 Shall we begin, Elena? Let us know when we're live, Emeril. We are live. So hello, everyone, and to welcome to the conversation, an open conversation with the Board of Trustees. My name is Shanee Evanstein Sigalov. I'm the chair of the community affairs committee and the vice chair to the board. And before we begin, I want to thank everyone for coming to our conversation with the board, which is hosted by the community affairs committee or in short, CAC. This is our third time hosting an event like this. And we are constantly incorporating feedback from you for previous sessions, including alternating the time slots between different sessions. And so we can have more people participating from different parts of the world and more regular and frequent meetings along along this year. Some of you may have seen the CAC page on meta has already all the links for the coming sessions. And we are doing everything we can to translate all of our materials to many to at least the five languages, right? Or is it seven? I can't remember. Seven. Thank you, Elena. So again, people can find the materials easily. We do listen to your feedback and we care what you want and what you need. So please, I encourage all of you to share ready links for the coming sessions. And we are doing myself double. Okay. Thank you. We have technical issues that's always happening. That's that's part of the game. And with that, before we delve into answering your questions and having the open conversation that we're all here for, I would like to take a few minutes for each trustee in the room to introduce themselves. Starting with our newest trustee, Luis. Let me go first. Good to meet everybody. Luis. I'm a new US trustee as Shani mentions calling in from Sao Paulo, Brazil right now. Originally Brazilian emigrated when I was 12, lived most of my life in the US, then came back a few years ago to Latin America, lived in Colombia for a while and back to Sao Paulo now full time. So amazing to be here looking forward to the conversations and the last piece I'll say is I'm very deep in the product and technology space. So anyone that's got thoughts, ideas, feedback, concerns on product technology at Wikimedia and how we can best leverage it to further the vision and mission here. Feel free to reach out. Thank you so much, Luis. Next is Natalia Timke of our chair. Hello, everyone. I'm from Ukraine and I'm also serving as a chair of the media foundation board. I'm really glad to be here. Thank you, Nat. Next is Raju Narisseti. Hi, everyone. It's great to be here. Lots of familiar faces from the board and foundation and the community. And it's always fun to do these things. Well, I don't know what fun. It's always good to do these things. Raju Narisseti. I've been on the board for about five or six years now. I'm based in New York and I'm a chair, the talent and culture. I'm the chair of the board committee, which used to be called the HR committee. And I'm also on the audit committee of the board. Thank you, Raju. Next is Rosie. Thanks so much, Shani. So I'm Rosie Stevenson. Good night. I come from the community and I know many of you. And I'm so happy to see that you're here. To share in this conversation with us. Thank you so much. I'm Shani, rural town in Northern California. And be to be here to listen and to learn from all of you. Thanks. Thanks, Rosie. Next is Vicky. Hello, my name is Victoria. And this is my Nick on the Vicky media projects as well. I am originally from Belarus, and I live in the UK. And my main project is Russian Wikipedia. I was elected on site with Rosie and Lorenzo in the community election last year. And I am a member of this committee, the community affairs committee. And products and technology committee as well. Thank you. Thank you, Victoria. And last but not least Lorenzo. Hello. I'm Lorenzo. I'm a third of the recently elected trustees in 2021 with Rosie and Vicky. I'm Italian and I've been on our pro on media projects for quite some time now, mostly on Italian Wikipedia and working with Italian chapter. Thank you Lorenzo. And thank you all trustees for taking the time to be here. They're doing so much already. And we appreciate everyone coming together to speak to community. So also with us today and quite excitingly is our incoming CEO, Mariana Iskander. Mariana, would you like to introduce yourself today to those who haven't met you and you're listening to us? Thanks, Shani. Hi, everybody. My name is Mariana Iskander. I no longer say I'm the incoming CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. I've survived six weeks as the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. Really delighted to be here with all of you and participating in these conversations. So thanks, Shani. Thank you, Mariana. We also have several other staff members with us today. Some of them will be sharing all sorts of updates and they will introduce themselves as we go. Can we please ask people to mute if they're not speaking? That would be really helpful. Thank you so much. I'd like to thank both trustees and staff for joining us today. And mostly I would say thank you all for joining us. Either live today on this Zoom room or watching on YouTube, where some of you maybe watched this later. We appreciate your communication with us and your engagement and look forward to hearing from you. I would like now to introduce you to Elena Appen. She's the senior movement communication specialist. And Elena will be helping us facilitate this session today. So Elena. Thanks, Shani. Nice to see everybody here today in this conversation with the trustees. Like Shani said, I'm Elena Appen senior movement communication specialist at the Wikimedia foundation. I'm going to be helping facilitate this session today, specifically the question and answer part of this session. So how it's going to work. The next 30 minutes or so are going to cover updates from Wikimedia foundation staff about important products, that are happening right now that are happening with the board's guidance. And that are. Relevant and impactful for the movement. And then the final 50 minutes or so of the conversation. Will be live participation. Q and A open discussion. With everybody here. Throughout the session, you can ask questions in real time in the YouTube chat or here in the chat. We're going to be collecting questions throughout that we can then cover in the second half of the session during the question and answer, but you can ask at any time. During the question and answer portion of this call, if you are here in the zoom room and you want to ask your question live, which we really do encourage you to do. We would love to hear from you live. Just raise your hand in the chat. And we'll call. We'll add you to the queue and we'll call on you and you'll be able to unmute and ask your question here. We've invited a lot of people to submit questions ahead of time. You may have seen that in our communications about the event. We have a number of those, which is great. I've consolidated them in the interest of time so that we can get to as many of your questions as possible. So you may not hear your pre-submitted questions. Or if you ask a question also live here in the chat, you may not hear it verbatim for the reason of trying to consolidate and get to as many topics as we can. But I will of course try to capture the meaning behind everybody's question and get you the answer that you're looking for. And you are free to follow up in the chat. If there's another question that arises once you heard the answer. If there are any questions live or pre-submitted that we don't have time to get to today, we will post those answers on the event meta page after the event. We are also taking notes and we will post those notes with the translations as well to the event meta page. We will also put those notes on the event meta page after the event meta page. We will also post those notes with the translations as well to the event meta page afterwards. And finally the event is being recorded and it will be immediately available once we finish on the same YouTube link that you used to stream the event. It will also be uploaded to comments and again posted on that same event meta page afterwards. Before we begin, I want to remind everybody that this is covered by the universal code of conduct. We will now move on to any of your questions so long as they are asked with civility. So now I'll hand it back to Shani to facilitate the update section and then we will get to the open conversation. Thank you so much Elena. We are going to hear now from a few member of our staff on different topics such as the annual planning process, the universal code of