 Welcome everyone to the September 2017 Wikimedia Foundation metrics meeting this month. We're doing a little bit differently because the office is closed. We're transitioning between our old office and our new one. Everyone is remote today. So this will be remote edition. This month's theme is the, I think we can jump on to the next slide. Here we go. This month's theme is the knowledge ecosystem. So we're going to be talking about how Wikimedia fits into the broader knowledge ecosystem free knowledge movements and what our part of this larger knowledge discussion is. And we're going to jump things off with we'll be doing a movement update and then we're going to get an update and talk about Wikimedia and public policy. Then we'll be talking about Wikipedia and US public libraries connecting communities of knowledge. We're going to have a strategy update an executive strategy update and then we'll have a chance for your questions some discussion and then we'll end off with wiki love. So first we've got some exciting welcomes to give to some new staff so we'll just pretend like we're all in a room together applauding for these people yes Catherine's doing a great job modeling this. So welcome to our conversions Aubrey Blanca in Caitlyn and welcome to our new requisition hires Georgina Shannon Pam Miriam and our new contractors interns and volunteers with the foundation Matthew and Nieraka and Sarah. So thank you to that group. And then we've also got some anniversaries of course with 11 years is Mark coming in at nine years is Eric coming in at six years is a Santosh Chris at five years is Dan. We have more dance of course there's another Dan coming in at four years as well as George and we've got three years Alex, Jake, Bada and it looks like Bartosh, Marty, Marcel, Sati and coming in at two years Karen, Alan, Manuel is at one year along with Sam, Lena and Natalia so let's all virtually give a big round of applause to that group. So anniversaries and welcome. Thanks everyone. So I'm pretending like you're all plotting right now. Okay, so normally our movement update would be given by Maria and see but she is unfortunately under the weather today so I will be pitching for her as well. So let's jump right in we've got some exciting developments that have taken place the fundraising team is going to be releasing the fundraising report at the end of this month so that'll be posted on wiki and talking about progress and fundraising over the last year. The rapid grants has just wrapped up and we approved over 200 or exactly 200 rapid grants so big excitement there in a huge thank you to everyone in community resources. And then as I mentioned earlier the foundation is moving offices so we'll be starting in our new offices this upcoming week officially on October 2 and a big thank you to office it and the finance and admin admin teams and the move coordinators who have been working for this very big move and have done a great job. So we've also got some activities coming up relatively soon in October, like wiki convention francophone which will be October 19 to the 21st for the French speaking community. We've got wiki Arabia on October 23 through the 25th for the third annual meeting of Wikimediants from the Arab region, and wiki data con will be happening October 28 to the 29th for our wiki data community will be converging in Berlin. So those are the big major movement updates. Next I want to hand it off to Demi who's a Wikimedian from Brussels who does some great work with us on public policy in Europe. So I want to take it away. Yes, hi. Did I unmute myself successfully? Yes. Okay, great. So hi everybody. I'm Demi. I am the well so-called Wikimedian in Brussels and I do coordinate and sometimes even lead the public policy efforts that we as a movement and you know as affiliates in Europe do. This requires some coordination so you know I was I just happened to be in Brussels when some of the interesting things were happening so I started doing this in this sort of gradually grew into well into a job more or less. So one thing I always felt a bit bad about is that you know this public policy work that I actually love and really like might take attention away from what we actually do from actually writing an encyclopedia and writing articles. And it turns out we as a community in general had mixed feelings about doing public policy work. So you know there were a lot of questions you know should we do this should we not do this. Does it make sense or should we just focus on you know what we do best writing articles. And well in order to you know try to find answers to these questions I started you know reading in all their books and seeing you know what people before us who had written encyclopedias were saying about this. So eventually I well stumbled upon while I quote from Denis Diderot the person who together with D'Alembert put together the very first encyclopedia in France. He actually said that you know the main goal of his encyclopedia was well to make sure that the work is not does not get lost for the coming centuries and that our grandchildren are more educated and at the same time more virtuous and have a more virtuous and fortunate future. And I was thinking well actually you know these people they weren't just gathering knowledge for the sake of gathering knowledge. They were doing this because you know they actually had a political agenda. So maybe it's not that bad that we also engage in public policy. I mean we are all about knowledge and knowledge gathering and knowledge has always been a factor of well social cultural scientific development of mankind. And well since we're on our way to a global knowledge society it is becoming increasingly important for the individual as well you know to have access and to actually be able to participate in this. So against this background the access to knowledge becomes a necessity and the right. And what we do in Wikipedia cannot be regarded as completely disconnected from the rest of well our societies and our global society that is forming now. So I think the question on whether Wikimedia shooter should not be involved with public policy got more or less settled with the SOPA PIPA blackouts. If you think if we think about it now this was a moment where the major Wikipedia's decided will block out Wikipedia for a day. And this is where we actually as a community at large told ourselves OK you know there are some moments even if we want to not be mainly a political force there are some moments where we need to be active politically and then policy and you know there is no