 Oh, you know what, there we are. For some reason it was messing up. Looks like we're live. Okay, welcome everyone. Good afternoon good day wherever or good night, depending on where you are in the world. Thank you for joining us today for this open conversation with the board. I'm a trustee in the board, the chair of the Community Affairs Committee and the vice chair of the board. I'd like to thank everyone joining us today for this meeting hosted by the Community Affairs Committee, but which is an open conversation with different members of the board, not just the Community Affairs Committee in short the CAC. This is actually our second time hosting an event like this. If you're not counting wikimania, and we are still trying to learn how to do it well and are incorporating feedback that we're receiving from you from previous sessions, including alternating the time slot. So today is much earlier in the day to allow different time zones and wider participation that we don't usually get if we do it in different time time slots. We encourage you to keep sending us feedbacks on how this is going to work for you. And so far, we are going to do a live translation, I think from Spanish right to Spanish Elena will correct me in a second. Otherwise, this will be recorded so you can join in later on if you can't make it to this hour. Before we delve into actually answering questions and having an open discussion, which is what we wanted to do today, I would like to take a few minutes for the trustees in the room to introduce themselves. I would like to begin with Nat, who is our chair, but I don't see her just yet. So we will move to Jimmy. Right. So I'm Jimmy Wells, founder of Wikipedia. I think most people know me and who I am and I've really enjoyed CAC committee. This is the first time that I've been on this committee, which is fairly new committee in the long history of the foundation. And I think it's fantastic. I think we really need to strengthen and improve relationships between the community and the community foundation and the board. I'm a big proponent of community power. So it's good to be doing these things. Thanks so much, Jimmy. And I'm actually very happy that we have today with us three new trustees to the board that were recently joining us. And the first one is Rosie, please introduce yourself. Thanks so much, Shani. So hi everyone. I'm Rosie Stevens and good night. I've been a Wikimedia since 2007. And one week ago, I began my term as a member of the Board of Trustees. And for that, I have you, the community to thank for that. So thank you. I'm also a member of the board's Human Resources Committee, which deals with people. I'm also an alternate member on this community affairs committee, which is all about community relations. So I think you can tell I'm excited to be here. I'm also excited about a lot of things happening now, such as the current election selection appointment process happening with the movement charter drafting committee. And that we have a new CEO on a listening tour before she officially starts in January. So thanks again for electing me. I promise to work hard while wearing my new hat as a trustee. And to Vicki, can I please ask everyone else who's not speaking to mute, please? Hello. My name is Victoria Doronina. I am originally from Russian Wikipedia. And along with Rosie, I became a new trustee in this October. And I hope some of you voted for me. So thank you very much. And I will be on the community affairs committee, then the products committee. And it's all about the new products for Wikipedia and the sister projects. And I hope as a user, I will be able to give some input to the developers and also I will be on the audit committee. Thank you. Thank you, Vicki. And last but not least, Lorenzo. Thank you. I'm Lorenzo. You can find me as user Lorenzius on on the wiki projects. And I've been most and I'm mostly active on Italian Wikipedia more recently on wiki data and, of course, sometimes on meta and together with Rosie and Vicki, I'm one of the newly elected board members. And I will be in the product and technology committee, and as an alternate to the governance committee and to the audit committee. Well, I'm honored to serve as a trustees of the Wikipedia foundation, and I will try to do my best to support the movement. Thank you. Thank you Lorenzo. And thank you all trustees I really hope that we get a chance for now to join us a bit later on and we will introduce her as well as she joins us. I also want to note that we have some staff members with us actually quite a few of them, which I'm really appreciate of appreciative of especially considering that for some of them it's really really early. Some of them you'll meet along this meeting today, but I wanted to give the stage to Amanda Keaton our general council and a member of the transition transition team at the foundation and Lorenzo can you please me. Thank you. Amanda, please go ahead. Thanks to me. Hi everybody. I'm Amanda Keaton general council and I'm also a member of the transition team, really excited to listen to the conversation today. As I think you all know, I work really closely with Maggie, who oversees community resilience and sustainability. And so I really look forward to hearing some of the concerns that might come up today and providing a few updates in partnership with the board. So, thanks so much for joining. Thanks, Amanda. This is a good place to say thank you to everyone actually joining us both trustees and staff members today. And thank you the audience and actually people of our movement who have submitted questions in advance and who are listening live or later engaging with us on the YouTube channel on telegram and other channels we appreciate your engagement. My final special thank you is to our incoming CEO, Mariana Iscander, who is joining us today as well just briefly, as she's transitioning throughout the world. And I wanted to give a stage to Mariana to say a few words. We're really happy that she is able to to join today, despite the fact that she is not formally joining us she will be joining us in January. She is already involved and starting to get to know us better. So Mariana. Thank you, Shani. My name is Mariana Iscander as Shani said on the incoming CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm joining you today in transit from Cape Town to my home which is in Johannesburg, South Africa. And as Rosie mentioned, I have been on a listening tour for the last month or so, and excited to use today's session as another opportunity to listen and learn the issues that come up so thank you