 Oh. We're on. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Wikimedia Foundation's May Metrics meeting. This month we have not so many agenda items, but don't worry, next month we'll have a lot for you to dig into. So I'm going to go into our agenda. My name is Eliza Barrios. I'm part of the OIT, the Office IT team here at the foundation. So what we'll be sharing is the movement update, which includes activities happening in June. With the movement update, Amir will be presenting a project the language team has been working on called the compact language links project. The language team consists of Runa, Amir, Niklas, Kartik, Petar, Santos, Pao, and Harika. The other agenda item is Catherine will be sharing executive updates. Then we'll go into questions and discussions. And then we'll go into sharing some wiki love. All right, the movement update. A lot of things going on for particular events or information. The community event grant funding announced the amount of $124,000. The events and conferences are scheduled between July and November. And many will focus on anti-harassment retaining and recruiting of new editors and structured data on commons. The other highlight is map frame feature, which allows for interactive embed maps. It has been deployed in the English Wikipedia and contributors have been building out templates and modules to help support development and adoption for the future. 276 other Wikipedias. The next highlight is Wikimedia Foundation's data set and analysis of most cited works. Received a lot of media coverage, including a spread in Wired Magazine. And the GSOC 2018, that is the Google Summer of Code 2018. Wikimedia Foundation has accepted 12 students who will be working on projects with the help of 22 mentors. So, stuff going on. So, coming up in June, it's our birthday. We're turning 15. The Wikimedia Foundation turns 15th on June 20th. As well as, Wiki loves pride. So, this month, it's that time of year where LGBTQ topics are improved on Wikipedia. But don't let that time limit your contributions. Feel free to contribute any time throughout the year on this topic and any topic. Locally, I kind of want to highlight this locally. Wikimedia Foundation has participated in the March. And last year, we actually won most fabulous contingent for fabulous mission. So, much out for us. So, with that, I'll hand the stage over to Amir. And he'll give us insight on what their team has been up to regarding the Compact Language Link project. Hi. Shalom from San Francisco. How's it going? So, Compact Language Links. That's a project that we have been working on for several years. And the goal. I want to start from the goal. Why are we doing this? We have Wikipedia in a lot of languages. Most people in the world actually don't know English. A lot of people are writing in a lot of languages. A lot of people are looking for information in a lot of languages. So, we want to make access to knowledge in different languages easier. The overarching goal of why are we doing this? So, we have inter-language links on the sidebar of each article that has a version in a language. For many years, this list was just a very long list of languages. On articles that have a lot of languages, this list was very, very, very long. We researched this and we found that it's hard for people, for the general public, to find the languages that they need there. A lot of people are not even aware that the language is there or that any language is out there because it becomes a very big soup of stuff. Also, it's hard to order it in any universal way because languages are written in different alphabets. Names of languages are written in different alphabets. A famous example, for example, is Hungarian, which is written with an H in English but with an M in Hungarian itself or with a W if you are speaking Polish and so on. It's complicated. You cannot sort them in any... There were several systems tried to sort them all too hard. We also found that less than 1% of people actually clicked these links which was strange because we would expect more people to do this because more people need different languages. And finally, it was all based on research. Research can be found on the pages. I'll give a list of links in the end. So, that was the problem. A little step back. Back in year 2010, the vector scheme was deployed by default and as part of it, the whole list of languages was hidden by default. This was not specifically an attempt to redesign the language links. It was a part of a much bigger process but this was measured and it was found that much less people clicked the links as a result of that so that was reverted after a few weeks. So, that's when thoughts started, however, about doing a more thorough redesign of the language links area itself. So, what do we have now? So, that's the old list that you can see on the left very long again and this is the new list. You have up to nine languages which are selected automatically according to each reader and then you have the more button which shows more languages. Now, what's the idea behind that? The compact list shows that you have some languages there. Quite likely, you will see the languages that you need already in the first list. If you don't see it, you have the more button to find the languages that you need. When the list is shorter, it's easier to see that something is there. Again, we found this by user research. We selected a lot of different readers that speak a lot of different languages. It worked with most of them. The most likely languages are shown initially, mainly by operating system and country from which you're connecting. Very importantly, once you click a language, this language will be prioritized the next time. So, the languages in which you are actually interested will be shown automatically. Again, we believe that this is the most likely language. These are the most likely languages that people actually want. Then there's the search box which works in any language and I'll give some details about this later. This is how it looks. This is how we also resolve the problem of sorting the languages by alphabet. We group them by each alphabet. You can see that all the Arabic alphabet languages are grouped and all the Cyrillic alphabet languages are grouped and all the other alphabets are separately. Most importantly, most people actually just use the search box to search for it instead of scrolling through the whole long list and searching for something alphabetically. We measure this, we found that most people just use the search