conduct, movement strategy and human rights. So quite diverse. And first I would like to hand it over to Mariana to give us an update on the annual planning process. Mariana, please. Thanks, Shani. Maybe just to start back at the beginning, those of you who were paying attention at the time, I'm not, I don't expect everybody to pay attention. My initial announcement was made on the 14th of September. I then spent the next two months on a bit of a listening tour trying to engage with both Wikimedia Foundation staff, but also communities around the world. And through that, tried to listen and learn how to shape the incoming priorities, both for myself and for the Foundation in the first six months. In mid-January, I published the result of what I heard from all of those engagements, entitled Puzzles and Priorities, will include it in the notes if you haven't yet seen it. That document provided an opportunity to identify what I think are some of the big puzzles that we face as a movement and communities, as well as naming three priorities that would be the focus of my time in this period. The first was an opportunity to reimagine and reshape the annual planning process of the Wikimedia Foundation. The second focused on attracting global leaders, particularly in our technology and product spaces. And the third talked about refreshing our values and the way we do our work at the Foundation. I'll focus here on the first one. It's taken up, I would say, most of my energy and time over the past six weeks. We've really tried to do four different things at the Foundation since mid-January. The first is to ensure that we start by looking at the world. I identified that as a first puzzle, what does the world need from us now, having heard from many volunteers who felt concerned that we not be too inwardly looking and lose track of trends, threats, opportunities, challenges in the broader world. We published the result of those conversations on a diff post and I sent a second message inviting any comments on those external trends. We'll try to find that as well and post it so that if you feel like the things that we collectively have to be thinking about in the broader world are there and can inform our planning and our thinking. The second thing that we have been busy with is just trying to get a cleaner and clear picture of the Foundation's current resources and how they're being allocated. We've done that looking at the various areas of work, but I think more interestingly I've tried to do that looking at the support we provide for Wikimedia projects. That includes all the language, Wikipedia's, Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wiktionary, as you know the list goes on. Just trying to get a handle on what the current resource allocations look like as they support the various projects. We've done that as well by language community trying to understand the support that we provide for the various language communities around the world. We've done that as well looking at geographic region so that we again can just answer the question how our current resource is allocated in those ways. I think that's been a learning journey and an interesting process for our teams and others may have comments on that and I think it will provide a useful point of departure for some of the questions that I anticipate will be asked in conversations we should have. The next part of this process is to engage further with our board in March and then come and as I think I indicated in the January letter and certainly have tried to repeat in all my other communications post a series of conversations in April to share what we have learned where we think we're headed. I failed to mention the last important process that we just started this week which is I certainly see an opportunity to align the foundation's annual plan more closely with our movement strategy. I've reached out to some of you who are actually here on the call to get more thoughts and input. I think that understanding the the journey and history of the movement strategy was an important part of my learning process but I do think that there's an opportunity to ensure that the foundation's plan and priorities are much more aligned and and more clearly informed by the movement strategy. So that's the last piece of work that we just kicked off this week and we'll take all of that to the board in March, engage in community conversations in April so that there's plenty of time to take the feedback on board. Once the board has approved a plan in July share that again I will say that it's important we not see plans as too fixed in the sense that there may be things we need to change and opportunities for feedback throughout the year and the last point is that really trying to encourage us to take more than just a one-year view on our work. There are things that just have longer timeframes and appropriate to also try to ensure that the timeframes make sense for the projects themselves and the work. So I'll pause there and I'll be happy to answer other questions as we get into the call but that's a quick summary of the work around the foundation's annual plan. Thank you so much Mariana and next I would like to call on Stella to give an update on the universal code of conduct. Awesome thank you so much. Hello my name is Stella Ng and I'm the senior manager of the trust and safety policy team. I'd like to give a quick update on the UCOC phase two. Currently the enforcement outline is now complete and available for review on meta. The process involved the robust participation of over 35 emerging and established communities via on wiki and conversation hours. The drafting committee for the UCOC enforcement outline was led by a diverse group of people from different parts of the world with 17 members from different regions such as Africa, East and South Asia, Latin America and North America representing 10 different languages. We were trying to encapsulate the movement as a whole by bringing as many different perspectives and cultures as possible. In response to the joint letter from arbitration committees we've set up a voting process that will allow the community to vote on the UCOC enforcement outline before it goes to the board. In the upcoming month of March the community will have the opportunity to vote on the enforcement outline via secure poll. The enforcement outline will be forwarded to the board for ratification if community votes are over 50% yes. If the community votes don't reach 50% you will go into a revisions process. I'm happy to talk more about voting during the Q&A if that's of interest to the attendees. After ratification the UCOC will continue to evolve with our ever-changing movement. The document will be reviewed and updated pending a review process one year after ratification. To discuss the voting and ratification processes more in depth you can join the team at one of our upcoming conversation hours February 25th and March 4th. For more information on those conversation hours as well as some answers to commonly asked questions you can also refer to my Wikimedia L email dated February 9th. But that's it for my update. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Stella and good opportunity to say thank you to all the people from the community who actually worked on creating this document. It's quite a milestone and we're happy this is progressing. Next is Jackie with an update on board elections. Well hi everyone thanks everyone for being here. I'm Jackie Kerner communication specialist with movement strategy and governance team. Yesterday the call for feedback about the board of trustees election came to a close so thank you so much everyone who took the time to participate provide feedback and suggestions that is really helpful. This call ran from January 10th to February 16 and it was centered around three questions and that was different than what we did last year. Yesterday we came with some proposals so we appreciate the suggestions and feedback on that to instead come with questions and encourage a more open dialogue so we really appreciate that feedback that you all sent. These three questions focused on diversity expectations of candidate involvement during the elections and affiliate participation in the elections. So this call really gathered great feedback and it's useful because there were some proposals suggested from community members and affiliates. Some of the emerging insights I'll just share them. They include clearer framing around diversity and inclusion so thank you everyone who provided that context and really opened up about those topics and sometimes that's challenging to share in an open