a delivery phase where you sort of address that problem and kind of create solutions for fixing that problem or opportunity. And so right now, we're exploring what's working with the visual editor experience. And one thing that I somewhat haphazardly learned was that it turned out that this multitasking onboarding was both a fire hose of information, but it was also pretty advantageous. It struck me that there was an opportunity to link our design methods to the Wikimedia mission and product principles that I was also learning about. So to get started, I'm just going to share with you some of the definitions that I learned about on an organizational level and then how I've been trying to apply that to our product work. I learned that the mission informs all of the work that we do at the foundation, not just how we conceive of our work, which is conceiving through principles and values, but also how we implement it through methods. So I'm just going to dive a little bit deeper and kind of go through each individual block here. Mission is the purpose or calling of the organization. Wikimedia's mission specifically, and this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone on this call, is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain and to disseminate that effectively and globally. So we have three basic tools in our arsenal to support how we talk about and implement this mission. This is basically what motivated me in general to apply to Wikimedia. Then you have values. So values are ideals that help frame the conversations around the mission or in my case, as a product designer, the product success. So when you come from orientation as an employee, you're asked to participate in an interactive remote workshop with other people who are onboarding to learn about the values of the foundation, which I've listed here. And what you learn along the way is that everyone is joining at the same time with you in some form and bodies these values, which are, in my opinion, the feelings that you walk away with when you connect with the movement. And this is something that I want to try to infuse into the products that I'm helping to build with everyone here. Then you have principles. Principles are a group of guidelines for best practices that convey our intent. There can be several sets of principles for a product, for example, design or product principles. They explore we are committed to this mission. What's listed here on this next slide we do is our design principles, which you can see on design.wikimedia.org. There are a set of five principles that really help us to structure our conversations around product success and specifically design success. Finally, I learned that there are methods. So methods is something that I didn't actually learn through my onboarding on the foundation side. I learned this through my design team orientation. Designs are practical exercises or activities that help us to achieve the goals of our mission. Methods are central to our daily practice. We probably have hundreds of different methods that we could apply to any specific problem. Here are a few good ones that we regularly use on our product teams, dot voting, card sorting, interviewing. These are the things that we do to get the job done. But this was in general a lot of information for me to process. So I started to do some experiments to make sense of how to practically apply this to my everyday work as a designer. So as I mentioned, the editing team right now is trying to figure out what's working well in our editing tools and where we can improve. So that's our goal, figuring out what's working. The one way to accomplish this, so this is actually the question we're asking, how does the user interface perform against our value-based Rubik when we do various tasks? So here's a view of visual editor. And one way that we're going to review this, there's a few different methods we could actually use. We could use usability tests and heuristic review, and we actually did both. But I'm going to focus a little bit right now on the heuristic review, which is when you gather a group of experts and methodically review the user interface against the established principles. They're also called heuristics. They were popularized. Heuristic reviews in general were popularized by Jacob Nielsen in the 1990s. He came up with a set of 10 rubrics to evaluate user interface design that are a fantastic foundation for the kinds of questions that we want answered about usability of visual editor. However, what they don't accomplish is answering the question, is this something that the Wikimedia Foundation is proud to put out there in the world? Or will we evoke the feelings that we value in our movement? But luckily, we also have principles, which I was talking about earlier. So we have our design and our product principles at our disposal. So what I did was I combined heuristics with Wikimedia's values and the design principles to create a simple value-based rubric checklist for each of the expert reviewers to go through when examining the editing tools. So if you look at this, so striving for excellence is like one of our values, but it's also like the culmination of all of our values. So if we get everything right, it's excellence. And then you have each one of our individual values. Layered on top of the values, I've layered on the principles. And then I was able to take this and I converted it into an integrated checklist combining the heuristics that Nielsen created. This checklist I converted into a worksheet. I'm just going to skim through these. And this is available, so when I'm not having to speak through it fast, you can take a look. But I created a scenario using the personas that the research team created, and I really built out a scenario that would allow us to test the tool through a simple set of tasks for editors to try