box. Next. Very frequently asked question, how do you select the languages to show in the initial list of nine languages? The highest priority is given to the languages that each user clicked previously. This is customized for each user. Then we pick the language of your web browser and operating system. If you are logged in user with Babel user boxes, these are used to select the languages there. Languages of your country by geolocation. Languages that are mentioned in the page. If a page for example mentions a city in Russia then the Russian language will be shown there. Featured articles are prioritized. Finally, if after all of this we cannot find any useful languages to show, the major world languages are shown like French, Chinese, Indonesian, Hindi, Spanish and a few others. A little bit about the history. The development of this feature began in 2014 by Niharika. She was doing this as her first intern project as part of the Outreachy program. In 2016, we started rolling it out out of beta status to different languages. This was a gradual process. We were listening to a lot of community feedback. We were fixing a lot of bugs and making a lot of design improvements. In 2017, we rolled it out to some major languages like Swedish and German. Finally, in February 2018, we rolled it out to English completing the deployment to all the Wikipedia's. Impact, the most interesting part. How does it change things? We see that it changes things for the better. We believe that it's good, that it's default for anonymous users. We can see that just in one month after deploying to the English Wikipedia, the number of clicks on these links grew by 9%. We see a 45% increase in visits to all the languages because it's important not just to count how many people click up but how many people actually go into different languages. Very frequently asked questions while we were deploying this was, won't this hurt smaller languages such as Africans? Somebody asked about Africans, which is a relatively small language spoken in South Africa or all the dialects of German in which we have different Wikipedia's or Esperanto or smaller languages of Europe. That's a valid concern. We found that this doesn't hurt them. Quite the contrary, more people click on the links to these languages because it becomes easier to find them. They are floated more clearly. In 2016, before we started deploying this, only in 34 Wikipedia's, more than 1% of the people clicked on the links, now it's in almost all of them. In 275 Wikipedia's, more than 1% of the users clicked on the links. Finally, the total number of clicks grew almost twice as much since we deployed. We also have a new dashboard, automatically updating every week. You can see it at this URL. This is an example of how this dashboard looks like. I selected five middle-sized languages to show here. Albanian, Hindi, Swahili, Tagalog and Tamil. You can see that this shows the number of clicks to these languages since the beginning of 2017. You can see that when we deployed in the English Wikipedia last February, it started jumping up higher than it was throughout all of 2017. That's because the English Wikipedia is the most read Wikipedia in a lot of countries, so it's an important gateway to everybody. When it became easier to use the language links in the English Wikipedia, more people started clicking them to find other languages. Now the search box. It's one of my favorite parts. You can use the search box to find any language in any language. So, for example, if you are looking for Japanese, but you don't have a Japanese keyboard, you can type in English Japanese and you will find it. This was several examples there. You can type Hindi. Hindi is one of the most searched for languages. A lot of people are using the English Wikipedia in India, but they search for Hindi there. I want to say thanks to the CLDR project. CLDR is a project related to Unicode. They have information about names of languages in all the languages. That's where most of this information comes from. They release the information for free, so thanks to them. Now this search box makes a lot of new interesting things possible. It's not just convenient to find languages. It's also possible thanks to this to find which languages people cannot find. So, for example, you go to the article, I just checked the data earlier today, you search for the article newspaper, you find it in the English Wikipedia, and then you try to find it in the Telugu language spoken in India, and there's no such article. So, we'll log this and we started counting how many people this happens and in which languages and in which articles. So, earlier today I published the first version of this report. Check it on the Wikimedia L in my link list. The interesting findings there are that the most popular articles on which this happens are recent movies like Avengers, and topics of Google Doodles. Google Doodles are the images that appear on the Google main page. If there's an article about them in the English Wikipedia but not in other languages, people will search for them. It always spikes every few days. Another interesting finding is articles with different ontologies. So, it happens that there is an article about this topic in another language, but it cannot be linked because there's more than one. So, for example, in the Russian Wikipedia there are two articles about World War II because of how Russian history is written. In the English Wikipedia, there's only one. So, a lot of people are trying to find the English article from Russian and they cannot because English is not there. So, we're trying to analyze this data. We just started recently. Very curious. It also happens to articles that were deleted. There's a certain Korean pop singer, for example. The article about whom was deleted from the English Wikipedia. So, a lot of people are coming to the French Wikipedia and search for English and cannot find it. Very interesting information. Possibly, to me, the most interesting thing to find there is that there are people who are searching for very small languages that are barely represented at all and this is how I know that there is actually demand for these languages. So, there will be more coming, more and more reports about this coming. Watch the Wikimedia L my English. So, a little bit about the future. The current Compaq Lounge Links deployment is just the first step in improving the design. We are thinking about more things to do. All of this is only the beginning. These are just early ideas. The design, there's no research about this. Just