forum so thank you for that. I also want to share that we need to appreciate the challenges and barriers involved in running as a candidate for the community members especially considering socioeconomic factors so again thank you everyone who shared that feedback and also we receive suggestions around either affiliates or with the global council pre-selecting the pool of candidates for the community to consider for selection. Also we receive suggestions about affiliates encouraging outreach and engagement about participating elections to encourage a more global participation in the elections so within the next week you all can find the final report on meta and we're going to be translating that into many languages thank you. Thanks so much Jackie and thank you to everyone who participated in the call for feedback as well as to the staff who are supporting this whole process there are quite a few people working on this so thank you all. Next one is Carl to give us an update on movement strategy. Thank you so much Shani hello hello my name is Carl I'm from movement strategy and governance team and I'm currently focusing on facilitating the process for the movement governance track that is the movement charter and also regional and thematic hubs. I have created some slides to provide textual support to the presentation I've also posted the commons link in the zoom chat who are there maybe someone can reach it to the youtube thank you. Next slide please so overall what we know about the movement governance part of the movement strategy is that it has been prioritized by the communities during the transition phase and so this track is a priority in implementing the strategy. The overall goal of the movement governance track is to define movement roles responsibilities mutual accountability and also support systems for a future of a movement. This is what we are really focusing on in this track basically building the movement up from ground and the work has started with drafting the movement charter convening the drafting committee this happened in November and then also advancing the discussions around regional and thematic hubs basically support structures or systems that have been envisaged in the movement strategy recommendations next slide please. Firstly I would like to provide a quick update regarding the movement charter process next slide we have convened the drafting committee. Committee is now well set up with good fortnightly or bi-weekly meeting rhythm emerging subcommittees around different topics and areas of work and also asynchronous work processes so this has been the work that has been done in the back end of the committee and now the work is becoming more public so we have regular monthly updates being published on meta there is a link in the deck you can click on that to get to the right place. There is also a communication subcommittee that is setting up the engagement model and plan for community engagement so the idea is that the drafting committee will start opening up for the community input rather sooner than later so this is some of the ongoing work that that has been happening. Next slide please. One of the most significant changes or things that has happened is that there is a new proposed timeline for work and this is different from the one that initially was posted on meta and that's why I want to pause on that. Basically now it extends over a time period of a total of 26 months getting us to a ratification of a movement charter by the end of next calendar year and the reason for that extended timeline is especially to have ample time and space for conversations with the movement also time and space for research items to ensure that we have informed decisions when developing the movement charter and also to provide opportunity to build shared understanding and agreements across the movement while crafting the charter that is not leaving everything to the phase of ratification. So overall we are looking forward for the wide community engagement across the movement when the charter starts progressing. Next slide please. I'm also quickly providing an update regarding the regional and thematic hubs. Next slide. As you might have seen on Wikimedia L or different channels we are just announcing the regional and thematic hubs conversations continuing and overall we are focusing on mapping the alignment but also contextual differences and we are doing that across different hub approaches across the whole movement. We have just launched the hubs dialogue initiative where we are actually reaching out to different initiatives regarding related to the hubs across the movement. There are about 20. If there are some that we maybe have not heard about or have not reached out to please let us know that we would like to include you and there will be next global event around the hubs happening on March 12th so there is an announcement. I hope you have information. Next slide please. If there is anything that you would like to hear more about this movement governance piece of work here is my email address also the user address you know where to find me. Thank you so much for your kind of attention. Happy to take any of your questions. What's up? Thank you so much Carl. This is again a good opportunity to say thank you to the movement to the movement charter drafting committee and to all the stuff supporting it again quite a milestone that is a priority to all of us and we look forward to this work. Lastly I want to invite Rebecca to give us an update on human rights. Rebecca the floor is yours. Thanks so much Shani. I'm Rebecca McKinnon. I'm the new vice president for global advocacy. I just joined the foundation in September. Time really flies and as some of you know in December the board of trustees approved the foundation's new human rights policy. My colleague Ricky is going to share in the chat now the link to the policy itself and other background materials like an FAQ and so the background on this is that after the foundation commissioned an impact assessment to better understand the range of human rights risks and threats that the movement faces the trustees agreed that finalizing and approving this policy was quite urgent. The policy is an important step in enabling us to do the ambitious work that we've outlined in the 2030 movement strategy because we actually only have the space to innovate build and iterate on our free knowledge projects and communities if the human rights of all volunteers and audiences can be protected and respected. So the next steps include working with outside experts as well as engaging with the community and staff on developing a long-term plan for implementation. So in other words the work is only starting. Here are a couple of quick examples of how the policy is already informing our work. Internally we're talking with colleagues in the tech department and product department about how we should go about assessing the human rights impact and risk of any new service or project. So that's an internal example and then externally an example of how our human rights commitments are helping to guide and strengthen our policy advocacy is our recent advocacy against a proposed piece of legislation in the U.S. Senate called the Earnit Act which had a laudable goal of protecting children but the way it the way that this bill had proposed going about doing so would threaten the human rights of internet users including wikipedia by undermining encryption and also weakening any platform's ability including all of our liability protections that in turn protect our volunteers right and ability to set and enforce rules including neutral point of view rules across our movement's projects. So we had to oppose it on human rights grounds as well as on the grounds of our platforms and community's interests. At the same time our human rights policy includes strong commitments to protect the rights of all contributors to our projects including children. So as we work to protect one group of vulnerable people on the wikis we also need to make sure we don't expose other vulnerable groups to greater threats and risks and that is what our human rights policy aims to help us do. So I and members of the board and foundation leadership are of course happy to answer any questions later on. Thank you a special thank you to Rebecca and her team for spearheading this work and setting us on the right direction. This is an infrastructure almost type of work that was missing for a long time and we really appreciate your work on this and yes we can answer any questions on it later on. I want to thank all of our staff members for the updates and all the people who have