out to figure out what we're doing right now. And as they're doing that, the various experts who are people who are from products, from design, from accessibility, from right to left, from various fields, some internal, some external, they're kind of going through each part of the checklist and they're reviewing it on a value-based rubric. So the questions I have integrated all of the things that I talked about earlier. So that's where we're at right now. We're running this experiment. And when we have the results squared away from all this work, we're going to be able to clearly say if our product is something that we walk away feeling proud about. We look to our core values as a way to strive for product excellence, and we use our principles as this framework to validate our general feelings about the user experience. So this is something that we're continuing to work on and explore, and if you're interested in learning more about this work, you can check out the product page on the editing team. And if you've attempted to infuse the mission and value into your work, I'd love to hear about it. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jess. That was really insightful, and I just want to ask the team in the room to say a collective, oh my, so on three, one, two, three. Thank you. So now we're going to hand over to Nicole and the rest of the strategy team to talk us through some updates on this call. Yeah, thank you very much. I should already be sharing my screen. Does it all work? Yeah. I'm Nicole Ever, I work, and I'm here with my colleagues, Karol Weitler and Tanja Hassan from the movement strategy team, and yeah, welcome to our second episode of this movement strategy update at this meeting, and thank you for having us there, and I'm going to now give a quick introduction and then hand over to Tanja. First of all, between last meeting, the last meeting and today, we have really participated in several events and conversations, and we received a lot of helpful feedback, and basically this presentation now is based on this feedback, and one of the feedbacks that was also a little bit surprising for us was that many people across the movement are not yet familiar with the strategic direction, which has been published around a year ago, and so we brought it with us again today, and I'm going to read it again. So by 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us. You can read more about the direction and all the context, of course, on Meta. What we are doing now is to define how we actually get there. How do we set our structures up for success, and now we are entering a new part or a new season of this huge Wikimedia 2030 process. What we have also heard from various Wikimedians is that the direction means very different things to them, depending on where you look at it, depending on your background, depending on your communities or your role in the movement, for example. And this is what we want. This is actually good and intended by us. Because for us, local context, or not only for us, but for this process, local context matters, we need all the pieces of the puzzle from all parts of the world and from different backgrounds to bring the strategic direction to life. What we are doing now, currently in our process, is that we will update our structures and programs so that we can successfully advance in our strategic direction. This is how we build, as a movement built upon the strategic direction, and we are doing this in two parallel processes. If you attended this meeting last time, you will also have probably seen it, but we also learned that repetition is also very helpful with this distinction. Because we learned that with this distinction, people felt that they better understand what Wikimedia 2030 is actually about. So these are two parallel evolving processes, programmatic and structural level. And the program planning, this is actually not what we will be talking about today, but I wanted to make sure that the distinction is well understood. This basically means taking the strategic direction and integrating it into strategic plans or annual plans or day-to-day activities. This is, for example, happening at the Wikimedia Foundation and, of course, also at other movement organizations and groups. And this also, of course, includes the work with different communities and local thematic and also project context. And the responsibility for this programmatic level is basically on the implementation. This is not on us, but basically on you, on many other people and groups in the movement. What we are talking about today and for the next couple of weeks, month and ongoing is the structural change. This is based on the fact that this movement has grown organically and that it's now time to structurally think through the way we operate, what mechanisms are in place, what the challenges are with this current situation and what the potential opportunities also could be. We are not using, because of the current structures and structures in the movement. Of course, all this always in the context has to be seen in the context of the strategic direction. This structural change is driven by movement working groups and it is built upon our needs diverse participation from across the movement so that we can really build a coordinated exploration process that prepares us as a movement for the future and the expected outcome of this process. Our recommendations for structural change so that the programmatic work in the future can be more successful and can have a greater impact. What's next? Just a sneak peek on the timeline, Karol will go into this later on a little bit more. What we've also learned is that the working groups they really want to start working. They are in the starting position and they are eager to do what they have actually signed up for. That means, yes, the process of bringing more