 So welcome everyone My name is Pete Forsythe and along with Ben Creasy and Wayne Calhoun over here. We started up this series In April, so now is what is this our fourth fifth? This is our fifth So thanks very much for coming. I am actually I'm gonna be leaving The Bay Area and moving back up to Portland So this is my last for a little while and it's really gratifying to see how many people are showing up and how much Independent interesting discussion about wikis is is happening So with the with the wiki salon series what we really wanted to do was create a space for people to Talk and and exchange ideas whether they're talking about projects that they're working on related to wikis or Wikipedia or any wiki site To learn something new to share ideas that they have to build projects together and And so we do like to have speakers and panel discussions and things like that But we also wanted to really be sure to have a lot of space for people to Work together and talk on their own. So it feels like that's really happening Well, I think next month will be one of the basically every other month We try to have one that does not have a scheduled program And so next month will be one of those So if you feel like there wasn't enough time here to talk or work on wikis at the event next month Should be more your speed for that I guess on a on a personal note. I really wanted to say This has been a very gratifying experience and I've made some some really good friends just through people I'd encountered Here and there and at events and on the wiki, but in various ways It's been just tremendously gratifying to work with Ben and Wayne and Pax who's been a regular Contributor and and a panelist and photographer and and just many of the people who have Turned up to these so that's all I've got my way of it Oh, and there's the Wi-Fi password if you need to get on Wi-Fi I believe the password is one edit can make a difference with the numeral one at the beginning And then I believe it's all just lowercase strung together for the rest of it one edit can make a difference Is that right? Yeah, okay, and then did you have something you want to add? Apparently I need to get used to speaking with this mic because He won't be around in the future to rely on so we could give Pete a round of applause because there's no way this would have ever happened He's got a lot of experience with organizing events apparently so he like knows exactly how to how to do all this stuff I Don't have too much else to say except that I really appreciate the people who came out to to spend time with us And I just want to remind people of just how cool Wikipedia is and and how much influence it has in the world and So I just hope to see people in the future and hopefully one of these editing Sessions you can hang out with me and try making an edit to the Wikipedia and I'm also excited at the opportunity to partner with people who have interests in specific topics So last month we partnered with the basic income Activists maybe in the future we'll partner with some other group of volunteers who are interested in some topic or non volunteers And That I think we can introduce our dad So so one of the things that we discussed at the beginning was that even though Most of our shared interest is in Wikipedia and the Wikimedia world We really wanted to have an event that that that covers wikis more broadly and online collaboration more broadly and and so You know are that the initial ideas that we had tended to be about wikipedia, but We were very fortunate that one of the early people who came along who wanted to share some ideas with us as our next speaker Marta Belcher who her first foray into the world of wikis as a Stanford law student she ran for the the graduation speech to give the graduation speech on the platform of Creating a wiki so that everyone in the class could contribute to that speech rather than having her own point of view that She was going to share and apparently had a bit of a contentious election and and did win that and deliver the speech She at the time was an intern at the electronic frontier foundation And she had done some she she had done a paper on mass collaborations So it was something that she had developed an interest in and she's gone on to become an attorney at Robison Gray where she does IP litigation with a focus on technology So please join me in a round of applause for Marta Belcher. We're interested to hear what you did Well, hi there. Thank you all so much for coming out Thanks, Ben Pete and Wayne and thanks to everyone who's watching on the live stream, which let's be honest is just my mom So today I'm going to talk about my experience crowd sourcing my law school graduation speech I do have a PowerPoint. I had a professor in law school who liked to say Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts. Absolutely So I took that to heart, but I couldn't resist in this particular case Primarily because I wanted to show you a blog post that the professional speechwriters association did About the wiki speech after the speech was delivered So it says behold the wiki speech More than 90 Stanford law grads used a wiki to write and edit their student graduation speech The result isn't as bad as you think So I'll take it That was how I knew this was a successful venture So let me go back and start at the beginning with how I got the idea So, you know how every startup has this great origin story like I was cutting