way around it. So you know now we know that you know we are also political but we we also want to actually not be political and you know just write our encyclopedia. So we are stuck in this back and forth and are not really sure what to focus on and how much to focus on policy and and on well on all the other stuff. So this I'm telling you because we in Europe here and you know are working together with an organization called Edry which is European digital rights. And since we're talking about partnerships and the global knowledge environment every is one of our close allies. And actually our relationship with Edry developed just as our you know our perspective on whether we are political or not. Whether we are political or how political we are developed with it at the beginning. You know we just knew Edry you know sometimes we had personal contacts with them but we never really collaborated much and we felt like you know they're doing all these dirty things because they're being political and we're not. So you know we really wanted to stay very much away from them. Then about four or five years ago well five years ago I think it was. And we so one of our European chapters actually became an observer of Edry. Edry is an association with members and observers. So we came an observer of Edry because we thought yes I mean we kind of belong to them. I mean we did blackout Wikipedia but we are still not ready you know to speak up and you know to be very active and visible. So we've been an observer for quite a while and then what happened last year is that Wikimedia Deutschland in this case in the name for all European affiliates became a member of Edry. So now we feel like we're quite embedded embedded in this in this whole European Digital Rights Association and we are a major part of it. However we still have our peculiarities and we were never willing to give them up. And what was important with Edry is that Edry over these five years also learned what you know they can expect from us. They learned you know what they can ask us to do. They learned about the things that we're not comfortable with doing and that we won't do. So you know this relationship increased. And how it works now is that basically when it comes to our top priority the things that directly affect us. You know the things that you know where somebody's arguing about you know what should go on a website or what should be legal. This we're mostly handling ourselves. But you know when it comes to something like some issues like the regulation of audio visual media on the internet which has no direct effect to us. This sort of play into the general infrastructure, the general internet regulation that we sort of exist in. That's you know something we let Edry cover and since we are a member of Edry they basically report to us internally. So you know this is kind of a just an example for how our view of who we are changed and what role we play in this general knowledge ecosystem. And you know also how other actors in this knowledge ecosystem learn about us and you know learn to live with us and you know learn to collaborate with us. So in the end you know we changed a little bit but we didn't change too much. And you know I think we're quite happy with our current situation. Excellent so thank you Demi for that information that was great on the public policy aspect of our work and particularly in the European Union and how that relates to the knowledge ecosystem. So next we've got Marilee who's going to talk about Wikipedia and the US public libraries and connecting communities of knowledge and Wikipedia and Wikimedia's part in that part of the ecosystem. So take it away Marilee. Thanks so much. Thank you for inviting me today and I want to give a special thanks shout out to Sam for for helping me so much with the slides and everything else and support has really been terrific. So I'm here to tell you about our project to connect libraries with Wikipedia. And although the lessons that we've learned have been from the perspective of dealing with the US public library audience. I'm trying to touch on some points today that I believe will be helping in framing conversations and interactions with other allied communities of knowledge. So I'm Marilee and I have been working since 2012 to create connections between Wikimedia's and librarians. One of the things I like to tell librarians is through Wikipedia's but that they just don't know it yet. I also want to give a shout out to my colleague Monica Sangle Jones who is the Wikipedia in residence on our project and who joins me as a Wikimedia on the staff at OCLC. Much of the intellectual framing in my talk today is is really her work so so thank you Monica. So there are three important components to our project. We responded to the 2016 night news challenge for libraries which asked libraries and library organizations to answer the question. How might US libraries serve 21st century information needs. So our application boldly proposed that we would train 500 US public librarians to learn how to edit Wikipedia confidently and how to bring those skills to their communities. Out of over 300 applications we were one of five major grants awarded last June and we believe that a big part of our success was demonstrating that we would actively engage with the Wikipedia community. We were pleased to receive additional supplemental funding from the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Monica's position so thank you so much for that support. And finally the secret sauce is Web Junction. So since 2013 Web Junction as a division of OCLC has been helping to build communities of practice by providing free high quality continuing education in a supportive online environment. Web Junction courses have been used by over 80,000 library staff and the Web Junction staff really focus on the needs of adult learners and seek to support librarians who are looking to extend their knowledge and skills. And that piece about adult learning is really important. People who are professionals have different needs than other people kind of in the educational sector. So our project has three phases. I'm going to be sharing outcomes of some research that were carried out during the first phase and a bit of what we've learned from the course participants now that we're in just barely into phase two. But first I want to talk a little bit about why public libraries are important and why US public libraries are important. Libraries are in every corner of the United States. Most libraries serve either rural or suburban communities and here's