for having me. Mariana, we're all excited for you to join us. And I think there's all over excitement about the listening tour. So if you haven't already reached out to Mariana and want to do it, you can still do that and catch her before January before she officially begins. So thank you, Mariana, for making an effort today during your transit. And with that, I think I would like to introduce Elena, Elena Lapen, who is our senior movement communication specialist, and she will be helping to facilitate today's session. Elena. Thanks so much, Shani. Thanks everybody for joining this conversation today. I just wanted to give a brief introduction to how the rest of the conversation will work. As Shani said, I'm Elena Lapen senior movement communication specialist here at the Wikimedia Foundation, and I will be helping facilitate this session today in particular the question and answer portion of this session. So for the next 30 minutes, we're going to cover updates from the Board of Trustees, and then the final 50 minutes of the call will be a conversation with live participation. You can ask questions throughout this session on a number of different locations will be monitoring all of those and gathering questions from all of them that is the YouTube chat here in the zoom chat. We have a general telegram group and the conversation with the board event page on talk page on meta. Again, we'll be collecting questions that we will then cover during the second half of the session. If in that second half of the session, you are here in the zoom room and you want to ask a question live please feel free to do that we would love to hear from you live. Raise your hand and chat and I will add you to the queue that I will be keeping. And we will pass you the mic when we can. If you do speak live in the interest of time we ask that you do keep it concise so we can get to as many questions as possible. I just want to remember to speak slowly and clearly because everyone has a different comfort level with English and because we also have as Shawnee mentioned live interpretation happening today from English to Spanish based on the request that we received. In addition to the live questions that we will be taking in the second half of the session. We also had a number of questions submitted ahead of time, and I've consolidated some of those questions so that we can get to as many topics as possible. If you did submit a question ahead of time you may not hear your question verbatim asked in the session, but I have tried to capture the meaning behind each question so hopefully you will get the answer that you were looking for. If there are any questions that either came in pre submitted or questions asked here today live that we do not have time to answer. We'll post those answers on the meta event talk page within seven business days. And just before we get started with the rest of the meeting I want to remind everyone that this conversation is covered by the universal code of conduct. So we will respond to comments and questions that are asked with civility and asked with curiosity, and we believe we can discuss things in a civil and respectful way, even when we disagree on certain topics. Feel free to bring any questions or comments that you have asked with civility. This meeting is being recorded it'll be available on YouTube and on comments afterwards. We are also behind the scenes taking notes here. Keep points from the meeting in English will be posted on the meta page within two business days, and then we will translate it into the other languages within seven business days so you can find those related notes at the end of next week. So now I will hand it back to Shawnee for the board presentations and then we will get to the open discussion after that. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much Elena. The first time in these meetings we thought it would be nice to share a bit about what it is that the board actually does, and kind of keep you updated on committee work and the top issues that we've been dealing with as a board recently. We just concluded our board meeting for this quarter, September and actually it kind of came into October as well and the next time the board will be meeting is December. And we wanted to give, we wanted Nat as our newly elected chair to give this update but as she's not here I'll just briefly go over the main topics that we planned to share today. And the first one is that as you know, we have three new board trustees joining us, they were selected by the community and are here today with us. We also reappointed Daryush, who wasn't able to join us today, but he is reappointed for another three years. And this is also a good time to take a moment to thank two outgoing trustees. The first one is James Heilman and Lisa Lohan who have done a great service to the board, both of them, their terms are coming to an end and it simply has been a pleasure to work with them for the last few years on the board. Now an update from the board governance committee. We have drafted and the board approved a trustee code of conduct. So we are, as you can imagine, preoccupied all the time with the code of conduct, not just in our movement but also within the board within the foundation. And so this was yet another step in that direction to create some more structure for our internal work. The trustee code of conduct lays out clear expectations from each trustees and will be signed every year, that's the idea. We also spend some time updating some of our committee charters and creating an executive committee. And these changes are part of a larger plan for the board evolution plan. So we are always looking for ways to get better in the way that we work internally as a board and the executive committee will be part of it. It will be composed of the board chair and the two vice chairs, so Nat, Isra, and I, and each board committee chair. So each of the big committees will also be included in that. The board also approved an update to the product committee, which is now being called the product and technology committee. And the board governance committee is now the governance committee. So this seems like maybe small changes, technical changes, but some of them are really not. Some of them highlight changes that we want to make to our work, especially, for instance, the product committee, which will now include a conversation not only with the product team, but also the technology team or department rather at the foundation. So we are very excited about that and looking forward to that work. Some more updates. So the board