paper one day and my hand cramped And I thought let's put batteries in the scissors So I'll be honest. I don't have a great Silicon Valley origin story for the wiki speech It was October 2014 I was getting ready to stand graduate from Stanford Law School the following June and I got an email Saying that the student graduation speaker was going to be chosen by an election And I started thinking about it and I'll be honest. I don't like graduation ceremonies There's something I find deeply disturbing about anti-climactic moments And I feel like graduation ceremonies are often kind of anti-climactic Even for the graduates because you're not really participating And I had been the student commencement speaker at my undergrad and I had actually really enjoyed that not just delivering it But actually the writing process And reflecting on my time at the school And I've been fascinated with mass collaboration for a long time And so something just clicked and I thought why don't we all just write the speech together in a wiki? At the time it kind of seemed obvious. Why has this not been done? We have the technology So I decided to enter the election for graduation speaker and my platform was if you elect me We will all write the speech together in a wiki And I started talking to my classmates one-on-one in groups and pitching the idea and Believe it or not. It was actually really controversial Both within Stanford Law School and in the media that covered it. You're all Perhaps wikipedia's so I don't have to sell wikis to you But a lot of people thought it was going to be a disaster Or they didn't really understand crowdsourcing. So for example, this is from a blog that does legal news roundups Stanford students commencement speaker crowdsourced her speech It was all going along fine until the three-minute segment where she just yelled bababooey over and over again Which isn't really that funny But that's kind of like that was sort of the the general reaction when I would pitch this idea to people And you know, a lot of my classmates had this concern But there were others who were extremely excited about it or at least felt like well like let's give it a shot And so there's this legal blog called above the law and someone laughed. Yeah It's like the national inquirer of the legal profession They're kind of like required to be super snarky And they did this article about the election while the election was going on and I was actually surprised they liked it They liked the idea. I mean, they were still super snarky So here's an excerpt from the article The snarky part, you know, they said it was brilliant. So they you know, that's something As you might have expected wiki commencement is coming out of a California law school You'd get your ass kicked for suggesting something like that in the upper Midwest Which okay, there was more snark in the article, but you know So the election I Ran against eight other people and it was extremely close There were two runoff elections, but ultimately I did win And I'll be honest Even after the election the wiki speech Continued to be controversial It had been a close election. So a lot of the people hadn't voted for it But I was really surprised. I thought the hard part would actually be writing the wiki speech But that part was actually extremely smooth The hard part was convincing people that this was worthwhile and that was hard there was one particular day that was particularly difficult and One of my professors who runs the Stanford intellectual property and innovation clinic pulled me aside And he said, you know Marta No one has ever really done something innovative and looked back and thought oh, that was easy So I tried to keep that in mind in mind and ultimately indeed the speech turned out really well The writing process went really smoothly and ultimately more than half of my classmates did participate and I really enjoyed the process of working with my classmates and Reflecting on our three years together and writing something together that celebrated our time together So you're probably wondering about the mechanics of writing the speech Obviously, we can't just have a blank page and a free-for-all. We need structure and of course I'm preaching to the choir here So we decided we would write the speech in three stages and here are the stages Stage one was topics stage two content and stage three editing And I'm gonna go through each stage and show you exactly how we did it, but first I'll show you what the wiki actually looked like Okay, so a couple things to notice First for wikipedia here. You're probably saying that's not media wiki Indeed it is not it is wiki spaces Why did I use wiki spaces instead of media wiki because I am a human and I make mistakes But I do think that a project like this could be accomplished using a ton of different tools out there Even something as simple as a Google doc if it was structured the right way Also, because we're in the Silicon Valley and URLs have to be adorable You might notice that there is a Swiss domain name So it's wikispeed.ch. CH is the TLD for Switzerland Um the first stage that we actually had was We would brainstorm topics and those topics would become buckets into which people could later contribute content So these topics were things like Jokes about law school funny things about Stanford stories about professors And so we actually just kind of like sat around and brainstorm topics a lot of the wiki speech was actually