a fun fact. There are more public libraries than there are McDonald's in the United States. They're really everywhere. We've seen time and time again that people both value and trust libraries. Libraries provide access not only to books, but to subscription based electronic content, including magazines, journals, health and medical reports and much more. If you have not explored the resources offered by your public library, I urge you to do so. I think you'll be surprised. Given the mission alignment between Wikimedians and librarians, collaboration to bring these communities of knowledge together is overdue. And given the reach of public libraries, we thought that this was a natural place to start. So today I'd like to share principles for engaging that I think transcend the types of communities that you might aspire to work with and thanks really go to Monica for helping to frame and formulate this. First, meet people where they are. When you're connecting with a community, it is really important to understand their values and their habits. So first among these is how will you communicate with partners? This is really super important. We gave a survey to those who participated in a preview webinar, which attracted I think around 700 people. And we asked them how did they find out about this, the course. So one of the questions that we asked was how did you find out about this? So the results suggest that people matter. Personal connections made the biggest difference in people finding out about our course. Colleagues, supervisors, other people. Second, OCLC and Web Junction had pretty big reach. We have really well established email lists that reach thousands of librarians. Next, more email lists. Librarians really read their email. Social media reach was lower, but those who referred participants may have found out about our course via social media and other channels. We just don't know that. We also gave multiple presentations as part of OCLC member outreach and professional conferences. So here we were literally showing up where we do we would find librarians. Finally, WiccaNedia channel reach was extremely low. We'd be expected that. However, it's extremely important that we are present there in order to connect with the Wicca community because that's a really important component of our project as well. So how many library staff have edited WiccaNedia before? Well, hardly any. And yet they are incredibly eager to learn more about editing WiccaNedia and much more. Our second principle is show, don't tell. As much as possible, we wanted to be able for our course participants to connect with their professional practice with what they might do on WiccaNedia. So we showed them how that could happen. Our research phase helped us. You could go to the next slide, Sam. Thanks. Our research phase helped us to uncover librarians who work in public libraries that are already incorporating WiccaNedia into their work. Monica interviewed more than 20 of these early adopters to understand from their point of view how they connected professionally with WiccaNedia. We published a series of articles called librarians who WiccaNedia. This format helps librarians see that their peers have already found a place for WiccaNedia in the library. And note that we don't call them WiccaNeads because several of them do not identify them that way themselves. I would call them WiccaNeads, but they don't, they don't feel comfortable with that. They're reluctant to label themselves this way, worried that they aren't qualified enough. And you can read the 12 articles in this series for more information. So let's return to meeting people where they are. Because the experience that Web Junction has working with adult learners, and because learning about WiccaNedia can be so daunting, we wanted to design the course so that it would focus on the area of most used to librarians. And what are U.S. public librarians interested in? They are interested in editing basics. They are interested in being able to cite their collections and along with that, doing it in a way that complies with community norms and policies. And they want to be able to take what they've learned and share it with the communities that they serve. So our course is very much designed around these three things. So those results were coded from free text in an intake survey. And here's a word cloud that reflects what our course participants said in their own words that they hope to gain from their time with Web Junction. So their aspirations and desires really inspire me and I think probably connect with the work that you all do as well. So three weeks in, what is resonating with our librarians? During the first week of the course, we had students focus on the five pillars. So what did this tell them? In our lively live chat and also on the discussion boards, there was a thread about Rankinathan's laws of library science, which are an important set of core principles that are valued by librarians everywhere. There are five of them. This discussion centered around strong correlations between Rankinathan's laws and Wikipedia's five pillars. So participants drew a connection with the law. The library is a growing organism, which pairs nicely with Wikipedia's constantly evolving. Another law is books are for use. And in one participant's analysis, this goes with Wikipedia's free content that anyone could use at a dispute. So it was really amazing to see this group of dedicated professionals draw their own correlation between the two sets of principles. And one participant shared, it's been really helpful to learn about Wikipedia's pillars. It's enlightened by perception of Wikipedia, and I've already begun to share that awareness with other users. So in the second week of class, we had participants evaluate articles. They really dug deep and were surprised and pleased by what they found. One participant said, it's eye-opening, exciting and fascinating. She shared her appreciation for the people, time and worker that are behind each article. Another observed that the exercise revealed to her that Wikipedia is a vibrant community. So in closing, I'd like you to leave you with the importance of, next slide, meeting people where they are and showing not telling. We do not assume or presume to know the outcomes of listening and learning, and we look forward to seeing where public library staff take what they learn. And I look forward to building more connections between communities of knowledge with you. Thank you so much. Excellent. So thank you, Marley. We'll all give virtual round of applause