worked behind the scenes to allow us to give you these updates. It's quite a few people. I can't name them all because we don't have time but yes we are very thankful for that work. As you can see from just these updates which are part of what the wikimedia foundation and the board is involved in there's a lot going on. There is quite a lot going on so without further ado I want to hand it back to Elena so she can facilitate the question and answer section. So thank you. Thanks so we are taking your questions from the Zoom chat and from the YouTube chat and again we encourage those of you here in the Zoom room with us to add yourself to the queue to speak and unmute and speak for us and ask your question live if you feel comfortable. We'd love to hear from you and just to clarify because I did get a quick question in the chat how long this call goes. It's going to go for another hour until 20 hours UTC so it's a 90-minute call total with most of the call devoted to open conversation. So I'm going to kick off. I know we have a couple of questions coming in chat right now but I'm going to kick off with a couple of questions that were submitted to us ahead of time. Let's go to the UCOC first. There were a few questions specifically about the universal code of conduct. The first question is what happens if the universal code of conduct enforcement outline gets less than a 50% vote yes and why is the threshold 50% Yeah I can answer that. Well the vote on the draft of the UCOC enforcement acts like a gate so if we have at least 50% of support it goes to the board for discussion. If it doesn't it goes back for being reviewed. So in that case a committee composed both from people in from people from both of the UCOC committees will be formed and they will have to revise the draft. In when voting for a certification there will be the option to add a note on what is why you are voting against if you are voting against and that will be an input for that committee during during the revision. As for why the threshold is 50% well that's one of the yeah the most common threshold that exists in binary decisions like these in in particular is what we usually have in real world referendums for instance. So it's it has been used here. We don't have any standard practice on these in even in our community there are elections and a decision taken with with different majority. This is yeah generally the most common one in when you have a yes or no decision. Thank you and then just a quick follow-up the for the 50% support. The question in chat is is is the for 50% support or is it only support or oppose or support and oppose plus neutral. I guess is there any measure for neutral being taken into account in this vote or is it just support oppose? I don't know how it would be technically done maybe someone else can answer on this. Yes thank you I can jump in here currently the implementation as it stands well it it will be yes or no for the options you will be allowed to provide a piece of feedback for when you vote. William does that address your question? All right perfect. Thanks wonderful. Great and then a quick follow-up on another question for the UCOC before we move to the next topic. The question is around voting for phase two so we just discussed there's going to be a vote for phase two around the enforcement guidelines but why was there not also a vote for phase one and how can we consider phase one legitimate without such vote Stella maybe we'd hand this one to you as well. Sure happy to take this one as well. So first our endorsement of the community vote for the enforcement guideline was a request submitted by the global arbitration committees and it is anchored on the fact that there was that we as a community have a collective responsibility to elevate good conduct on the projects. The enforcement guidelines are meant to support this work down to the individual level to help volunteers on every project in an every movement event to understand how to do this in a thoughtful and equitable fashion. These guidelines are meant to empower all of our communities to address harassment and negative behavior while creating a more welcoming and inclusive environment for contributors and readers. While functioning enforcement pathways have great potential to reduce bias and confusion to concentrate at efforts at the local level wherever possible. A vote will help to surface issues that may prevent the enforcement of the ucoc from functioning as intended. The policy was generated on recommendation of the movement strategy and I don't want to speak for the board so I would like if anyone wants to weigh in after me to also talk about this but we did act on this recommendation in such in much the same way that it acted on the recommendation to create a movement charter drafting committee without additional community vote. We were called on by the community to ensure this work happened. It has not been historical practice to put platform policy to vote including the privacy policy and the trademark policy among others. Similarly local community written conduct policies are not generally put to formal vote. The international consultations helped craft a document to serve as a baseline and as we've been communicating for some time it is our current expectation that one year following the ratification of phase two we will have been able as a community to observe what works and what needs improvement to address any necessary improvements in both. In terms of the legitimacy of the policy passing resolutions to put policy into place is part of the role of the board a function that it has served since 2003. The legitimacy of policies the board establishes by resolution is defined in the terms of use and not speaking for them so feel free to weigh in after me. I do believe that the board believes firmly in collaborative governance and evolution which is why it defined a two-stage input process in May 2020 with its statement on community culture but has ultimate accountability for the Wikimedia sites and their platform policies. I hope that answers the question thanks. Thank you Stella. I'll give anybody else an opportunity to weigh in on this if anybody from the board would like to talk about it. Vicki please. I just want to say that in general one of the points of contest between the Wikimedia Foundation and the communities is that when people complain about some users behavior disruptive behavior that the decision was to block them globally completely opaque so nobody know why it happens and it's very rarely that the staff explains why often because it impacts the rights of the individual or several individuals so basically it's a black box but this policy allows to have a pathway where it's more transparent and it's not just some unknown people unelected that are taking decisions concerning Wikimedians but the Wikimedians themselves it's a process that will lead to bigger transparency so and we need to start somewhere if there was I think if there was a would do we want something like that there was would have been a larger position to it at principle not even seeing what it is and what it will be proposed now we have something we can discuss we can hate it we can vote against it then it will go for revision but we needed to start somewhere and I think it was a good start the first place thank you thanks Vicki so we have a question that we pulled from the board notice board about historical decisions made by the foundation and the board so maybe somebody from the foundation would like to answer and somebody from the board would like to answer on this one the the question asker states that throughout the years the board and the foundation have made and published different decisions about the use of funds some of these published decisions appear to be out of date and or contradictory to decisions that were made later is there a way that the board can address what is current and what is not and then they gave some examples like the decisions around implementing basic criteria for affiliates to be able to raise their own funds the freezing of affiliate annual plan grant budget and the increase importance of the funds dissemination committee as examples of historical decisions that may or may not still be current and is there a way that the foundation and the board can address what's current and what's not I can take the question so as conditions change and situation changes the board position of course is also evolving it depends on the information that we have or the current thinking or the strategic priorities or some other I don't know limitations or considerations we are currently looking at ways to better