sitting around and and doing things much like much like we will be doing later today And throughout the entire writing process The wiki it was up and people could contribute online But I really found this to be sort of the the core of you know, the wiki speech Experience and the events started out really small like this one and By the end and the weeks leading up to graduation the events were much bigger like 50 or 60 people So that stage lasted a few weeks And then we had these topics and these were sort of like prompts And so we wanted people at stage two to just give us everything they could think of that fit in that topic All their funny stories about professors all their ideas for jokes all their heartwarming stories about classmates So this is a stage two page and so you can see like each topic had a heading And when people would contribute their ideas and stories they just put it like in bullet points And the point here was not that this is all going to go in the speech The understanding was this is just going to be the pool from which we're going to pull at the next stage So I just wanted as much content from as many people as I could possibly get And more importantly, I wanted as many people as possible to participate And that's actually pretty challenging Because as I read on Wikipedia As you all know, there's this one nine ninety rule for wikis that usually 90% of people just view content 9% of people edit content and only 1% of people actually create new content And then there's also the Pareto principle that 20% of the group will produce 80% of the activity But to me it was really important to get as many people as possible involved And I realized that not everyone is going to sign up for the wiki and not everyone is going to come to a formal event So what I did was Cupcakes the answer to everything As often as possible during stage two which lasted about six weeks I would have these informal gatherings And so I would just sit in the courtyard that everyone has to pass through and I would have cupcakes and lemonade And I would just invite people to come and grab a cupcake and chat And I would ask them, you know, do you have any ideas for stories? Do you have any heartwarming moments, you know, and I would just sit there and put them in the wiki myself And so that was something that was really successful This one for example, I tried to do them on days that made sense. This one was our last first day So it was the first day of our last quarter And it was we ended up having a huge amount of content to pull from when we moved to stage three moved into the editing phase This one lasted about a month The whole writing process all together was Actually quite a while about three or four months And to be fair the editing process kind of had subparts So first we sat down in person And we had an edit-a-thon where we just looked at all the content we had and we said what themes do we see emerging? What should be the overarching theme of this speech and what we settled on was this theme? You've made it Um, so here a few um, I'll read these in a second. Um, here are a few Sort of excerpts from the speech the way we started was the speech was the way we started our law school experience Which was that um in our first hour at stanford law school a professor welcomed us with the words you've made it Um, and so we sort of took that to be our organizing theme You know, what does it actually mean to say we've made it is the statement kind of actually problematic Um, you know, why is it that we made it by getting to stanford law school? Um, and and so we sort of circled back around at the end and and came to you know, we understand now that three years ago We made it because we arrived at a place where excellence does not mean perfection Um, et cetera, et cetera. So that that was our sort of organizing theme. We got that first And that was how we how we did that So with this overarching theme in mind, we then filled in the in between So we created this kind of hodgepodge outline where we just copied and paste stuff Over from our bullet pointed list over to the content bank bank and tried to from the content bank and tried to put it into a meaning Um, and then we sort of suggested ways to transition and organize it Um, so we started with the you've made it story and then we talked about our experiences at stanford law and Filled in stories and then we talked about going to law school and learning about justice in the classroom at the same time As we saw all these injustices around us um And we talked about the things that we were able to do in law school to combat these injustices And what our law degrees would allow us to do in the future Um, and so that was sort of our outline and that really organically became a polishing process where we took the raw stories and ideas And suggested specific language from them and wrote and rewrote Um, so this might look a little more familiar Um, I saw something that said um every war that's ever been fought has been re fought on wikipedia Um, so we did have discussions of course like like any good wiki We had we had a discussion section. Um, so you can see up here. We've got sort of the The actual language of the speech and um, anyone could go in and actually edit that Just move it around, you know active version delete things add things go back to previous versions and um, and you could also sort of highlight a section and say Um, you know, well, I don't really like this word