voted and approved a new board committee assignments. That means that each year or each each each period we kind of allocate who which trustee is sitting on which committee and you can already hear the updates from the incoming committees and which committees they will be in. But this is important because that kind of informs the rest of the work that will happen throughout the year. So that was also also done in our previous meeting. We have the committees are just to give an overview for those who might not know. We have an audit committee. We have a governance committee. The HR committee will now be called talent and culture. And we have the product and technology committee and the community affairs committee. There are a few additional committees that are either ad hoc or will be finishing their roles soon. And one of them is the special projects committee that will be wrapping up the work on executing and onboarding an onboarding plan for new trustees, and then will be dissolved in December. The board recently released a statement on the Wikimedia Enterprise and I'm sure all of you have seen that so I'm not going to delve too much into that but we'll mention that we have some people from the team today so if you do have some questions they will be able to maybe answer more. And I will also update that the board sees the gift policy as a model for board oversight and transparency for Wikimedia Enterprise. And so whatever income that comes through that channel will be continued continually be monitored by the board and whatever happens we keep track of everything so we're all fairly excited about enterprise and the new possibility that it entails. Finally, the board perceives enterprise as a step forward. Treating corporations and being treated by them more fairly large corporations which rely on Wikimedia services heavily and so far have not adequately contributed back. We'll have now a clear way to do so which is really important. While smaller organizations and fewer technical resources with fewer technical resources will be able to get high quality services that they would not be able to obtain otherwise. So all in all this, this is a case of win-win the way we see it. We will also hear several updates from staff relating to board work but we'll begin with an update on brand. Branded is yet another ad hoc committee that the board created a year back. And we just wrapped up our work and the September meeting we passed a new resolution on the topic of branding. And we're so excited that the foundation and our staff will now resume their role as stewards of these projects in partnerships of course with our broader community. The Wikimedia foundation teams intend to share more information on this project soon, including their plans for engaging our communities really in the coming weeks. I would like to thank the community advisors to the brand committee. We were really, we had the privilege and the pleasure to be working with nine volunteers from our community who kind of informed our decisions throughout this year. And this is a good time to stop and say a big shout out of a thank you to Lucy who I think is here in the room. So thank you Lucy, Zhuao, Megan, Justice, Rahmat, Elan, Richard, Phoebe and Jeffrey. All of them, all of their input and work is really appreciated and the time they took to kind of help us throughout this year has brought has the fruits of it is the resolution that was passed and we're all very excited about that. I would also like to thank our brand studio team from the Wikimedia foundation, especially Zach McKeon who is not able to be here today in Matoto and Kelsey for their work in partnership in making this work happen. This is a good time to mention in general that nothing that the board does happens in a vacuum. It always happens in close collaboration with our staff. And so this is exactly why today we have so many staff members in the room, not only because that they are able to better answer some of the questions that our community asked, but also because they are our biggest partners in the work that we do so again thank you all. That concludes like the very high level update that I wanted to share about committee work and what happened in our September meetings. And next I would like for you to hear some updates from our staff members, and then we will go to the live Q&A. So first, I would like to recall Amanda Keaton to share some information on human rights. Amanda, the floor is yours. Great. Thanks so much, Shani really appreciate that and always excited to be reminded of how much great work is happening. So we are really excited about human rights and actually looking for human rights to be the global standard to guide our work. Of course, along with our guiding principles and values as well. So really looking to leverage the international human rights framework to speak to our global work. We have completed an assessment of our impact and we'll be sharing that soon with our communities as well as a human rights policy. We are currently scheduled to go through the product and technology committee in the next few months and then to the board. What I think is really exciting about this in particular, especially with so many platforms really being called to the carpet for their negative impact on human beings in particular. We have a chance to leapfrog where other platforms are because we're not only looking at the actions of state actors but actually also at the effect of our product and technology on readers and editors human rights across the globe. So really excited to dig into this work and there will be a lot more to learn about this over time but really happy that the board of directors is, you know, taking this work so seriously, and that we're really assessing the way that our actions and our technology affect and impact human rights across the globe. So, oh sorry I guess I go back to Shawnee and then Shawnee will introduce Carol and Margie. We can just go with the flow that's fine. But let's let's do that properly. So I would like to thank Amanda for the human rights update this is really again exciting work that we are very happy to support. It makes sense and aligns with our movement strategy and our goals for 2030 so deeply. So I'm super excited that it's happening and we have some incoming staff that are doing work related to that so all in all really exciting. Next one, I would like to call Carol Dunn and Margie Novotny from the product department. So Carol and Margie the floor is yours. Thank you, Shawnee. I'll start off here. I'm Carol Dunn vice president of product. And