organize the tracking of our past decisions and maybe making sure that the ones which are up to date can be marked in the way that it's clear and so because it's really challenging to be reliant on historical knowledge of the board members to know what things were discussed back in the day at this point I would actually invite Mariana to join the organization and give more context from her perspective as a CEO and thanks for that Nat I'm still new and learning so you know trying to make sure I understand what the question is intending to ask I would say that in the short time that I've been working with Nat she is doggedly focused on this issue I think documentation seems to have its challenges in many parts of our movement and trying to ensure that knowing where to communicate how to communicate how to mark things as having changed is a perennial challenge and it's true it appears for some of the the board's history as well so you know I think as I learn more trying to certainly understand how critical decisions are not confused with things that again may not be I would say that the weight of decisions that the board takes may also vary in just making sure that we have the right forums for communicating them in their current form and ensuring that lapse decisions or change decisions are more clearly marked I think that's what I've understood the the question to be and I do want to say that I you know I think this has been a priority area for Nat specifically certainly since I've joined thanks so much so we have as well a number of questions about the human rights policy so let's turn to that answer a few questions from chat and resubmit it about the human rights policy um let's see the human rights policy work um volunteer pointed out that it didn't involve an on wiki consultation for gathering ideas or drafting the policy text so why is that um who made this decision and um yeah we'll take that first and then I'll move to the next question hi I'm happy to start this answer and also I know that Shani has some some thoughts to share about this um so definitely do stand behind the need for this policy and there's a lot coming up in the context of our work um in trying to keep volunteers as safe as possible um given their immense contributions to the um free knowledge that we see across our projects and many of them becoming um targets increasingly and we've seen that in multiple jurisdictions some of those um actions have led us to other policy changes um which similarly we have not consulted community about because we do feel that it is our responsibility as the platform provider to keep volunteers as safe as possible and to respect protect and advance their human rights um when we can so this was one of the key recommendations coming out of the human rights impact assessment that was part of the medium term plan which I understand was um you know done in collaboration and um in consultation with many of our communities and this was under the global advocacy priority which was one of the five medium term plan priorities so it's a very natural outgrowth of that work we did notice and several of our board members and then several staff members um and several community members were consulted during that process um to figure out how to strengthen the work that we're doing so that we do continue to respect protect and advance human rights um whenever possible in the context of our work so given that we did understand that there was an urgency and wanted to pass this in order to really have the mandate that we need heading into our next planning cycle where we anticipate large-scale um community conversations as Mariana spoke to at the top of the hour and so um you know it really made sense to us to go ahead and pass this and then to get to um in in sort of one of my conversations with Jimmy one way that he put it is rather than tackling the very uninteresting question of whether we should evidence our commitment to human rights let's get to the really interesting conversation of how to do that and let's leverage um perhaps the most valuable resource that we have being um volunteer time and um deep thinking by our communities of volunteers across the world about how to do this best and how to really tailor this for the Wikimedia communities so that's where we'd like to focus um moving forward and that's you know why we're trying to preserve our most precious um resource to really target it towards the most important part of the conversation which is how do we do this together um you know and hopefully better I think this is one of those chances we have to leapfrog some of the other platforms and some of the other um social media companies out there not that we're a social media company but there are not not many people doing this as well as I think we are positioned to do it um by reason of the fact that we have local communities all around the globe um who are really close to some of the threats um and some of the opportunities to protect respect and advance human rights sorry that was a long answer but I really wanted to answer that question Shani do you have anything to add, subtract, edit um on that answer? No you did such a great um such a great job describing uh it all the only thing that I'll mention is um everything Amanda said is the board absolutely supports for us uh from our perspective this policy is missing almost like a missing piece a missing infrastructure to do the work that we need to do and um just in the same way I don't know if you if if many of you remember but the board made a resolution um about the health and safety of of the movement and that started off the the universal code of conduct process and among other things so to us it was a similar thing right it was something crucial to start off the strategic process to before we can even talk about implementing anything from the strategy of 2030 we need we need this to happen so that was another piece of the puzzle and as Rebecca mentioned before and as Amanda mentioned time is of the essence and I think all of these policies the universal code of conduct the human rights policies these are all work in progress so let's all just keep that in mind we are happy to to get feedback if there are specific policies that don't have a place for you to to put um comments on and kind of collect your thoughts we'll we can deal with that right we can make sure that there there are spaces like this I'm pretty sure there are but if they're not do flag it for us if you don't know where to go to to tell us what you think we are happy to hear it we'll collect things for the universal code of conduct there's going to be a process of looking at it at the end of of the year I think there's also going to be similar things happening for the human rights policy so it's going to be iterated on changes we're trying to be agile and flexible and just uh address the needs that we see in front of us to do the work that we need to do for the movement so this is where it's coming from it's not about bypassing anyone or there's some things that you know you chose us to in a sense do the work that needs to be done and this is what we're doing that's what was needed at that point in time and we stand behind it thank you Rosie do you have a follow-up to that sure yeah I'd like to just kind of piggyback on what Shani said the foundation is still in the coming months and years this process is going to be iterative it's going to be consultive it's going to be transparent we commit to consulting and updating the community regularly throughout the process and we welcome your thoughts and input how we can best achieve this outcome just wanted to add that and now back to you Elena thanks Rosie a quick follow-up from chat about the human rights policy and the scope the question is about whether the policy is intended to protect all rights of all people all the time the suggestion being that perhaps the scope of the policy should be smaller than calling it human rights as that may give very high expectations to everybody Rebecca do you want to take this one absolutely I'm happy to take this so so just to address that the human rights policy relates to the way in which the foundation and the movement affects human rights so it's not saying we're gonna turn ourselves into human rights watch and amnesty international and completely change our mission but it's it's saying that you know the platforms themselves the the wikis themselves are a vehicle through which everyone is exercising their human rights and so as we design and operate the wikis as we design and operate any other projects or services that relate to people being able to access the wikis or