and and the comments you can see they really range from like Kind of really big topics like have we made it? Um, you know Uh and you know overarching organization things and then they got down to like I don't really like this word Like can we find a better word for this? Um And so we had these discussions going on online But we also had editathons where we would have these discussions in person and I would always um Compare the process to sandpaper The more friction you apply the smoother it gets is what I would always say Um, and you know, of course the question that always comes up And has constantly been asked is you know, when do you stop editing? Right? Doesn't just freeze one day and that's you know, the sum of the world's knowledge So how do you do that with a speech? Where you actually have to deliver it at some point and how do you prevent someone from coming in right before the deadline And deleting everything at the last second and replacing it with a different speech Um, so the way I addressed that was to have an event that ended the editing process So the last editathon so we came into the event and did final tweaks and had final discussions And during the event I was the only one editing So I was editing as we were discussing and when the event ended That was the end of the group editing process. Um, one thing to note Is that I I did make little tweaks to it to make it a little more deliverable Um, so there certainly is an element of top-down structure. You know, I I'm sure Wikimedia can attest to uh structure is important And um, so it's it definitely was not a free-for-all um, so The delivery method, um You can watch the speech on youtube, um, of course and um My vision from the beginning was actually to make a video With different classmates saying different parts of the speech And it would have been great because we actually had an award-winning filmmaker as one of our classmates And he agreed to make the video, but unfortunately the law school would not let us have screens at the graduation Um, so we had to look at other options And it definitely could have been done any number of ways and would have been great So for example an audio recording would have worked a celebrity delivering it jimmy wales delivering it Um Or one person delivering it, but ultimately what we decided to do Was a three person delivery Where the other two classmates were chosen by lottery And it worked out really well. It was really fun to have this kind of like back and forth dynamic Um, and to sort of have an interactive speech giving Experience it kind of felt symbolic of the writing process Um, so the speech is on youtube and you can watch it Um, I didn't want to take up too much of our time actually sitting and watching the video Um, it felt kind of like meta like i'm standing here and talking to you and then standing here and talking to you um So but you know we can I guess kind of play like the first like minute just to sort of like It really was a thing that happened and it really wasn't a disaster. I promise Uh So we'll play just like the first minute at stanford. We're surrounded by a spirit of innovation That constantly encourages us to ask Yeah, that's just the audio. Uh, maybe they were right that the audio delivery wouldn't have been so great Um, so I think ultimately my takeaway from this, um was that uh, You don't crowdsourcing doesn't need to be just something that Has objective Facts at the end of it, right? Um the sort of stereotypical Version of why we should crowdsource things Is the jelly beans in the jar example, right? You can guess the number of jelly beans in the jar But if you have 500 people guess the number of jelly beans in the jar You know, you're and you average that you're going to get a much much much more accurate kind of picture um But I think oh gosh Oh, that's you Okay, um Let's put this back up It's so but this is sort of an experiment, you know, how do you crowdsource something that's fundamentally creative? You know, there's this idea that create creativity is like, you know, some author locking themselves away in You know in a in an apartment in paris and uh, and you know Extracting something from the depths of their soul That is this creative thing. Um, how do you do that? How do you do something creatively? Collaboratively and make it work And so this to me was something um that I think was ultimately a success or at least not as bad as you think um And um, so going forward as well. Um something I wanted to mention that may be of interest my current project, uh Since there are no more graduation speeches to deliver. Um, my current project is working on a Crowdsourcing legislation type project, which I will say for another time But happy to chat with people individually later about that. Um, so with that, I really wanted to just open it up I'm pretty easy to to find My sincerest hope is that someone out there on the internet is watching this and uh, not to be meta And is going to you know, maybe take this idea and uh and repeat it at their own school And I'm happy to chat with anyone here or anyone on the internet about how to do that And I'll open it up to discussion and thank you all again so much for having me Well, thanks very much for sharing with that with us. Uh, I'm hoping that we have some questions here Brendan, do we have the um, is there a microphone over here on the side like we've done in the past? Okay, so if you see Brendan in the back if you want to ask a