for Marley and for Demi for presenting today. And just as a reminder, if you have questions, you're welcome to hold them until the end because this is a virtual remote session. The question is probably the easiest way is on IRC and James Forester is monitoring the IRC channel, and that is the Comedia-Office on free note if you're not already aware of that. So with that, next part is our strategy update. And for that, I'm going to pass it over to Guillaume and Catherine, who is wearing a fantastic Star Trek inspired outfit today. So take it away, you too. Thank you. Thank you very much, Greg. We can go ahead to the next slide. All right, so we are here to talk a little bit about Wikimedia 2030 and where we are in terms of the process. As you know, over the course of the past, I guess it's nine months now, we've been working on trying to develop a strategic direction that can align and inspire our movement for the future. And I have to apologize for the background noise from the street. We're in a co-working space today because we're waiting for the new office, as Greg mentioned earlier. So we're in the process of moving forward to a direction that can align and inspire our future. And we are really excited that over the course of the past nine months, we have gotten through the first part of what we're calling phase one. And we're at this really sort of critical point in juncture where we're very close to finalizing the strategic direction itself, which Guillaume is going to talk a little bit about. So if I could go to the next slide. Okay. We, as you know, this is a little bit of a recap, but again, we always have new people joining us in our staff and in our movement. And so just to reorient people, we started out the process by saying we want it to be as inclusive as possible. We want to be able to reach as many people from across our movement and different language communities. We also want to be able to understand people who don't consider themselves Wikipedians to Marely's point. There are many people who engage with the work that we do, but maybe you're not comfortable considering themselves Wikipedians because either they don't feel so they're qualified enough, or they don't recognize that there's a community, or they do work in another sector and rely on Wikimedia or use Wikimedia in a different way, but it's not necessarily their primary identity. So the four tracks that we set out to investigate were the track of individual contributors are organized groups, which includes affiliates, but other groups that are organized in some sort of way and contribute to the Wikimedia community. The track of people who are what we're calling new voices, so people who are not in the conversation but are part of our ecosystem. And so that was included experts and people in mature markets for whom awareness of Wikipedia is high, usage of Wikipedia is high, they might be readers, they might be technologists, they might be our partners in Glam institutions, they might be policy experts who are interested in the work that we're doing. And then our new voices in our emerging communities or where we have new readers, places where we may have people who are interested in Wikimedia and using Wikimedia, relative to the number of people in a given country or given language group just not as high as we would hope. And we also interviewed experts in that area from civil society, from cultural institutions, from government, social movement leaders, as well as doing research around the needs of these users and what their hopes and aspirations are for knowledge in the future. So those are the four tracks because we really wanted to have both the perspective of our Wikimedia community, and we also wanted to have the perspective of everybody that the Wikimedia community touches through the work that we do. Now, we're about to wrap up Phase 2, excuse me, we're about to wrap up Phase 1 and go into Phase 2. We've been talking about this as a two-phase process, the first phase around aligning around this direction and the second phase about making it real. So we're finishing coming to the end of Phase 1 and we're about to start Phase 2. We're going to talk a little bit about what that means next. In Phase 1, we had three cycles of iteration and consultation. The first one being an opportunity to really open it up and understand what are the different things people want to talk about, what are things on people's minds. Just a totally wide open discussion with no borders of what was or what is not appropriate for conversation as long as it was along the lines of a strategic direction for the movement. We got lots of different ideas. The second cycle was very much around bringing those ideas together into five themes, which you see below. And then the third cycle was very much around how we integrate these themes, but also how do we integrate some of the research and findings from these other tracks of these new voices outside of our movement and understand what their perceptions and experiences and findings meant for the themes that we came up with as Wikimedians. And then the five themes themselves were really reflective of the wide variety of interests that our movement has from the most trusted source of knowledge to thinking about how we partner more effectively to achieve our goals, the augmented age of technology in the future, thinking a little bit about a more inclusive environment, healthy strong communities, and then finally a truly global community, which means really opening ourselves up to embrace everyone who wants to be apart from places that we are currently present and places where we're not present yet. And the whole idea was to shape this into one direction, which I believe is the name of a British boy band, but not what we meant here. Next slide, please. And so how did we do this? As you know, we came together from across the world. We kicked off with a conversation on Wiki, but we also brought people together in a variety of different groups. We started with the Wikimedia conference in Berlin with 400 participants, not just from our affiliates, which is usually the case, but we had representatives of the language committee, of our stewards from outside of our movement from affiliated organizations, not affiliated organizations, organizations that do a similar work to what we do, like Creative Commons. Next slide. And then that spirit of convening to have conversations continued in lots of different areas around the movement. It wasn't just, of course, in Berlin are groups of Wikimedians across the globe convened together to bring