early ideas, but these are some of the things that we plan to do. So, we are thinking about showing both language names. Both the name in that language, like Espanyol, Ruski, and so on, and the name in the language of the Wiki. So, you will see Spanish, Russian, and so on. Why do we believe this is useful? Because several Wikis already have a gadget that does such a thing. So, we might as well just integrate it into the proper software because I guess it's useful to at least some editors. We want to generally clean up the area of the interlanguage links. There are a lot of buttons there. There should probably not be so many. Again, we have to think about this carefully. There's a button for Wikidata, there's a button for Settings, and so on. We are thinking about moving the whole interlanguage links area higher up on the page, it's somewhere on the side and you have to scroll down to Seat. We are thinking about switching language variants. Now, this is something that affects a very small number of languages, most notably Chinese and Serbian and also Kazakh and a few others. We see, by analyzing the search box data, that people are trying to switch, for example, from Chinese traditional to Chinese simplified using the same panel. And this doesn't work, this is currently not supported. We are thinking about making it possible. We are thinking about making the designs for mobile and desktop more common. Currently, they are developed and designed separately. They should probably be more common. And finally, this is the part that I love the most, although it will be very experimental and will require a lot of research. We are thinking about showing the compact list and then in the panel that opens to show all the languages, even if the article in that language doesn't exist. The reason for that is that we are thinking of ways to make people more aware that there is a Wikipedia in their language, even if there's no article. There is, of course, the question of how to distinguish them, how to show that if you click this language, you will actually get an article. And if you click this language, you will not get an article, but you will get something in your language. There's also the question of what will you actually get? Will you get the Wikidata information? Will you get some kind of an article placeholder or something like that? We have to think about this, but that's something that we have started to think about. And finally, I want to remind you the goal. Why are we doing this? That's where they started from. We want to make access to knowledge in all the languages easier. Thank you. Thank you, Amir. Talk about language rabbit hole. Awesome. I really love the flow between all the languages and the Wikipedia pages. Next up. Thank you. Next up, we have Catherine. She'll be sharing the executive update. Yay. All right. Hello. So I'm mostly here just to chat because I haven't, don't think I've done one of these since February and give you an update on what's been going on from my perspective. I'm going to talk a little bit about the short agenda. Just going to talk a little bit about annual planning. Wouldn't be enough date without some conversation around strategy. I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the events that we've been at and that I have attended over the course of the last couple months and wrap it up there. All right. So the annual plan. Thank you so much for everyone who participated in developing the annual plan this year. We took a different approach this year than we had in years past trying to organize programs for the organization around three core priorities around growing our reach, around growing the number of editors and investing in our core infrastructure as an organization. And the plan itself was a little bit lighter weight and tried to be sort of more high level and talk about what our overall goals are for the organization itself and then had lots of links to all the different sort of individual programs that folks have been working on. The plan has been up on META since April 1st, I think. Is that right? Yeah, April 1st. And went through May 15th with a comment period from the community. We did not get a tremendous amount of comments, but those who did respond to community comments, thank you for engaging and answering questions. The next step for the annual plan is to bring it to our board's audit committee on June 5th. So we're preparing for getting that all done right now and then on June 12th, hopefully it will be approved. That is exciting news, because that means that all of the work that you have proposed for the year to come should hopefully get the go ahead, which means everything from opening new rec numbers, bringing on new colleagues, and just sort of certainty and planning as things move forward. So I just, the finance, and finance seems probably going to be a little annoyed with me because these numbers are slightly inaccurate. I apologize. They will be up to date as of June 12th. Everything is approved, but I wanted to just pull this up because I think that where you put your money is really an indicator of what your priorities are. It's a little bit like where you spend your time and what you put on your calendars. And we broke down for the first time this year how exactly our allocations of resources are aligned with the work that we're trying to do. So for Evolve Systems and Structure, and for those who have been in meetings, this is stuff like what we're planning to do around Media Wiki's platform evolution project. That's going to be 26% of our budget next year. Not the Media Wiki platform evolution project, but investing in systems and structures for the organization overall. Then growing new content and contributors. That's going to be things like our work on mobile editing, for example, and integration with some of the work that between C and the audiences team. That's going to be 20% of the work that we're doing next year just by sheer numbers of where our resources go. Increasing reach in audiences, that's a smaller number. That's about 5%. That covers things like our new readers program, some of the outreach and awareness work, and also some of the work that we're going to be doing around SEO, search engine optimization. And then the remainder goes into what we consider other program work. And that means this sort of core work that we do just to keep the organization running and support the communities overall. So anything that's not specifically directed to one of these three areas falls into other program work. And then the