question It's great if you can go up To the microphone How did your wiki deal with edit conflicts? Um, yeah, so there were definitely a lot of edit Conflicts, right? There was like I say the sandpaper thing and I emphasize the friction Like there really was a lot of you know, it's it's friction, you know as applied to the speech itself not between each other um I think also that I think the collegiality aspect really helped I think the fact that we all knew each other already Was really great because we all could sort of like actually sit down and have a discussion about You know, what do we what do we think about this line? And I'll be honest. I think the um, I think I think one, you know Criticism of this kind of creativity that you could say is that it does become a little bit watered down In that, you know, you sort of have to you do kind of have to appease everyone, right? We we had to have a thanking the parents section, you know Because it was very important to many people that we thank the parents even though it's sort of you know the standard um and So, you know that was But I think remember your mom's watching my mom is watching. Thank you mom For everything you did to get me there. That's from all of us Yeah, I mean we tried to like add in the like We tried to like do the we made it spin like thank you for everyone who helped us make it You know, we tried to do something but um, but there were definitely editing conflicts And um, I think the collegiality is is really what saved it People try and tell you like how you should speak like how you should move around the stage or theatrics to do or anything like that And uh, if so, how did they organize that kind of thing? um So much So much, uh, yes, there were a lot of there were a lot of um Opinions on on how to deliver it. Um, and like honestly the delivery could have gone a million different ways um Some of the ideas, I mean all the ideas were actually like, you know, pretty good Like at one point we played with the idea of like what if you know, like, I mean This is definitely like when you're in like a deep discussion. You're like, what if we held up emojis? And I'm like this was like this right and like at the time it seemed like a great idea And we like actually talked about it um for a while and then didn't end up going with that um Um, but um, but no and the other thing was writing the speech collaboratively. Um We were funny. There were funny moments. You can you can watch it later Um, there was there's one joke where we're listing out all these legal words that we like really just, you know, got lost in Um, and then um at one point we like list out like Wingardium leviosa And then someone goes that's from Harry Potter and like it's like this little like a side and it was really funny And it landed on the day of um, but like half the class was like that's stupid Like that is a terrible idea like that is not funny at all Um, so it was also it's also sort of like a matter of balancing people's um people's taste that one made it in Other other ones other ones didn't The humor was a humor was it humor was hard. Yeah humor was hard. Um In my original um in my original speech um Like not original speech in my um like in one of my edits Uh, I had put in uh, like a joke about how law school was bonding through mutual trauma You know, which I thought was hilarious, but um, but like people were like, that's not funny trauma isn't funny And it and it isn't and it isn't um, and so and they were right and I'm glad and so this is the water down thing Right. I'm glad I am glad they took that out so We've solved the humor thing I think on wikipedia if you ever just Don't just don't just don't be funny. Just don't be funny. I know I just I like I really I think this was mostly me pushing it I really wanted it to be funny because my feeling on graduation speeches is like you're sitting there It's hot and like like you don't care about, you know, the other 500 people Like you being like an audience member not a club, you know a member of the class and like It's just kind of really painful And so my whole thing about the student graduation speaker is like your job is to be funny Like your job is to make this less painful for everyone sitting out there in the audience Um, and so like my undergrad speech Just jokes. I mean the whole thing like there was nothing serious about it. Um, in this in this one We did get pretty serious. It sort of started out funny Because I made you know, I like forced them to to make it start out funny But no, we did end up like talking about really serious topics Um, so for example, we we talked about what it was like to be like sitting in the classroom and like talking about um, you know justice and like criminal justice and then to sort of like look out You know, look at the newspapers, you know on the same day and see the things that are happening in the criminal justice system and you know People not being indicted and lots of things that were going on at the same time And so one thing that was actually really cool Was being able to have these really serious conversations like among ourselves as we were editing like What do we think of this and how can we say something meaningful about this? And so on the on the serious side, it was actually very it turned out to be I think a really good thing that we were when we got serious So so I have a question So I've I've done a fair amount of work here at the foundation and separately in