diversity into the group is now coming to an end and the working groups will move into the scoping phase. We have divided the development of recommendations into three phases. The first is the scoping. That means exploring and defining the actual field of inquiry of the thematic area that the working groups are engaged with. Then the next thing is analyzing. Analyzing like research or case studies and also community input and community consultations to be able to then conclude and draft really these recommendations for the anticipated change. Karol will go more into detail also in a couple of minutes. What we have learned and I've put already on the slide because this part of the process is pretty young but we have already really really learned a lot which is super cool but also it's super interesting and cool but this process is something that no one has really ever done before and we are trying a lot of things. We're trying them out and we're experimenting and a lot of them also don't work at least not at first. It's a little bit like we are building the bridge bridges while we walk on them. Yes, of course we have a plan. We have a plan for the steps in the process but the plan is a plan and it will change as soon as it turns into action. We are already in the process of adjusting many parts of the plan based on all the feedback that we get. Feedback from the working groups, committee members, from mailing lists, from all the events that we have been going and this feedback doesn't come as a total surprise because we are of course also observing the process but we are now really starting to work on mitigation and we'll be going more into detail in a second. Yes, this feedback really helps us to make meaningful course corrections and just to give one example where we really have an enormous or essential learning is to figure out the balance between guidance and autonomy. How much guidance, how much support, how much bureaucracy do we provide the groups with and how much autonomy do we give them. So do we just let them go and figure it out themselves or do we give them a step by step manual and how do we make sure that we have, yes some bureaucracy is needed but how do we make sure that we don't kill creativity with bureaucracy so that's something that we are currently still in the process of figuring out and trying to make some course corrections on that and Tanveer will now go more into details on that one. Thank you. Good morning everybody. Thanks so much Nicole. Before I dive deep I would like to just reiterate everything that Nicole said and reiterate it again. Feedback is helpful. Let me correct that. Feedback is super awesome helpful. So much so that if I were to be offered a tub of ice cream and some quality feedback I think I would go with quality feedback as of now. So how did we get this feedback? Where all did we look for this feedback? We have been extremely lucky. We have been very fortunate. We have received feedback from working group members. We have received feedback from staff members both from the foundation and from different affiliates. We have received feedback from friends who have been observing the strategy process carefully and have a lot of affection towards the process and towards us. So we have been very, very glad and we have been very thankful for all the feedback that we have received. So what do we do with this feedback? We respect the feedback. We make sure that the feedback is taken into the process and made sure that there is a meaningful course correction as Nicole pointed it out. So what has the feedback changed in the way that the process is shaping up? We have upped our communication. We are actively communicating with working groups. Our earlier communication was only two-dimensional. Now we are trying to make video messaging. We are trying to reach out. We are trying to participate more on the social media channels. We have also upped our contribution towards administrative support and various other administrative tasks so that we can free the working group members to take part in the content-related discussions, take part in the action points that come out of the calls and not worry too much about housekeeping, about various little nitty gritties of arranging the call and scheduling the call and such things. The other thing that we have improved is also try and allocate time and try and allocate resources, facilitation which has come up very strongly across our communication channels. Nicole, can I please go to the next slide? The super important point that was on the slide that I'm intentionally carrying it forward is that there was a point where we did not understand what was not understood. The feedback that we have received has helped us engage better with the working groups. We are working well with the working groups. We are working in both on the online calls synchronously with the working groups and we are also promoting, developing and encouraging asynchronous models for the working group. What we have been trying to do is to try and develop the scoping document with the working groups. The working groups are already working on the scoping document whereas the diversification process is running hand in hand. These two feed from each other and we understand that a collaborative process between these two conversations can only be good for the health of the working group and also for the discussions that can happen. The scoping documents are shaping up at various levels in various spaces. Many different methodologies are being discussed. Many questions that were earlier not the central questions or not were super important in the conversation of the working group are being re-broad, are being re-discussed which presents us with a lot of exciting questions and a lot of exciting discussions. The one thing that we would want to stress to all the working group members, to