last 20% is paying for the rent on the building, making sure that we have a clean audit every year just of underlying work that goes into running an organization with good governance practices. And that's actually a really good number for an organization of our size. 20% is sort of the place where we want to be. That's a best practice number. And then everything, fundraising is included in that, for example. And then everything else, having such a ratio of like 80% program to 20% non-program is really an indication of an organization that's putting its money in the right place that's investing in the mission. And that's something that I just want to point out because I think it's something that everyone here should be proud of, right? At the end of the day, the numbers are representative of what our donors trust us with is how we carry out our mission. And this is where we want to be focusing. And it's a big budget this year. It's 92 million is a big budget. And I want to emphasize that too because I think one of the things that we're focusing on for the annual plan is we really want to make sure we're using that money wisely. And so making sure that we're spending the resources that we've planned on time, making sure that we're focusing on hiring new folks because the biggest increase here really is around growing teams in areas where there have been gaps. Making sure that we're hiring on time, making sure that we're keeping this moving forward is so critical for us to be able to actually achieve our goals for the year to come. So this is my request to all of you as we're thinking about going into the year, whether you have a budget line or whether you are a part of a hiring panel or whether you're working on your team or your program is keeping an eye on how we're proceeding against the annual plan because the annual plan really is our responsibility to our donors. It's our responsibility to our community. It's our responsibility to our mission. And it's a pretty big mission just by numbers alone. So that's the annual plan, I think. Yep. And then I wanted to talk a little bit about the movement strategy work. So we wrapped up movement strategies for the strategic direction planning for October of last year in terms of having the initial strategic direction and if for those who have not memorized it yet, that is Wikimedia moving towards the essential infrastructure for free knowledge by 2030 with the core priorities of knowledge as a service and knowledge equity. And so what are we doing to interpret that and what does that mean for us as an organization and what does that mean for the movement as a whole? I've talked a little bit in the past about what we're doing sort of for phase two. For the foundation, what we really want to do is come up with some longer term priorities that could take place over the course of three to five years or it might be 18 months to three years. These are priorities that we know we need to take on. They're things that we can actually sequence. For example, I love the example of the MediaWiki platform evolution program because we know that's going to take longer than 12 months. That's not something we do on an annual plan cycle. That's something that we want to have a longer term set of milestones, priorities, horizons around. And we also need to know we need to do some of that work first in order to do some other work later. And so the whole goal for us as a foundation is to have a longer term set of goals and priorities and plans so that when it comes time for annual planning or annual budgeting, we actually know what it is we're going to do year in and year out for a longer horizon, which should hopefully give everybody in this room and online and in their work more clarity and consistency about what are they doing and how does it contribute to a series of longer term goals. In the movement overall, there are also a number of questions that our communities have raised and said we like this direction, we've all gotten aligned with this direction, but now how do we as our individual organizations or communities or projects start to actually move towards it because it raises questions for our affiliates, it raises questions for individual contributors, and that's what we're taking on with phase two. So over the course of the last couple months, we've been assembling a core team that will be working on phase two for the movement and that is really outside of the Wikimedia Foundation these are affiliate organizations, these are non-organized groups, these are folks who are working in the various different committees and other bodies that help the movement run and grow, people who interface with partners and outside audiences. How are we going to ask some core questions of ourselves and put forward a plan to move us into the future that is meant to be the phase two core team and I think one of the interesting things about it is so far it's mostly made up of people from outside of the foundation which I think is really great in many ways because it means that this is a responsibility that's being distributed across our movement it's something that hopefully people from different parts of our movement with different experiences, needs and priorities are going to be integral in designing and moving forward. So the phase two core team is Nicole Eber, you may know her from Wikimedia Deutschland she's often in the office, she'll be around next week say hi if you happen to be located in San Francisco Carl Weidler, who is from Wikimedia Estonia used to be the executive director there but from the Estonian community and Annalena Schiller from Wikimedia Deutschland Babes Patel, if you have attended Wikimedia conference in the last two years you've probably met Bav on Kerkigard, or yes I get it, yeah Kerkigard from Wikimedia Deutschland two folks that we're hiring right now an in knowledge and information manager and a project manager for movement strategy and the folks that we've had applied to both of those roles have come from a variety of different places from around our movement and the broader open ecosystem and I look forward to announcing who those are going to be hopefully in the next couple weeks The phase two core team is organizing working groups around and supporting our process of working on a couple key questions and these are sort of the buckets that we have narrowed those key questions into these came out of consultations over the course of the last year in the broader movement strategy process but also at Wikimedia conference itself where we ran another series of