in persuading Professors and teachers that that wikipedia or wikis in general Have an important role in the educational world and that there's a lot that can be learned From engaging on a wiki and from engaging with people who maybe aren't You know in your class, etc. So I'm curious like was there Were there any faculty members or administrators who kind of took an interest in what you were doing who might have been Inspired to try something different in their classes Oh, I wish that would be great. I mean that was sort of my hope right is to you know, we're already in the silicon valley and Collaboration is all around us and I really wanted to you know, sort of bring technology to the You know hundreds of years old tradition that is graduation ceremonies and tired and stale graduation ceremonies And I think bringing wikis into the I mean Not entirely, but you know tired and stale old methods of teaching You know is another great example of like how you can use wikis. I I wish that professors Had sort of been more involved. I did have professors come up to me after the speech and say this was so great So maybe they were inspired My favorite moment if you watch the speech at one point A professor Takes out his phone and he's sitting on the stage behind me and like it kind of looks like he's like taking a selfie Like and I'm like behind him and it's great. It's great. So like watch for that that easter egg So maybe he was inspired by the by the nature of the wiki. We'll go with that. Yeah, let's go with that Anyone else And if you could maybe introduce yourself and if you'd like to say a couple words about what you do I think that might I'm sure people are curious Long time wiki meeting Former board member and now i'm a lawyer. I actually work with part of outside of wikis I'm wondering what the best thing that ended up in the speech is that you would never in a million years have put in if it was just you That's such a good question Um So one of the parts of the speech I really liked Um is we sort of start listing off The things that we did in at law school that kind of were aimed at Combating some of the injustices that we saw in the world. Um, you know, stanford has a lot of really amazing Programs that allow us to like clinically, you know work in clinic and do things and um as we were sitting around Talking about what we should list people were saying. Oh, what about this? What about that? And i'm like, I didn't know we had that at stanford. Like that's amazing. You did what like So that was really cool. Like I mean I really do think that a big part of it was the process of like Sitting there with people and talking about their experiences and what they um what they did So that was that was really cool And I was really glad that we were able to list things that I didn't even know were at stanford Oh, we do please. Uh, I'm charles rostoff. I'm a lawyer here at the wikimedia foundation Um, what was it like delivering the speech when you knew probably at least half your classmates had already read it Like did you did it feel like you were delivering it to them or more to the people who weren't your classmates who were there How did that like affect how you thought about it? Yeah, no, that's such a great question because you know, that was definitely a consideration or that was something I heard people talk about like well, isn't the speech also, you know for us Um, and I guess in on this I sort of felt like I would rather that we participate in this process for months And sort of have have that experience together collectively then, you know, just collectively sitting and listening to a speech um, but um actually um The climate classmates, I think reacted a lot more Than I than I thought they would right like of course like with jokes you'd think they wouldn't laugh, but they totally laughed and um I guess like a social proof thing other people were laughing so I felt like they should laugh but um But like there's a moment in the speech in the beginning where um So I sort of stand up there and I say like here's what we did Here's how we did this here's what the process was like And then the other two classmates come on and and we sort of say okay And the result is this speech and the classmates went like crazy like they were and it was just like completely spontaneous We did not plan to stop for flaws, but they just went nuts Like you know clapping applauding about like yeah, this is our speech and we wrote this together And um, so they I actually think they reacted kind of more Hi, my name is Maria and I work for uh, wikimedia foundation community engagement department And I'm from Argentina. So this is where I'm coming from with my question. Um, I realized um speeches You know, uh legally blonde So I realized speeches are a tradition here in the u.s. For graduation ceremony. Um, So my question is um Is there any uh political view? Um or intention to control it from the authorities of the university and Um, how does that work when you say i'm just gonna crowd source the speech Was there any, um intention to Control that or or monitor it or uh censor it That's a fantastic question. Um, uh, so The stanford was Incredibly supportive of of the wiki speech like the law school was incredibly supportive and I really um, I was really grateful to them and um Actually, there was less than I thought there would be I'll be honest. I thought they would ask me for a path You know the the wiki is closed You can only sort