in both their communities, but also people who are influential in the world in which we work, whether again, whether it's policies or museum experts or librarians or government leaders or educators, thinking about what did they want out of Wikimedia. And so you can see some of these images of salons that were held across the world. Across the world that we're in. So from Poland to Nigeria. Next slide. And all of this was this idea that we really wanted to be thinking about ourselves within an ecosystem. And we talked a little bit earlier today, and this is why it's such a great follow-up on the presentations from Demi and from Marilee around the fact that we are not the only player in the ecosystem of free knowledge. We're actually one, we're certainly a large one, and we touch many different parts of the free knowledge world, but we really think of ourselves as part of this sort of continuum of free knowledge where we're strengthened by the work of others and others are strengthened by our work. So how did we want to think about integrating with these different aspects of this free knowledge ecosystem? Who did we want to learn from? How did we want to think about partnering? How did we want to think about improving and increasing the impact that we're having on the world while strengthening that system as a whole? And this is just an illustrative example. I think it's a really good one, but certainly we know that it is just one way of rendering the world in which we exist. Next slide. And so I talked a little bit about some of the research and expert engagement that we did. As I said, we talked to hundreds of different experts around the world from all of these different sectoral areas, people whose job it is to think about the future, people whose job it is to think about evolutions and technology, people who are curators and at museums, people who are deeply involved in thinking about the future of library sciences. And we wanted to understand what is it that we could bring to their missions and what is it that their missions could bring to our work and how do they see their worlds changing as we went forward. We also did this great research, building on some of the work that we've been doing around our new readers project and also our new editors project, trying to understand what are the needs that people have for knowledge in different places around the globe, how there are those needs changing, how are user behaviors changing, how is information seeking and what are the very devices around which we're accessing knowledge, how are those continuing to evolve. We did some research in some of our mature markets, that is places in which we have lots of users and we're very well known, trying to understand from Russia to Spain to the United States, how do people perceive Wikipedia, what do they know about us, what's the value that they receive from participating or using the projects, what are the things that they, what are the ways that they conceive of the work that we do. Do they even know that, for example, we're a community based group or a nonprofit and then we also looked at like how are they using us and so breaking it also down by generational measures from people who are under the age of 18 to people serving their 20s and 30s, this next generation of users, what are the changes that we're seeing in terms of the way that people are engaging more generally and then specifically within the Wikimedia projects. Next slide. And once we had all of this research, once we had sought the perspectives of community members from all of our different affiliates and organized groups, once we'd done this work and I think, you know, all these different languages, nearly 20 different languages of consultation and language coordination, once we'd done the external research, we went into a process of synthesis and iteration. So we convened, of course, as I said, through the three different cycles, thinking about how do we go from the broadest possible perspective on what our future might be into a process of bringing these different themes, trying to identify themes, trying to create some sort of clarity and coherence, ensuring that it still reflected the priorities of the community, trying to integrate where we felt like there were top line issues that people wanted us to focus on, also separating out some of the really practical requests around things that are for immediate changes, like feature requests and development on the projects themselves and saying, you know, this is really important, but this might not be a strategic discussion but more of a tactical discussion or a feature request. And we're going to take that and we're going to separate that out and we're going to present that in a different way so that we can address that sort of in the near-term future. So that process of synthesis and iteration, getting from the wide open to the five themes to ultimately what we believe is the strategic direction which Guillaume is about going to present to you. So on to the next. And so just really quickly, what we did was, of course, we brought that strategic direction together. We've gone through a couple of different drafts so that I think we're on the third version right now. We've presented the second version, I believe, at Wikimani after feedback. We use Wikimani as a really exciting sort of experimental laboratory of trying to understand how people reacted to what we had so far, what was missing, what they felt like was essential, how it made them feel both in terms of, does this inspire? Does this seem practical? Is it bold enough? Does it challenge us? Does it feel as though it really reflects the diversity of our experiences? And that's where we got to sort of this third strategic direction which Guillaume is going to get into. Before we do that, I just want to say thank you very much for everybody who did participate. I've had a lot of conversations with folks just as recently as over the course of the past few days about the fact that this was a remarkable undertaking and there was probably a point at every week in which a participant said, I just don't know if we're going to be able to do this. This is chaotic. There's so much going on. We're continuously having to sort of reassess how what our success metrics are and whether we're making progress. Have we really reached enough people? We've got all these different perspectives and yet somehow as we go around the movement today, one of the things that I continuously hear is, by and large, people feel as though their perspectives have been incorporated. By and large, they feel like there was a good effort to really consult and try to make this as inclusive as possible. That the direction itself, even if there are no sort of really huge surprises, reflects the values of who we are and where we might want to go. And that as a whole, one of the things that it really also did for a lot of communities, particularly smaller communities or language communities that are not as widely represented in the sort of global movement is make them feel as though they were connected to what it is that we're doing on a global scale. So I really just want to say thank you again for everybody who participated. Your contributions were what made this possible in much the same way that your contributions are what makes Wikimedia projects possible. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Guillaume who's going to walk us through the strategic direction and what went into it and what it means. Thank you, Catherine. So as Catherine mentioned, there have been a lot of drafts for the text of the strategic direction. So from the one that emerged right before Wikimedia to the one that was revised after Wikimedia to the one that sort of combined them and that is just ignoring all the drafts that came before that and all the revisions that you can see in the history of the direction page on meta. So there has been a lot of writing of commenting, of rewriting, of rewriting and of editing. And I'm really excited that this collaborative writing process has now led to something that is nearly final. Next slide, please. So now, you know, when discussing strategy we often have to talk about very abstract concepts and sometimes use a business jargon and define precise phrases. And I know that that kind of vocabulary doesn't necessarily resonate with many people in our movement, especially when it needs to be translated and adapted into dozens of languages. And sometimes even the use of metaphors that do simplify the language don't actually simplify the intent. And those metaphors can seem jargon-y or detached from reality or even I heard a cult-like. Next slide. So yeah, anything with that kind of language was not going to be something that people could get behind. So there was a lot of rewriting and I just wanted to acknowledge that, you know, that language was difficult to understand and I think we've come to something that is better, but it would not have been possible to get there without the feedback and the comments. Next slide, please. Okay, so just in terms of framing the direction I want to look at the basic concepts of how Wikimedia works and some of the tensions in the previous drafts were coming from the fact that we were trying to emphasize one part of our identity over the other. And to me, the power of Wikimedia relies in its combination of people and technology. And you'll see that I haven't just put an addition sign here. I've put a multiplication sign because to me it's not just about... to me, it's about being more than the sum of their parts because, yeah, it's a multiplication, really. And people and technology are intricate in what we call a complex social technical system which is a bit of a mouthful and I'm not going to go into the details of that today, but I'm sure that if you ask Aaron Halfaker and he will tell you all about the paramecium and social technical systems and you will learn a lot. But, you know, these two... these two are really the two sides of our identity and the strategic direction needs to address... both of them. And I want to say a few words about this word direction because strategy can be a bit intimidating or scary because it's about inherently making choices and leaving stuff behind. But the nice thing about a movement the size of Wikimedia is that it's so large that there is room for everyone to contribute meaningfully in many different ways. And so we're not really ever going to leave anything behind because there will always be someone who wants to continue to do their thing and that is fine, that is who we are. So we can define a focus without leaving people behind. For example if I am an individual contributor and I'm not really motivated by the outcome of the strategy process that is completely fine. I can continue to develop the content as I have been doing and that is a valuable contribution. What I want to say is that a strategic direction is about focus but it's not about having tunnel vision. And so the direction as contributors, as communities and organizations have arrived at is one of service and equity and I'm sure you're wondering what that means. I'm going to say a few words about each of those concepts but really I think that the way to understand the direction will be through asking questions and having discussions because that direction can mean a lot to a lot of different people. So service is primarily in my mind about infrastructure and that infrastructure is mostly technical but not just. It's also about the human structures of the movement around the world. And Wikimedia projects and Wikipedia in particular are mostly known as websites that are used by a lot of people and as products that people use. And the idea of service is that we want to move from being websites to being a service to others and that means for example evolving the platform and the infrastructure not just for us but so that what works for us can also be leveraged by others who are in the same line of supporting free knowledge. Next slide please. Okay, so what it means just to give you a few examples knowledge as a service means that the platform is about serving open knowledge to the world across interfaces and communities and it's about infrastructure and tools like I said for ourselves but not just it's about going beyond Wikimedia to have that service for allies for partners and we still want to focus on free and trusted knowledge. I think verifiability is something that people felt strongly about in those discussions but it's also about thinking about verifiability for different kinds of knowledge. These are some of the big discussions that we've had and that we need to continue to have and they are really thought provoking but I do think that people in the Wikimedia movement are the best people to think about this. Next slide please. And then the other side of the direction is about equity and equity is it relates more to the people side of the movement. The concept of equity is in this context is more related to fairness and justice and next slide please. So what does it tell? It's about really the social movement side of Wikimedia and during those discussions