everybody who's looking into the movement strategy process is that there is really no time to waste in confusion but there is all the time in the world to invest in discussions. So we would like to discuss, we would like to engage in different parts of discussions and different methods of discussing the topics and the questions that come up. Nicole, can we please move to the next? The other way of working together is with the significant stakeholder of the movement strategy process which is the community members. How are we working together with the community members? We are actively seeking out opinions when I say we are also including the working group members here. We are attending conferences, we are making sure that the community members who either have heard about the strategy process get more details about it, get more updates about it or the people who have not heard about the movement strategy process or have some other notions about the movement strategy process discussed with the working group members, discussed with core team members and there is some shared understanding about what is movement strategy process, what is the direction, what are the steps involved, what are the important milestones, where are we going together, why is it important for us to be connected, what really is the big picture that we are talking about. The working group members is that local perspectives are very important but it is not the only thing that is important, local perspectives need to be discussed on a global level. So our mantra is that local perspectives global discussions. The working group members are also taking part in these conferences, they are seeking out specific inputs regarding their domain of interest, the scoping document that they have been developing, the discussions that are central to the working group discussions and the working group deliberations these are coming up very well. The one last thing that I would like to point out before I hand it over to Karel is that we are extremely grateful towards the feedback that we have received we would like for more feedback coming our way and we are in this together there is no way that the movement strategy process will progress without the active collaboration of all the stakeholders including the staff members, including the affiliates, including the community also including the working group team members. Over to you Karel for the big picture. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Tanveer. Excited to have a chance to talk to all of you about strategy again. One thing I want to make clear for everyone is that when we are talking about the movement level the strategy process at the moment we are currently talking about structural reform. So far Wikimedia has grown quite organically the structures in place they are there just because it has happened in a certain way and we never actually had a good platform for the discussions or framing for the discussions around the structures in the movement and I think it's a great occasion to use a work on strategy the strategic direction to rethink our movement structures, institutions how we cooperate, what are the relations between everything. Take that apart and try to rethink the movement structures in a way that we want them to be or would be ideal to support us in our ambition going towards the strategic direction. Also our ambitious direction demands that we also design collaboration with the world beyond Wikimedia. So we understand it better we create connections also on that level and also it will be about difficult choices what fits and what does not we have to think about this and this is something that we have also understood that we want to have the global impact but also we need to have local relevance so how can we improve our structures in a way that we use the local level the best but also ensure that through this we also create the global impact that we are aspiring to have and if you are looking on the structural reform in other words it feels that it's kind of getting our vehicle ready for the journey. Yes it's the roads and bridges and villages and everything this is one thing but on the other hand it's really looking at what do we need to take us towards the strategic direction what is what is missing if you look at the vehicle we also see that we need different type of people some may know how to work before we as others work on engine we need to do it in a collaborative effort we need to bring in all these perspectives so we ensure that we have everything needed also we might need to look into the terrain that we are facing looking forward and this might need different kind of preparations so this relates to the fact that we need to have local perspectives to do the global impact and currently we have started discussion so we are setting up the working groups we are having the diversification process in the working groups to have more of the perspectives but now we are also moving forward to recommendations phase and scoping process really exploring what is out there what do we need to really prepare what are the things that will take us forward in the future and the scoping process has already begun with the working groups but we are also looking to hear more from other actors the fact that we have a working group model doesn't mean that the process is solely driven by the working groups we still need wider input we need to hear from you what do you think and looking at the structure level there are different questions that we need to answer and really we can clean the table and try to rethink the movement as if we were to redesign or rebuild it at the moment so why do we need affiliates what is the role of Ichimida Foundation who and how makes decisions on the movement level where does the money come from who collects it how should funds be distributed how do we bring in people