days on sort of a track at the conference on movement strategy and so we're looking at roles and responsibilities that's sort of the who does what where and when in the movement and that is everything from sort of affiliate organizations to the foundation itself as we think about the movement that we want to be and the mission that we want to serve if we were to start from scratch and say what would we structure ourselves like how would we distribute the work that we do how would we distribute the resources that we have this would be this questions that we'd want to ask ourselves another one is revenue streams and resource allocations so right now as most folks know the foundation does most of the fundraising for most of the global community and also is the primary past point of resource distribution as well and so one of the questions that's come up is is that a model that works do we want to think about the way that resources are distributed are they distributed means that are equitable right now across our global movement should we interrogate some of these questions and so these this will be a working group that will address that diversity and inclusion in our movement for anyone who's attended diversity conference we know that we have a very broad conception of what this actually means depending on where you come from what project you work on and so I think this working group really wants to dig into this understand what a shared conception might look like and then what programs and priorities we might put in place to address this partnerships as we've continued to grow we know that our partners are really critical to our work I love to think about our vision statement here and it says nothing about Wikimedia being the only person our only entity rather that's going to get us to a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge so who are the partners that we're going to work with and how are we going to think of a broader movement beyond ourselves capacity building that's how do we just overall continue to improve our ability to get our work done how do we make sure that folks have the skills resources and the like community health everyone knows that one of the big challenges that we have is making sure that our communities are places that people want to be part of and want to participate in we've made some really great progress in having conversations around this and I think setting forward a more positive vision for this in our communities but how do we make sure that this is continuously a part of the work that we do technology I think a lot of work has already been done on how do we move this forward through some of the work around the platform evolution team but are we want to expand that conversation out to make sure that it's not just our folks in the technical community who are participating but also folks from our communities who perhaps don't identify as being technical but are interested in the way and in the plans that we have for the future and then advocacy how do we raise our voice to stand up for the values that we have as a movement and what are the sort of activities that we may want to take on there as a broader global movement so those are the key thematic areas and the phase 2 core team is putting together working groups to address each of these there'll be one working group prayer thematic area the goal is to get 10 to 15 folks on board there who will then put together a plan for how they want to address these issues what sort of research they think they need to do what kind of proposals they want to come up with what validation mechanism they might want to run through with the community as a whole what the end product will look like the goal is for that composition to be equitable and diverse and represent the broader global movement folks from inside movement organizations folks from the foundation folks from partners potentially depending on what it is that we're looking at the goal for participation for these working groups that's coming out next week and so we'll be asking the whole community the broader movement to think about how they might participate in all of this I think I already kind of ran through the responsibilities but the goal is much like the strategy itself to be developed in the open and really open to community feedback throughout but also thinking about you know when we get to these recommendations what does it mean to implement them how do we even know that there are people who will be accepted and adopted and that's that whole process of developing in the open hopefully we'll get us through so that is that just another way of looking at it called to participation coming out this month discussions going through the next couple months we'll be hanging out at Wikimania talking about movement strategy draft recommendations in the fall and then defining and refining and discussion happening through the end of the year and already there will be where the goal is to really focus from the foundation involved in these conversations I know there are individuals across the foundation who've already sort of started talking about what their role might be teams that have set aside time in order to participate I know community resources has made this a major part of their workflow in the year to come and along that lines I have asked Delfine Maynard to be our point person for the foundation to make sure that as these working groups move forward that the right people are brought into the conversations at the right times so that if you are an expert in an area and you might be sort of heads down in your work and you might not know that the conversation is happening should be able to come tap you on the shoulder metaphorically and say hey come join this conversation so that that information flows hopefully really coordinated because we know that you have your own work that's happening throughout the year but we want to make sure your voices are really part of the discussions as well that's movement strategy alright and then I just wanted to talk about some of the awesome things that have been happening in the community since I was last up here I had the chance to go to Wiki in Daba which was amazing Wiki in Daba was this gig you've heard a little bit of past metrics meetings but the gathering that we did in Tunis with all of the folks from our global community in Africa the Tunisians hosted which made it the first time Wiki in Daba had been hosted in North Africa and one of the things that was really inspiring to me to in Daba in Ghana last time round was