of participate if you have a password And I really thought they would ask me for a password, you know, and I I tried to I tried to yeah I tried to do things, you know as openly as possible. Um, you know, I went to the then dean with my idea And she thought it was a great idea. She you know, she allowed me to you know, run in the election on that platform and um, and so she was you know, really great and um And I yeah, I was actually really surprised. There was not a lot of there was not a lot of attempts to control it Um from from the top and um, I I appreciated the the freedom um To do that, but um, I mean, I think This is something I think about a lot. I know we're not talking about crowd sourcing legislation But like this is the thing I think about a lot, right? This is a like we're luckily like in a place that is You know in the u.s. Where you know, you can say things that are you know in a non anonymous fashion and um and and not have to worry about Government repercussions of that. Um, and so as a result you can have sort of you know Like non anonymous ways of collaborating and in so doing you avoid sort of the the twitter troll problem um, but you know in other places doing something like um like a Crowdsourced legislation kind of thing You really you really can't you know, you have to be anonymous You absolutely have to be anonymous because there's you know, the government repercussions. So definitely something I think about Yeah, and great question Okay, well, let's have a round of applause for marta We've still got a bit of time to hang out and some more snacks and drinks in the back So if you have more questions that come up, I'm sure marta will be here for a little while to answer them um, and I also We have one further announcement Before we break here and actually this reminds me I want in the earlier intro I really wanted to acknowledge the wickamedia foundation For not just providing the space for uh for I guess four out of our five so far of these events Which is a fantastic space and also the the staff who have really actively helped us So steven is going to make an announcement in a moment. Steven la port over here Uh, brendan in the back. I'm sorry brendan cambell There's a hyphenated in there is Campbell craven brendan cambell craven has been our stalwart av person juliet barbara Who asked a question earlier has been helping in getting the the facilities set up. So Wayne and ben and I basically put at the bill for uh for getting some refreshments in the first few months But the wickamedia foundation also through a grant has now funded that stuff for I believe the the next year So uh if we could just have a round of applause for the foundation for supporting this I think steven has uh an announcement or an event for us Yeah, so this is unrelated to uh my role at the foundation. I'm steven la port. I sort of Big fan of these events. Um, if you look behind you, there's a there's a photo on the back wall back there above that couch Of a monument that was taken last year This photo was one of the top three from a wiki loves monuments campaign Which is an international competition to photograph all the historical sites around the world It's primarily run in europe, but for very exciting news today We have someone organizing a campaign in california this year Um, I think there was one in california last year, but this is really not a big thing here. Um, there's not a lot of Photographs of these these monuments. We have a long list of things on a page on wickamedia commons And if you're at all interested in taking photographs and submitting them to the competition Or helping the volunteer who's running this Organize the competition and recruit more photographers and the jury to select the winning photos Come talk to me afterwards and i'll introduce you. Um, but I think it could be a lot of fun The competition will run for the entirety of september. So starting september 1st You can take pictures of monuments in our beautiful state upload them to commons under a special tag and then Hopefully be one of the the best monument photographs at the end of the year So come talk to me afterwards if that sounds interesting to you because I think us in the the bay area could do a good job of like making this a A good campaign and demonstrate it for other states. Maybe get more photographs and be key lives monuments in the us Okay, and one other this reminds me uh, there is another important california-based event that's coming up in uh in october Which is the wiki conference usa So this is uh, I think is becoming an annual event, but this is the first time it's going to be on the west coast I'm sorry with the wiki conference north america. Not just usa. We haven't built that wall yet Sorry, I didn't scratch that scratch that So, uh, so this is going to be in san diego. There is a um There the I believe the deadline for submissions to do a presentation is today And i'm not sure maybe that's past now. Maybe you could squeeze something in under the deadline like this evening But the the Applications to join I think are still open. I'm not sure exactly when the deadline is but I think there's still time to get involved And I believe that's the 7th through 10th of october in san diego. Yeah, i'm getting some nods any other announcements Anyone wants to share? Okay, well, let's uh, let's call it and get back to the food and drink Last wednesday of the month here for for the wiki salon every month So come back