that we've had in the past few months we have talked a lot about diversity and inclusion and emerging communities and the way to find the common thread behind this is that as a movement we want to focus on the knowledge and communities that have been left behind by structures of power and privilege. And then we have also had discussions about things like community health and about you know mentorship and being welcoming communities and that is true for everyone really. But that is true in particular for those communities that have been left behind. And we do want to build strong diverse communities and that is a component of knowledge equity and the last component of knowledge equity is about identifying and trying to break down the social, political and technical barriers and that relates to some of what people have said around about access, about advocacy like Dimir was mentioning earlier. And it's not just about access to knowledge as consumers but it's also about being able to to share back on contributions. So that sounds great but what would it actually look like? What will we achieve? So I apologize because I'm going to use another metaphor but I think this one works really well. I think there are two things that we want to become or to achieve by 2030 as a movement. The first one relates to knowledge as a service and it's about becoming the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge. And if you think of I know that the word ecosystem trips up people sometimes because it can be difficult to translate. So if you think of coral reefs their whole ecosystem made of many different species and they all live in the same place and some of them are allies and some of them are dependent on each other and some of them are in the food chain but they all have to contend with that environment. And so in our case we want to become the infrastructure that is the foundation for all of that and the yes thank you and so the other side of the direction knowledge equity the goal is to become a place where anyone who shares our vision is able to join us and that speaks to geography but also to ethnicity to gender and to make us different but that eventually makes us human. Next please. Thank you. And the last thing I want to say is that this is there is a lot of content that we have to digest and even just the direction is very dense and I have talked about service and equity the parallel of the two sides of people and technology but it's of course a lot more complex than that if you think about like I mentioned human infrastructure or if you think about technical systems that do support equity themselves so it's not just a one-to-one match. So I do invite you to take a look at the text of the direction on meta which will be final within the next two or three days and also I do want to hear any questions because I know that people on the strategy team and also people who have contributed very heavily for us it can become a bit difficult to explain those concepts because we've become so familiar with them so I think it's through questions and even through challenges that we will come to a shared understanding as a movement about what this means and then I'm going to at Catherine talk about the next steps because we are in a process of continuous evolution like our projects which are never done, the Wikimedia strategy is continuing although we do hope that it will be done at some point just in terms of the next steps of work. So we're wrapping up phase one with the conclusion of the strategic direction as Diom spoke to and if I could go to the next slide the next thing that we're asking people for is to endorse the strategic direction so over the course of the last couple months as we've been developing this we've known that one of the really interesting things about our movement is there's no single party that can sign off on saying yes this is the way that we go forward and ask for is for people to say I endorse this and this is something that I want to work on in my own community, in my own project in my affiliate in the work that I do and so we'll be asking people to endorse the strategic direction once it is concluded for additional comments on October 1st and going through that endorsement process over the course of the next couple weeks but also recognizing for some people that may take a little bit longer. So we have been talking to groups and individuals throughout the movement, preparing them to say when we're closed when we're finished with the strategic direction on October 1st we're going to come to you and ask you to bring this to your community and see if endorsement of this direction is something that you can get on board with and recognizing as somebody said just the other day at the CEE conference last week in Warsaw it's not about selling your soul not everybody needs to change every single thing that they do as Diom alluded to, if you just want to keep editing articles in the main space that is totally okay. But what the endorsement process says is that you are largely behind the ideas that this contains and you'd like to think about a way for us as a movement to work on these issues and you is in your individual capacity or organizational capacity will align at some point around what you can do to contribute to the strategic direction. And as you can see the cuties of the Wicca Cuteness Association have already volunteered that they would like to endorse the strategic direction. So cuteness approved and we'll be looking for other endorsements over the course of the coming months and weeks. What does this all mean? Well after we've got an endorsement from a broad variety of folks we're actually just going to get started working on this. We've been talking to different folks around what it is that this means for them and over the course of the coming year what we'd like to do is to work with our communities to think about how we can interpret this within the context of your work. If you are a Wiccomedian in Indonesia the way that you're going to implement this is probably going to be a little bit different than being a Wiccomedian in Venezuela and that's probably a little bit different than being a Wiccomedian in the UK and that's okay. The whole idea of having this direction is that it's broad enough that we can find ways to contribute in our unique context in which we exist. So over the course of the year ahead what we'd like to do is start with Phase 2 which is thinking about implementation. How do we start to make these ideas that Guillaume just spoke to real in a practical way? Whether that's thinking