access the the data from the wikis as we think about how we operate the foundation employ people host gatherings all of these affect human rights in in different ways and so so the policy's purpose is to say we recognize that by existing in the world we are both enabling and having an impact on rights and we have an obligation to consider all the rights we have an impact on not just pick the ones we want to to be held responsible for and and not be concerned with the others but it is true we're not going to suddenly say okay we're going to start advocating for the human rights of you know there are a lot of human rights issues that maybe aren't directly related to anything that the wikis do or that the foundation does and so we're not going to start developing projects and programs around those things but the point is is that to the extent that that the foundation the wikis the projects the movement affect any aspect of human rights whether it's freedom of expression whether it's privacy whether it's the right to life whether it's it's the you know the the right to economic opportunity access access to information you know that that our free knowledge projects affect these things and and therefore we have an a responsibility to hold ourselves accountable to how we're affecting human rights so that's the purpose of the scope that human rights kind of based on the universal declaration of human rights which is also linked in the policy they're indivisible right so you can't actually cherry pick among rights you have to consider them as a whole and as you're defending and upholding one right you have to consider how you're affecting other rights so children's rights is a really good example we could say okay we're going to prioritize children's rights but then that might result in us treating adults like children and violating rights of privacy or expression that other people have so the way in which you protect and defend rights needs to be what's known as necessary and proportionate in in human rights parlance but but that's the point of the scope and and this is definitely something this is actually having a human rights policy and committing to implement it is is actually uh this is not we're not the first organization to do that in fact major many major internet platforms that i would certainly argue there are not um as as purpose driven to to advance human rights like facebook has a human rights policy microsoft has a human rights policy um you know are they very good are they living up to them you know we can have a conversation about that but but we're actually late to the party and having a having a human rights policy oh i mean rebecca's answer was quite um complete but i'll just add one more thing to those who might not know the policy is just a first step right so the policy is like a guiding um the guiding principles or the guiding um light and then staff needs to take that on and bring it down to earth kind of right to to connect it to the annual plan to connect it to practical things and projects and priorities so this whole process still needs to happen the policy was just giving us a framework to work from and it was needed so we can then do it we can then practically take it down to to the to the to the actual um day today of the foundation and and the the job that is done not only by by the foundation but by many of our affiliates who are you know either contributing to human rights or advocating for it in in different places in the world so it's just a first step that that will allow us to do this work in an accountable way so just wanted to offer that perspective thanks everyone for shedding light on our human rights commitments and using the policy to inform work going forward um that's all really helpful i want to turn now to um a question that we got on the cac talk page recently um about the community wishlist survey there's a proposal on the community wishlist survey that has a lot of support for meaningfully increasing funding for technical issues and implementing technical features that the community feels concerns them so the question is to what extent is budget allocation a board level issue and how will this be addressed from the board's perspective or from the foundation's perspective Vicky go ahead please um i'm the member of the product and technology committee and i should say that in any uh problems and as with any proposals the board doesn't approve every single detail uh we just oversee uh the general allocation of the funds so we will discuss annual budget which mariana already talked about and uh having said that we realize and we can see that there is uh there are widespread programs with products and technology and in fact mariana is concentrating on this aspect of the foundation work uh mariana do you want to add something to that thanks vicky i think that that's right i think when it comes to specific projects and programs the accountability has to sit primarily with me and the foundation staff i have followed the particular thread again i want to make sure i'm answering the intent of the question you know my my understanding is that the community wish list program has actually been quite successful in past years as a way of co collaborating and co creating both product and technology needs um between the community and the wikimedia foundation staff what i've understood is that it's not it's not the right place to raise other technology related concerns it's up to us to make sure that those other avenues are made more clear as i referenced at the beginning the process underway now is attempting to get us there which is understanding current allocations across the various wikimedia projects so that we can be more clear what the priorities are and engage with the the right subsets of communities around that i doubt we'll come up with the perfect answer that will make everybody happy but i feel confident at least we can try to make some of this a bit more clear in the in the months ahead i would also say that we're in as i mentioned in my opening letter in a search process for technology and product leadership at the foundation i've asked for ideas i continue to ask for ideas either individuals that people would recommend organizations to learn from i've tried to reach out to some members of our technical communities to also think about how they can be engaged in that process with us um and so you know i i suspect in a couple of months when we share out some of the work that's happening now we may not have a perfect answer but hopefully more clarity on where concerns and suggestions about our product and technology infrastructure can be made that doesn't rely on the community wishlist as the only avenue if i've misunderstood the question or answered the wrong question uh happy to be redirected i'll just quickly add if i can uh that we remind everyone that the email for the cac is open to you all the time all throughout the year you can ask questions and if you have ideas you can share it through through that email and it will go to the right people internally i also want to acknowledge that louise is here and joining us through the product committee our product and tech committee so i'm kind of really hopeful that he can also help us rethink some of these things and like mariana said tackle some really uh long-standing issues that we've had i'm not saying we're going to fix everything right away but at least we're going to try to address some issues yeah i'd also like to say that here in the zoom chat we have an acknowledgement and a broad agreement around the fact that technical debt is one of those things that needs a multi-year commitment to address um wonderful so uh i think i'll go back quickly to the ucoc we did have a number of follow-up questions in chat about the ucoc the first one are we not concerned that the community skews privileged and thus has fewer incentives to support something that seeks to protect underprivileged and minority members of the community if the phrasing is not entirely clear i'm happy to say it again so are we concerned about that and how are we addressing that um i see amanda nodding amanda why don't you take this one if yeah i think we absolutely are concerned about it you know and and thinking about the ways that certain underserved communities need help um you know in putting together these sort of minimum um level of policies that that was a big driving concern of the need for a universal code of conduct and i think we continue to explore you know with respect to how we're having conversations with communities trying to show up where they are not have everything be one you know meta-level conversation