seeing the number of folks represented from countries that hadn't been there in the past and I really just want to give a shout out to the folks who worked to make Wiki in Daba happen thank you so much for all of your efforts because we had people from Mali and Chad and Tanzania and Uganda people who had not previously been part of these conversations and I don't know if you know much about Chad but Chad is a country with very little infrastructure in the center of the African continent and the fact that we have Wikimedian a Wikimedian I don't know if there's more than one Wikimedian but a Wikimedian from Chad is an indication of I think the opportunity and the potential for growth of our African communities and so it was just a really exciting event to see how as we've invested in this particular community and this particular community has benefited from additional growth and support and being part of the global conversation these efforts are really continuing to grow and there just seems to be a huge amount of opportunity there so I just wanted to say this community is awesome just more shots folks talking about I'm not sure exactly what that comes from oh I think this is about challenges and priorities and some repping of the Wikimedia Ghana shirts from last in Daba of course Wikimedia conference I know we've already talked about this at length too in past metrics meetings this was a really important part of the strategy conversation so you know there were three different tax to Wikimedia conference and one of the things we really wanted to do is to bring people together and think about how we're going to move the movement and the organization forward as a whole so just some lovely folks from that conversation and then I was asked by the comms team to talk a little bit about where I've been on the road because I for those who've been in the office you may notice that I'm not always in my actual office and part of which I hope you take as an opportunity to use the office because I know meeting room space is tight one of the things we've really been focused on doing is trying to explain our values to a broader audience as we're focused on this ambitious strategy that isn't just about us but is about knowledge more broadly and is about a world in which we have partners and allies and we're trying to knit them together to achieve our mission I've also been out there trying to advocate for that and talk a little bit about this and so I got to go to the Oxford Union recently to participate in a debate as to whether tech empires are good or bad for society I'd be curious I know I can't raise hands in the online but who in the room thinks I was on the side of good for society alright, yeah, so I argued that they're not actually great and we won the debate but I think that the real goal in having this conversation is talking about why Wikimedia is different than a tech empire why Wikimedia and why the community that we've built offers a really positive model for a vision of the web that we want to be a part of and the communities that we want to build and thinking about what it means to have governance and to have community that is distributed to have agency and empowerment at the level of the people who are building the mission that we want to achieve and so just really putting forward sort of an alternative conversation around what technology can be and around what a technology community can be and as we were talking earlier about movement strategy working groups this sort of conversation and putting together an alternative frame starts to be really powerful when we're talking about advocacy and policymaking and articulating a space that is different when we start to get into really serious conversations about things like our legal requirements when we are talking to policy makers in Brussels and the like so I also had the chance to go to the CC Global Summit where partners at Creative Commons and talk a little bit about the value of the Commons earlier this year when YouTube decided that they were going to start pointing to Wikipedia articles about controversial or conspiracy theories one of the things that came up is what is the value of the Commons and what is the power of the Commons and then how do you invest back in the Commons to make it something that is meaningful, sustainable and robust into the future and so I was asked to give a keynote at CC Summit on this topic and what I talked about is we're at this incredible inflection point as the Commons as a whole because we as a movement started as sort of an alternative to something open licensing was copy left instead of copy right we as Wikimedians were talking about free knowledge as opposed to knowledge that was owned by others we were talking about a global community that was distributed and was self-governing as opposed to a global community that was organized hierarchical and top down and as it turns out these models have had a lot of power in the world they've created a lot of value in the world I'd be remiss to not call it open source and our open source community as being a powerful part of this too and so now that we're in this place where we're actually really valuable and really powerful how do we stand up not just for our values but our value and how do we ask those who get value from us both individuals but also larger entities, organizations to contribute back in a way that is meaningful and sustainable and can help us achieve our mission over the long term and advance that mission too because one of the advantages we have as a movement and one of the advantages we have as a open movement is that we don't have to worry about market incentives in order to go and do the right thing and so we can be out there on the front lines doing the right thing working on compact language links to make sure that we're serving languages where there's only a tiny number of people who are able to access a digital version of their language and community and culture but in doing so we can pave the way and show the way for a future that is more equitable and inclusive and so that's what we talked about at CCSummit and we went to Repubblica which is a big event in Berlin that is sort of the larger digital culture conference one of the larger ones in Europe was asked to went in partnership with our colleagues from Wikipedia Deutschland and basically talked about the exact same thing which you know it was a different experience speaking to a German audience I heard they liked it it's kind of hard to tell and then I got to go to Reitz-Kahn which was for