who are not even knocking on our door we are good in sharing knowledge but how can we become as good in sharing know how so these are different questions that different thematic areas different working groups are currently working with but we need your perspective and for that reason I'm happy to give you a heads up but we are finally getting the working groups up to speed we are now ready to integrate your feedback into the process I'm happy that we have received in the beginning of the process feedback from you some of you but now we are ready to take on more feedback on these questions really to understand but what do you think are the important questions we need to ask what are the structures we need to build what do we need to redesign so in the next week we will have a soft public consultation cycle where we can join in at our strategy portal and there you can really tell us what needs to change it will be a rather open one so if you have current thoughts at the moment you can share just to be sure that the people who are not privileged to take part at Wikimedia conference Wikimania in person meetings we have been attending these recent months so just to be sure that everyone has had a chance to participate in this kind of open ended before the scoping has really really kicked off in essence so you can join us but we will be coming back with more information, more context to you and we'll run a more heavy consultation cycle probably in the spring where we can course correct and get the local perspectives and what we plan to do for this is to appoint affiliate liaisons community liaisons to have a really good contact with these local perspectives that are important and we are also looking into translation options so we have mapped out the bigger communities, bigger languages but we are also looking forward to and we are looking into options in getting translations in small languages so these are the things we are looking forward and try to include in the in the next phases of community consultations and just to ensure that we have the local voices really presented in the process and integrated in the work of working groups so for updates about the strategy process you can always go to strategyportal2030weekmedia.org we will meet some of you in different movement events, I have enjoyed discussions so far and looking forward for clam conference and other events that are in the pipeline we will be continuing participation on monthly activities meeting to give you update and if you have any suggestions to us please let us know so also on the next slide we have contacts, mail addresses, please reach out to us, please talk to us we are eager to learn, learn as we go and build a better process together with you, with your participation thank you. Alright, thanks Nicole, Tanvia and Karel for that informative update a plan as a plan is a plan and don't we love it when a plan comes together so we've heard about how principles and values can come together on a daily basis through our work from Jess, we've heard about how strategic initiatives are being pushed forward by the strategy team now let's hear from Catherine and she's going to give us an update on what's happening at a broader scope Catherine? Hi everyone can you hear me? Yes we can. Alright well greetings from Seattle on the west coast of the United States where I was here with the fundraising team to re-meet some of our donors from the region last time I think I spoke with everyone was back in May which just sort of is amazing and at the time I talked about what we were doing with the annual plan we're now three months in or four months into this year's annual plan I talked about the strategy I don't think I need to update on that because you just heard that from Nicole and Tanvir and Carl and I have to say I want some of the ice cream that Tanvir is having particularly if it comes in the flavor of feedback because that is a pretty strong statement to choose feedback over ice cream I think I'm team ice cream and then I talked about some of the events that were going on in the community and some of the knowledge equity work we've been doing and there has been a lot that's gone on since May right so we all got together at Wicca Mania as you've heard about in previous Symmetrics meetings and there's been a number of community events since the Wicca Convention in France the CEE meeting the Wudak Wiccan for the Germanic speaking community German speaking community excuse me the gathering for the Italian speaking community and of course just this week we had folks get together for the Techconf in Portland, Oregon and you know after Wicca Mania I think a lot of folks were recovering I and taking some time off and hopefully getting some rest I had the chance to actually go from South South Africa to South America where I had the chance to meet with some of our community members in Uruguay and Chile and Argentina and learn about some of the work that they are doing and it is really exciting interesting work I think that one of the things that we always see when we spend time at least I always see when I spend time with community members is the innovation and new programs and activities they really always come from you I was really taken aback and impressed and moved by the work that these communities are doing specifically around some of the work on memory and human rights and using Wikipedia as a tool for writing of course about history which is very much within the scope of our work but also the very specific histories of these communities and have a chance to go and visit with some of the museums the glam partners that they have and really just appreciate that opportunity spending time with the open knowledge communities in those countries one of our colleagues in Wikipedia Uruguay told me at the time that what we do is really a matter of cultural rights and I