really trying to you know follow listen show up to to to folks and in places where we can normalize and equalize people's ability to participate in the development of this and you know really develop that shared understanding and i think it's been one of the factors that has taken us a while um you know to really figure out how to ratify this in partnership together so um there's been a lot of intentional thought around how to put people on equal footing and how to think beyond some of the communities that are most well developed that may need a universal code of conduct slightly less um than communities that are just building you know all of these assets and all of these capabilities now so that has been a really central concern and i really appreciate that question uh whoever whoever raised it in a similar vein we had another follow-up question about diversity in the voting process and just a general question about how we can make sure that diverse people are really voting on this phase in this phase to vote what what are the plans and what is already in action to ensure diversity in the voting process rosie go ahead please yeah i'll go ahead and take that one so retaining diverse editors and enabling the different pathways and it is really important to us and selecting trustees historically been from people living in or from the united states or canada or europe and we're looking to shift that we're also interested in diversity of experience which brings awareness and depth of discussion to drive our movement forward representation matters if we're talking about growing diversity in our movement we need diverse people present at the highest levels of decision making to form and guide our choices and priorities these are the things we're thinking about thanks for that insightful answer rosie i think um that probably and it probably had to do with the way i phrased the question was more in reference to the board elections process if i'm not wrong which is also extremely important in terms of diversity and making sure that we get enough diverse people voting and participating in that process absolutely um i think and maybe i misunderstood in the chat i think this question in particular was about uh ensuring diversity in the vote for the ucoc um out enforcement outline um i don't know if any and i know vicky vicky wanted to share something vicky uh i wanted to say about the diversity in the elections not about ucc so but i saw that mariana wanted to say something as well sorry vicky were you referring to me i thought you had your hand up no sorry about that apology okay so sorry so about diversity and that's why we have this consultation process and that's why we have 50 percent uh barrier uh for the approval i think there was another question as well why 50 percent why why so low on the other hand what happens if there is no 50 percent so 50 plus one means the majority and because we don't need two thirds for example it will give more votes to uh less represented communities as for the communities themselves election task force uh which is organizing the trustees election this year which i am and lorenza are the part we had conversations uh across the board with affiliates from all parts of the globe including the most underrepresented uh asian community and while there we try to encourage them to take part in the meta processes and pointing them at meta so we are trying to uh recruit people well recruit maybe not the right word but uh involve people from underrepresented communities in the discussion of the decisions uh that will impact them at all uh not only people in the united states and europe thank you thanks yeah so that theme of involving people in the decisions that impact them of course applies to both the board elections and to the ucoc draft enforcement guidelines i don't know if let's see i think it looks like stella wants to um talk about the ucoc angle on this yes so i can speak briefly about the amazing teamwork that the policy team has done to engage with small and medium communities but before i do that i want to throw it back to what i mentioned previously about how we had on wiki conversations as well as conversation hours with 35 emerging and established communities it's very much been in the team's goal to make sure that we get as many different cultures and perspectives as possible in the document in addition to that the team has been working very very hard to make sure that we get as many voices and we get as many opinions that people feel empowered to vote in fact i would like to plug a panel q and a that is happening tomorrow where we will be having members of small and medium communities engaging in essentially a fireside chat about how they believe that this document will impact their day-to-day interactions in their communities thank you thanks for that if there are no other quick follow-ups on the ucoc which looks like we don't have in chat um i will move on to another topic this question is about the movement charter the movement charter will change roles and responsibilities throughout the movement what is the level of readiness of the board to discuss potential changes in roles and responsibilities as a result of the charter i'll take that thank you Elena and thank you to whoever posted that question um i think it was mentioned quite early on in this call and in other places that the board first of all the community itself prioritized this process as something key to our movement strategy it's the same thing for the board and for the foundation we see it as one of the most important things that need to happen we want to see this process um happen well and to be successful we are ready to have difficult conversations or not difficult but challenging conversations maybe um about roles and responsibilities the board has assigned two liaisons uh Nat Timkev and myself to uh two liais with the mcdc that the movement charter drafting committee and we finally are at a point where we will be starting to work together so we look forward to that and we will keep the the community updated as we progress thank you um we also have a question that is about uh generally about the shortage of local administrators across various wikimedia projects the observation is that projects are suffering from a shortage of local administrators and backlogs of work what is the foundation and by extension the board's role in addressing shortages and backlogs i'll go ahead take that on Elena so let me start by saying that i am an administrator uh on the english wikipedia so i empathize with the question retaining diverse editors and enabling the different pathways to become administrators is hugely important to the success of the movement it's an issue that the movement is facing collectively and therefore we must solve this collectively working with communities to foster environments where diverse editors can thrive has been and continues to be the top priority so projects like the universal code of conduct that we've already talked about the new editor experience and then other movement strategy projects that the board and the foundation are supporting all of these are in mind as a top objective there is certainly urgency around recruitment and retention of a diverse editor base and so we will continue to partner on projects that work in different ways to address it thanks thanks Rosie um we've got another question about the annual plan and i think mariana touched on this in her update but maybe if there's an opportunity to expand that would be great um the annual plan process this year the first observation is that it invites community discussions and community input community participation particularly into the external trends that are happening in the world that we should be planning around so the question is just how do we know that our ideas are have been taken seriously how do we know that our ideas have been integrated into the annual plan i mean it's a great question and i'm the person who's never been through the process before so i'll do my best to project what i hope will be achieved one is that we're trying to do the community engagement and conversations earlier so that there's time to really onboard any of the feedback that we get um so that's the first point the second point is that as i said you know we need a planning document that gives us overall direction and helps hold this accountable but the nature of the work we do isn't a moment in time and so i'm very interested to think together about what the cycles of ongoing conversation and sharing and reporting out look like even sort of after a plan has been adopted and so those will at least be two things