those who don't know Reitz-Kahn is the largest gathering around human rights and digital culture technology policy many of our colleagues from we had colleagues from the Comedia Foundation there our colleagues from Wikipedia policy work in Europe were there and lots of different things that were covered but one of the things that we did or I got to do was was in a session on something called the big open so now if you were at Wikimania last year or if you were at CCSummit or if you were at MozFest you may have actually or at Repubblica we've been hosting Wikimedia Foundation Mozilla and CC have been hosting a series of conversations on what is the big open what does it mean to have something that's broader than our individual open communities what are the things that connect us together and what are the goals that we share and so we've been having these conversations progressively over the course at Wikimedia at MozFest for these different audiences for these different communities trying to understand as we are at this inflection point of open as communities what does that mean for our future because what we've seen is that while we started in different places a lot of us are really aligning about a common vision for a shared future it's one that responds to the challenges of the web today but it's also one that's really optimistic about a future that we could build together in a shared way it's one that focuses on devolving power from a centralized place into into the global communities understanding and receiving guidance from as to where we should be going from those communities themselves focused on a more equitable outcome and focused on doing the work because of an end goal that is not about just the open web but the open web for a purpose the open web for a social justice mission the open web for a change mission this is Mozilla for our purposes thinking about knowledge equity thinking about making knowledge more valuable to people and so as we're starting to see that alignment how do we bring our communities closer together so that we're collaborating more openly and ways that are hopefully sort of provocative and valuable so with the notes from my session I ran one on diversity inclusion at rights con we were wondering what would a feminist internet look like if we were to tear it down and start all over again what would an internet black internet look like what would an internet that is built by people who are non-native English speakers look like and how might that really start to open up our understanding of what our missions are and how and if we have sort of a resistance to that why do we have that resistance and how do we interrogate that resistance so that we can really start to move forward into a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge but really truly every single human and really truly all knowledge so that was that and then we've also been on the road for a lot of donor events meeting folks who support our mission and want to support our mission or want to learn more about it and so just big thanks to the advancement team we were in DC, New York, Chicago have LA going back to LA next week I think it's next week London, Seattle talking to various different individuals about their immediate support for Wikimedia but also the endowment and how we build a long term commitment to free knowledge and to our projects as a whole and it's been really interesting it's fascinating to learn how little folks know about us I think it really points to we are an amazing mission and once you're in you're really in but like the barrier to access is high and that I think has implications for every single thing we do it has implications for how we think about new editors it has implications for how we think about global growth it has implications for how we talk about advocacy and so very often just getting out there and say and meeting people who are like I love Wikimedia I don't understand how it works at all can be very instructive because when you're in the fishbowl you tend to forget that water is wet and so it can be helpful to get a cold splash of water on your head and I hope they've been successful right we see that there is a tremendous amount of excitement and love for our movement and then of course internal priorities for the organization I think that one of the big things that we have really realized over the course of the past year is and apologies these words are sort of imprecise I wasn't really sure but I wanted to speak to them instead one of the big things that we've realized in the past year is that as we've grown we're now nearly 300 people the systems that got us here aren't the ones that are going to get us forward into the future and there's a lot that we need to and do to invest in the people in this organization there's a lot that we need to do to invest in the consistency by which we manage the organization the consistency by which we offer people training professional development, career pathways advancement and all of these things are tied to making sure that this is a great organization to work for not just a great mission to be a part of I think it's really important to all of us everyone in this room not just those like myself on the executive team everyone in this room everyone on the hangout everyone who's participating in this mission it's a place that lives up to the standards that we set for ourselves the values that we set for ourselves but the core of that is doing the work around the systems that we organize ourselves around the clarity by which we make them accessible to people the way that people are able to navigate the organization in ways that are consistent clear and equitable and so that's I think the work that I have really realized and hopefully the organization and we know through some of the annual planning work around structures is meant to address going into the year to come and I hope that as we start to go into everything from performance reviews to personal development plans to sort of the job leveling that we're planning on working on over the year to come that people will start to see this in their day to day work because we want this to be a place where everyone can succeed but also a place where people feel good about where they feel like they're learning and then eventually when folks decide they need to move on it's a place where you're really proud to have come from so that's the goal and you know I think that that should be our culture and hopefully we've had a lot of conversations around equity and inclusivity in this