hadn't heard that expression before and it's really been powerful in staying with me for the last six weeks or so though I've actually been in San Francisco which has been really nice spending time at the foundation and with the foundation working on getting some of the work in the annual plan spun up and going and building out the organization to offer greater support to all of our wonderful community members doing work around the globe I was actually struck by the fact that in the last quarter so in the last three months the foundation has hired as many people as we hired in the entire previous year so what that really means is is not about the numbers of people that we're hiring but really about the focus on increasing our support and the resources that are available to community members around the globe each one of those hires has really been in response to feedback that we've heard about need for everything from improved support for our technical community in terms of technical engagement to making sure that we have more capacity in terms of site reliability engineering so that folks are not working 24 hours a day to thinking about how we do community development and growth and bringing folks online to support for example some of our efforts around knowledge, equity and glam so really thinking about how we respond to the needs that we've heard from our community and there's been a lot of work happening as well just in terms of responding to some of the things that are preoccupying us around the world in particular I'm thinking of some of the great work that the policy legal team have been doing around how we engage with things like GDPR for example but just a huge amount of progress that's being made as far as I can see across the foundation and I hope others in the movement are feeling that too on that note in terms of hiring one of the things that's been keeping me busy has been hiring for leadership positions across the foundation and in the board so some of you might know and I know this came up at Wiki Conference North America and my apologies for not mentioning that just a few moments ago it's a long list as I said of things that are happening around the community one of the conversations that came up at Wiki Conference North America is the need for somebody with technical leadership experience on our board of trustees and you may be aware that we are actually recruiting for another trustee for the board for the seat that was previously held by Alice Vegan and we're really looking for somebody with significant technical expertise and experience there who's run or led a technology organization and really can speak to some of the work that the foundation does so that's keeping us busy. I'm talking to some folks this month and I'm hoping that we can have a new trustee on board so for early next year the other positions that we've been looking at you may be aware I sent out an email yesterday about the chief of community engagement so a quick acknowledgement and thanks to Maggie Dennis who has been in the interim chief of community engagement role for two and a half years as of yesterday she is now a full chief of community no more interim and that is really just a recognition that she's held that position as long as anyone has held that position but we are recruiting Maggie intends to step from this chief position into a VP role and we're looking for a new chief of community engagement and we've had some interviews with some really excellent people representing lots of different experiences backgrounds nationalities languages and we're hoping to get that person on board early next calendar year so in January we're doing some final rounds of interviews between now and the end of the year I'm really excited about the folks that we're speaking to and the experience that they bring and the diversity of experience and then then other positions that we're hiring for are a chief of talent and culture so Jodi Laura who's been in that position is also stepping into a VP role and so we're recruiting for that process is underway I know that's not a position that many of the community interface with as much but it's an important position for us at the foundation supporting our colleagues so that we can support everyone and then finally I realized coming into this meeting that perhaps not everyone has heard the news Eileen Hershnov our phenomenal general counsel has made the decision to leave us at the end of this year for personal reasons and so she is going to be stepping down at the beginning of December I have to say that this is was such a hard thing to hear but I totally support and I think the whole foundation supports her decision and she will be working with us to look for her replacement so the news will be coming out I guess it's not the news is out but we will be spinning up a search to find a new general counsel for the foundation over the coming months and that's going to be a big deal for us so we have three new executive positions that we're looking to hire for and I think that our commitment at the foundation is in many ways continuing to look for folks who come from other backgrounds who have great global diversity and experience as we continue to try to meet and live up to our commitment to have the foundation staff really reflect the global communities that we serve so that's really been keeping me pretty busy in my role and as I mentioned I'm in Seattle right now I just got back from Switzerland where I was meeting with our Swiss community and had the chance to speak at an event there on the value of open and why that is important with a number of influential folks who are in the Swiss open community I was there along with folks from the open source initiative and a number of other really aligned open organizations and from here I am on my way to Mossfest in London to go spend time with our friends