to to try to speak to and engage with as we as we go i think our movement communications team has done really good thinking about what are the mechanisms for community engagement in the past that have worked well so that we replicate those i certainly feel that the time i spent on the listening tour taught me a bit about what the right setup is for conversations where you can really listen and really onboard and take into account what people are sharing and saying i want to be careful that we also set expectations for those conversations and be clear what they are and what they're not so that we don't disappoint people or we don't have misaligned expectations about the nature of the input and the nature of the conversations and that'll be important i think for us to do upfront but at least trying to do it earlier and trying to to do it in a way that gives us more regular cycles of back and forth will be important thank you for that does anyone from the board want to add anything about that should i move to the next question happy to take the next question that i've queued up which is about the community selected board seats and the affiliate selected board seats i believe that this is in reference to the upcoming board election so the question is that the bylaws changed in 2020 to remove the distinction between community selected board seats and affiliate selected board seats what will affiliate involvement be during the 2020 board of trustees election i'm happy to to ask again or rephrase the question if it's not clear as i understood the question it's it's what will what will what will the process be for the upcoming selection process is that right alaina yeah what what will affiliate involvement look like during this election different from previous elections where there was a distinction between community selected board seats and affiliate selected board seats i think this is under consideration right now by by the board and specifically the board selection task force so i don't think we have a great great victoria over to you vicki uh as i said i am a part of election tax force as well as lorenzo and uh we've had conversations with people and there was there were three questions asked on meta and that is being summarized and we have recommendation for the board on what the procedure will be but this is just in the process of uh establishing what it will be because obviously board needs to consider it and agree or disagree with it basically it's too too early to tell i'm sorry great but that's helpful to know that it's all being discussed right now and under consideration right now so this question ask or should feel free to participate in determining that going forward um i think that we have managed to cover um the questions that were asked in chat so that's wonderful i'm going to do a review and just make sure that there's nothing outstanding um but we'll post of course the notes to this conversation on the meta page um and if we find any questions that we missed we'll post answers to that on the meta page as well um so let's see i think we can potentially move towards closing the call shani unless there's anything else that you'd like to yeah i'd like to give you know people a last chance especially those who haven't spoken yet you ask questions either on chat or from youtube we'll give it a minute for you to think about that um and i will be just thanking everyone uh in the meantime and before we wrap this up um we as i said at the beginning really want your feedback on how these conversations are going a lot of effort goes into setting up these calls and we want to make sure that we're addressing your needs and this is what the community needs and wants so elena i think uh staff have prepared some some short polls that we can share that would be a good time to maybe share it and then we can see if we have a some coming up questions oh there's there's a question from hugo yeah it looks like we need one question live go ahead hugo hello i have a question about the form 990 do you think is it possible to reduce the time it needs to publish it from my point of view it should be possible to publish it earlier and i would say i can try to help making that possible and i think it's very great it would be great if it's possible that the form 990 is published earlier after the closing of the fiscal year after the current proposed that we republished in may 11 months after the closing of the fiscal year small from my point of view very late hi raju here um i actually replied to it in the chat um so technically the form is due to the us irs um five months after the close of the year and the average time it takes for organization to publish is anywhere from 12 to 18 months which is across the board my sense is that we are kind of in the ballpark of that but it's as to the specific issue of like what are the various steps that need to happen before it goes out from the time we prep for it there's a significant audit committee conversation about it kpmg and everybody else gets involved so there's a reason why it feels like it's a it's long but when i checked it looks like that's about the average for most organizations it is not an area where i can specifically answer but it's something that the staff can go back and talk to haimei and come back with the answer as to why it takes that long and if if for some reason there are ways to kind of speed it up i'm sure we'll be more than happy to consider those i'll just add that when i saw the question in the chat i also think i may just again to learn more i will say as a new person given the number of questions we get asked about the 990 you can appreciate we just want to make sure to be careful to get it right and so i'll try to learn more what the steps of the process are and if there are opportunities for any of that to go faster but i suspect that haimei will also want to ensure that getting it right is the key driver i understand the question of the timing between when it's submitted and when it's published and again we'll be happy to learn more and share but i don't want to speak to something i don't yet fully understand thanks mariana thanks for raju so that is definitely something that we can post a more detailed answer to on the event meta page after afterwards and we've got about five minutes left and we want to make sure that we have time to allow you all to fill out the poll to evaluate today's call so we'll i'll hand it to shami to do that but i also just wanted to remind you all that if you'd like to sign up to automatically receive zoom links um for these calls in the future to be able to join us in the zoom room um you can sign up for those by emailing ask hack at wikimedia.org we'll add you to the list and every time there is a conversation with the trustees we will send you a reminder email with the zoom link so that you can join us here also shani did say this earlier but you can email ask hack at wikimedia.org with your questions and with your feedback at any time it's being monitored and responded to year-round not just during these calls so yeah i will pass it back to you shani to explain the poll and to close the meeting and i will drop the link to the poll in the chat when you're ready yes so this is a really short couple questions poll we're going to post the answers live here so we are hoping you can join us either here from the room or live from youtube someone is putting the link there as we speak please take a moment to give us some feedback on on this call this is meant to help us improve these calls and if you have any other input we're happy to to receive it again all year round um yeah if your answer was not um if your question was not answered we will answer it later on in writing the same goes for other questions that we may have missed so thank you all for being here i want to say a specific thank you to all of our staff members who've been working again for quite a long time to make this a reality to our uh not incoming anymore see oh mariana for being here and to all of the trustees who've taken the time to be here and of course to you the community for hanging in there and doing all the amazing work that you do uh all over the world this is always inspiring and we're receiving some um results right now on screen we'll give it two more minutes for people to be able to respond and i don't see any anything moves anymore so i'm guessing people voted um so thanks everyone uh for joining wherever you are we appreciate your engagement and being here we'll see you in two months in in the next one and probably before as well thank you all thanks so much everyone for joining take care bye bye thanks folks