organization hopefully that will also do a lot to address some of the challenges that we've had there so I think that's it questions and discussion we got 10 minutes left over to you Eliza you want to MC again? I can always pop back up if I need it alright thanks Catherine I always learn a lot when you do these run downs it's actually it's super awesome does anyone have any questions? ah IRC thanks James so I've got two questions both from someone whose name I'm about to butcher so I apologize but Schnee Smetze I think asked first of all a question for Amir and then a question for Catherine so Amir so the question was around there seems to be quite a lot of complexity around how you decide what languages to show users but one of them is not an explicit set of preferences just Babel Boxes and so on and so forth can you talk about why that is? why is it not an explicit preference? because there was no such preference in the Media Wiki's preference system to do this we didn't create one because doing this would be a bit complicated we did something similar for the Translate extension only on sites where the Translate extension exists it's not as easy as it seems but we do get requests for this repeatedly so it's possible that we will do something like that my dream scenario for this would be having something like a real user profile on Wiki sites because you know Wikipedia started in 2001 before MySpace where you could have a real user profile where you say which languages do you know for example so Wikipedia users hacked it in the form of Babel Boxes so that's what we use moving to some real user profile where you could have it as a preference would be very desirable it seems simple but it isn't anything else? and for Catherine the question I'm sure everyone wants to hear GDPR has come into force when will WMF adjust its data protection policy to European standards end quote could you say that again? the GDPR has come into force when will the WMF adjust its data protection policy to European standards course legal is on retreat this week I am going to actually punt on that a little bit because the folks who are responsible for leading on that are John from our security and privacy team and Tony from legal and legal is actually out of town on a retreat right now so I didn't make that up I mean you will have seen that we just recently did a minor update to our privacy policies and some of the work that will be updated in the annual plan which will be coming out the republished version will be coming out soon looks a little bit about some of our commitments around data portability and the like so we have some work flows that I think are very much building on the organization's overall commitment to privacy and I think some of the principles that are embedded within GDPR but I would love to have perhaps a presentation on that that could come from the folks who are actually leading on that program because I don't want to put my foot in my mouth accidentally thank you Catherine and Amir any more questions? even from the audience here Amir in my talk I mentioned this report that I started publishing about articles that people are looking for in their languages and cannot find so you can see in the report that I published earlier today that one of the most popular articles that people cannot find in their language is GDPR yes GDPR it's all about GDPR okay next slide this is a prompt for everyone in the community to submit your ideas just go to this URL and yeah we'd love to hear from you alright next slide is wiki love this is where everyone even out in the community will share their wiki love does anyone have anything to share? yay there's Lincoln so Lincoln and I want to give a little bit of love to our new website is coming out relatively soon and we have worked with almost every we've worked with all the departments we've worked with a lot of people in this room 95 people across the organization that have worked on the website at one time or another it is coming we're super excited we really appreciate all of the work that everyone has given into that so thank you Greg do you want to get in line? I want to give some wiki love to the folks that were involved in wiki and daba Catherine already gave some wiki love in that direction but it's a fantastic event so much great organization happening there and as a follow on I want to give wiki love to folks that have been doing some of the inspire grants for awareness over the past few weeks blossom working in abuja has done some fantastic things as one particular call out so big love going out to those folks alright wiki love for the person that's going to have his last chance to have it done for him Chad he's leaving the foundation so I just wanted to say thanks for all the years and good work together and helping make the team what it is so yeah everybody hug Chad before he leaves today okay hey Chad Greg got there before I did Chad it's been brilliant working with you thank you so much and all the best with everything you do it's always very sad when one of your own recruits leaves but that's actually not the primary reason I got up to the microphone today although I definitely will miss Chad after recruiting him something like that ash cloud right yeah it was the 2010 it was the ash cloud I want to give some wiki love to wikimedia amical and Rachel Farrand and everyone else who was involved in organizing the wonderful hackathon in Barcelona earlier this month and I also want to give some particular wiki love to Amir who neglected to tell you that at the hackathon in Barcelona he helped someone incubate a wikipedia in faun a language spoken in Benin a country in Africa it has millions of speakers that doesn't have a wikipedia they're working on that now and Amir also didn't tell you that he then promoted this in the media by speaking catalan to a reporter because of course he can do that we'll take it James will take in IRC yeah I've got wiki love from Abby for Amir and the language team for fixing language links to make them easier to navigate also for helping us all to understand what articles people are looking for in various languages and not finding them and wiki love for Catherine for sharing about talks and conversations you've been having with people and organizations around the world alright four minutes to spare anyone alright well thank you for joining us this month of May my gosh we're already halfway through the year can you believe that and we'll be here in the same bat channel next month hope you can all join don't forget to submit ideas thanks