from Mozilla and talk about some of the ways that we can collaborate and meet with many of our community members who will be there in attendance and then on to Amon Jordan where I'm really excited to meet with the Wikimedians of the Levant and do some outreach around some partnerships there particularly with the Hashemite University and then from there to Tel Aviv to the Glam conference I'm really excited for what the work our friends at Wikimedia Israel are doing and also to Ramallah in order to be able to meet with some of our community members in Palestine so looking forward to the next week and a half always spending time on the road as a trade-off but it is one of the most wonderful trade-offs in the sense that I get to really get to see all the work that's being done across the communities and bring that back to the foundation and it always enriches my understanding of how we can support all of you so that is the update on my end and I hand it back over to Coy for taking us through to the end of metrics oh I guess it's not metrics anymore the monthly activities meeting excuse me Thank you Thanks Catherine and I think we can give her a big oh my how about that so on three one two three oh my thank you very much so we're going to progress to wiki love at some point and I know you all can't wait to do that but before we do that it's time for question and answers so I will open up the mic which is over here for any questions and James is on IRC Hi there there's a question here for the strategy team Nicole Tanvir Karel Pine asks how is work going with regards to diversifying the composition of the working groups how many non-staff people have been adding to these working groups and he says he understands it's difficult to get volunteers for such a big commitment and he'd like to know how that's going Yeah, thank you Pine for that question I also appreciate that you have been advocating for volunteers being part of the working group since the beginning and really providing strong feedback regarding this so thanks for the feedback and thanks for the question we are not in the fully final stage with the diversification so basically only kind of eight names are close to closing but out of these eight names for example six are volunteers so this is at this small sample is 75% and this is actually something we are looking forward to having more volunteers added to the diversification process so this is one of the things why we are doing this to engage better the volunteer community and also have better global reach or local perspectives different local perspectives within the working groups we will be discussing the themes so far it's looking that we are bringing in more volunteers with the diversification the other part of your question that you have been bringing up since the beginning of a process and working group model is that we are looking for quite a high commitment and we are trying to support the volunteer members of the group in participation we are also looking to adding facilitation to the meetings helping to get them better involved and make the most use of the time they are providing in their volunteer capacity so this is continuously a risk working with volunteers and using them in this process and we try to be mindful about that and try to bring efficacy into the engagement of volunteers I hope this answers your question you can also follow up practice talk page mail in English whatever we can have a discussion around this but now it's looking like it's going in the right direction we also hope to publish a report about the diversification then we are closing with most of the groups so thank you any questions from the room going once going twice no one one more so my question is what are we doing as we search for new leadership specifically to hold ourselves accountable for increasing the diversity on especially with new leadership hires sure can I ask who that was so I can address you directly hi Catherine this is Kate Zimmerman and I just joined last week oh great yeah hi Kate so this has actually been a major priority for us when we were looking at recruiting firms welcome aboard by the way really excited to have you here for great things so we are working with a number of different recruiting firms for these different searches and in each of the sort of processes of reviewing and interviewing for these recruiting firms we specifically inquired into what their approaches were for recruiting for diversity what their track records were in this space the first one that we're working with on the chief of community search is a search firm called parrot laver and their focus is on global recruiting for international organizations the academic space and international NGOs and sort of really a global development background and one of the reasons we brought them on was because of the fact that they had such a strong presence outside of the US and so the candidates that they brought to us in the first pass five out of six were not American five out of six spoke the second language four out of six were women and so that was something that was really where we kind of wanted to be I don't know how all of those individuals identified in terms of ethnicity or religion or the like but just in general sort of our availability to be aware of the composition of that group was really kind of what we were looking for in terms of a very diverse pool of experiences and backgrounds and so that that has been very important to us on the talent and culture chief we are working with a firm called bridge partners we do not yet have a pool of candidates that we're interviewing for but one of the reasons that we chose bridge in particular was the emphasis on inclusion in all of the work that they presented to us that is something that they view as sort of a unique offering of their firm in terms of recruiting and retention and so