about the partnerships that we're involved with the collaborations that we're doing, the work with regards to the editathons that we're running, the technical projects that we're working to develop and at the foundation our roadmap over the course of not just the annual plan for the next year but over the next three to five years what are the things that we want to achieve in partnership with the community and in service of the direction. So that's what we'll be focusing on in the year to come and we'll be looking at some big issues and themes around support for of course knowledge as a service what does this mean for our platforms, for our architecture, for what it is that we build how do we ensure that the tools that we're building are in service to the community as a whole and then in terms of knowledge equity thinking about are we providing effective support to the movement in a really broad sense are we ensuring that resources and that support are equitable in their distribution what are the conversations that we need to have in order to really work towards achieving this direction that we've put forward. So that's the year to come and we'll be spending time with more information coming about how exactly that's going to look as in terms of implementation in future meetings ahead but if you think about, I'm sorry again about the background noise, if you think about the last year as being a year of collaboration and alignment and thinking big this next year is going to be a year in which we roll up our sleeves and we really start to get to work about making this real I think it's going to be really exciting I think it's going to require some interesting and perhaps difficult conversations but at the same time my experience of the course of the past year is that we're in a really good place to be able to do this come to the table and have honest discussions about the things that matter most to us in order to reach our vision so thank you very much Excellent so thank you I feel like calling you Admiral Catherine today but we'll pass that and be home for your fantastic update on movement strategy we do have time for questions so if there are questions I will pass over to James Forrester to see if we have any lingering questions from the IRC channel Hey there so I've got one question for Mary Lee asked by Layla and there's been a subsequent discussion in the channel but I feel like we should ask it too have you experimented with asking librarians to add facts to wiki data along with their references or provide references for facts already in there if yes what have you learned and if not were there any blockers that stopped you That is such a great question and I thought about including that because I know that there's a huge number of wiki data fans out there most librarians are in fact public facing not data facing I know that people have this exception that librarians are very wedded to their catalogs and that most librarians are cataloging books but that in fact is not true it's particularly not true in public libraries there's only a handful of catalogers left in public libraries so in terms of and I think you saw in our survey in terms of what librarians are interested in learning about it really is very wikipedia oriented that's the thing that their patrons connect with I hope that when we engage them deeper in wikipedia and once we wet their appetites for engaging around free knowledge and being able to share knowledge that we can hook them into wiki data and I also think that there are particular opportunities for engaging with metadata librarians and I'd be happy to talk about strategies for doing that but that's really a separate project and effort and I am a huge fan of wiki data as you guys I think know so let's have more conversations about how to do that but getting back to my concept you need to be really aware and attended to the needs of the audience that you're trying to engage with and I think if we had pushed wiki data to a public library audience it would have really fallen on deaf ears to be frank so thanks Excellent any other questions James? Nope or at least if we have any no one to pass them on to me Excellent okay so if you do have questions you've got another minute or so otherwise we will jump into wiki love and to start that off I will thank Demi Merley Gilman Catherine for presenting today and for talking about the different ways that wikimedia partakes in the knowledge ecosystem as well as an update on the important movement strategy that is coming together and I also wanted to thank Sam James Forrester and Brendan for doing the behind the scenes work to make all of this possible and I just found out that while we can see visually each other on the bottom you all cannot which I thought you could so I realize in context that you do not have any understanding of the outfit that Catherine's wearing but I assure you it's a fabulous outfit that looks to me like it's inspired by Star Trek but so that's my wiki love is there any other wiki love from IRC or anywhere else? Yeah Jody asked me to say this wiki love thank you to the many wiki lead program participants and facilitators for the module that was conducted this week and a big thank you to recruiting and hiring managers for filling 24 WREC budgeted roles since the verse of July so is that a yes any other wiki love or any other comments or questions from folks in IRC? Yeah Matt just asked a question I guess back from Mary Lee are you working for librarians in other countries or is it just inside the US? Thanks for that so this particular grant is anchored by the night foundation and the call for proposals was specifically for US libraries so because of the anchoring of that grant and because of the strengths of Web Junction we are rolling this out for US librarians at the moment but we would love to talk about ways to expand and extend this to other environments again recognizing that each community is different and that there really is quite a bit of work I think to be done to understand the needs of individual communities so hopefully that answers the question not now but we'd love to let's talk All right and I think that brings us to time so apologies if you had a lingering question but you are welcome to send it along to the presenters or if you're not sure how to reach them feel free to email it on to communications at Wikimedia.org and we will get it with that thank you very much for joining us for the September 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Metrics Meeting we look forward to seeing you next month. Thank you everyone.