that's something that you know at least in the initial profiles of candidates that they presented to us we felt really positively about about the range and diversity of folks in that the work that we've been doing is for the firm that we're working with their viewcrest advisors is also looking at diversity as a key indicator one of the things that we found that has been a bit challenging is we always want to bring in diversity outside of the US onto our board because we are such a global organization the good news is is that today on the board of trustees I think we have only two out of the ten positions nine currently filled are American the rest are all folks of different nationalities and one of those two Jimmy lives in the UK in recruiting for a technical position most of the folks we've been talking to are based in the US but again being based in the US is not necessarily an indicator of nationality or country of origin languages spoken ethnicity and so we really tried to prioritize in looking at that not just technical capacity but also diversity of experience of origin languages as I mentioned and then for the GC search we are looking at recruiting firms Eileen is going to be working with us to help us identify firms for this because GC recruiting is a little bit more specialized and this will be a similar question that we ask of all of those firms in terms of their track record of building diverse pools of candidates and ensuring that those pipelines remain open all the way through to the end so I'm not a believer in the Rooney role per se which says like you just need one person I'm a big believer that you actually need a very diverse pipeline so that you're really comparing people on their merits but we need to do that work to make sure that we've got that final pool so that we can make a selection for the person who's best for the organization but hopefully brings other experiences and qualities to those roles I hope that answers your question I think at the end the proof is in the pudding and there's no question that this is a priority for the executive team I think you know I don't know if Jodi is around but in general we've started to make some real progress in terms of hiring across the organization and I do believe that these leadership roles while it is I'm going to miss every single person it does create an opportunity for us to diversify the executive team across a variety of different factors and I think that's something we're all really looking forward to okay thank you I'll do one last pass for questions in the room online IRC and it looks like it's a wrap so to be remiss of me not to speak about weekly I mean monthly activities meeting and the fact that you can all participate so Greg's going to give us a quick brief on what's going to happen for next month yeah so it's that time of year again it's the end of year so we're going to be doing another end of year edition again this year so what that means is two changes to the meeting one the November meeting and the December meeting are merged together because of the holidays that take place in well all over the world so it's a little difficult to schedule things with the communities as diverse as they are and with all the activities so we try to pick is we can never pick a day that's not happening on some holiday season so I apologize for whatever holiday season we're on top of for this one but we do just have one for the two months and it's also a lightning talk model so we want to hear about how people's years went we want to hear about what happened this past year so if you are interested in giving a like two to five minute talk on something you did this last year anything related to wikimedia it doesn't have to be in a staff role it can be in a volunteer role it can be as an affiliate role it can be as a board member whichever kind of capacity you are serving in we'd love to hear what you did this last year and you can sign up on the meta page or you can also shoot me an email or whatever method you want to get in touch with us we'll make sure you get on the list so thank you so much great and that brings us to wiki love it's time to share your love and positive feelings about everybody you've been working with and the mic is open so please step up to the mic please unpress me if you want to speak about something that really made you happy over the last month I'll go first I would like to appreciate the talent and culture team I think the stats we just heard about today are no easy feat and it can be an incredibly difficult task to get that many people and the right people into the roles so I'd just like to share some wiki love with the talent team on ILC, Pine says I'd like to say thanks to the strategy team and especially volunteers for all of the good faith effort that seems to be happening I realize the strategy process is big and complicated and difficult and I appreciate people putting in good faith effort I'd like to give some wiki love to a commuted Deutschland in particular Adam Shorlin to help us with all our weird deployment gremlins for structured data on commons they've been wonderful Adam's been working through TechConf and I don't know what hours and we really, really appreciate it thanks can I get some wiki love? go on just wanted to shout out to the community liaisons although that's probably not your name anymore and particularly Sherry because I think you guys are doing such a great job in teaching me kind of how to onboard and how to kind of engage with the different community members around the world it's really fantastic that you can do that and teach us all how to make the most out of wikimedia all right, I think that brings us to the end of today's Monthly Activities Meeting thank you all for participating and for being great we'll see you again same time, same place hopefully next month goodbye thank you very much