along with Margie, we are co-leading the product department during the time of transition. And we work really closely with the teams on executing the product platform strategy within the annual plan. And we're really looking forward to working with the board product and technology committee. I'm going to hand it over to Margie for her introduction and to go over some of the highlights of what we're working on. Thanks Carol. I'm Margie Novotny vice president of product design. And as Carol said I'm just going to share some quick highlights from our ongoing product work. Let's see. First, the major user facing projects continue to move forward. So for example desktop refresh continues to roll out more features to more wiggies. Our newcomer experience is now the default on all wiggies. And we continue to deliver new features that are designed to make it easier for newcomers to make successful edits right off the bat. Content translation continues year over year increases in article creations, in article creation and emerging communities. And abstract Wikipedia continues to progress. We expect to launch an MVP of wiki functions in Q3 of this fiscal year. And finally, we're super pleased to say that we have seven beta teams currently testing the inclusive product development process that we developed last year. This is the process that we presented at wikimania for anyone who may have missed the presentation. But this is very exciting news because it's taken us around here to get this in in action and it's happening. So it's great. Thank you. Thanks so much both of you. I also want to call and that would be our last update from staff, I would like to call Corey Floyd and touch Taylor from the technology department. Thanks, Johnny. How you all doing I'm Corey Floyd vice president of platform and part of the technology department transition team. I'm also looking forward to working closely with the board and the technology and product committee. I'm working closely with the product department on executing the product platform product strategy, and that's gotten a lot of efforts for enabling new abilities to enable for new experiences, and also creating more inclusive development practices for engineers. Now, I'm going to hand over to my co leader, Tosh. Hello everyone. I'm Tosh Taylor vice president of data science and engineering and the other half of the technology transition team. An important part of our work this year includes developing our data strategy, including governance for machine learning, and also making machine learning models and data more accessible to our staff who are building products and our communities to help them curate their content better. The technology department has posted our annual plan for the year on media wiki.org share the link here. And there you can click through for additional detail on the on the plans for executing so the annual plan was shared in July this has a little bit more detail about how we're going to do those things. Thank you. And back to you, Sean. Thank you so much, both of you and this is a good place to pause and say, we have so many other updates there's just so much work happening in every single department at the foundation, and with the board, but we, we want to pause here and go back to the questions that you have from the as Elena said, this is going to be divided into two sections one is answering pre sent questions that people sent us through the ask CAC email, and the second part is going to be just a live discussion here with people in the room. So, we will begin with moving thinking all of our staff joining us today again, and moving back to Elena for facilitating this Q&A support. Thank you, Shani. So we are taking your questions live from the zoom chat, YouTube chat, the general telegram channel and days event meta talk page. And I will kick off the question answer part was some of the questions we received ahead of time again some have been combined and consolidated in the interest of time. The first topic that I want to cover from these pre sent questions is about the recent board election. So this first question makes the observation that not as many people participated in the recent election as was hoped. And so the question is, do you intend to replace the current voting process of the board election. And if so, what are the plans to replace or improve the process. I'm asking Jimmy to take this one. Right, great. Hello. Yeah, so, you know, it was a disappointment to not see as many participate. And, you know, we think there's several things that can be done about that. You know, I personally think that getting participation throughout the broad movement so diversifying the people involved in governance is really crucial and important to us. So the concepts that we're going to experiment with a voter compass was like the one that's probably seen it for the movement charter drafting committee election. That's actually quite interesting, increasing the amount of visual multimedia content. So basically, making it more interesting more exciting more visual, so that more people actually set up and pay attention and listen. We're building on translation best practices. So this last election was supported, more than 40 languages, or no, 40 more languages than those spoken on the teams I don't actually know the total number of languages, but that can continue to grow to reach more people around the world. So figuring out and investigating where are the communication and knowledge gaps. What is it that people, they're not hearing about it or they hear about it but they don't have enough knowledge to feel like they can participate. So let's fill those gaps let's figure out what it takes there. And also just, you know, when we hear about any feelings of apathy. Let's think about what are the root causes of that let's actually solve that it's really important. So for me personally speaking for myself. I think that we need to strengthen and increase the amount of community control over everything that's going on. And the only way to do that is to actually get more people engaged more people involved. So that's, that's kind of where we are on that. Thanks for that Jimmy. And then we had a quick follow up question to that about trust of the process that just happened. Is this question ask her who's wondering if you trust the voting passes for the past election. Why are why not. I do. I don't know what she has any thoughts about that or anyone else but you know the elections committee put in a huge amount of work. It's, it's not an easy task. Not everything went perfectly but we've been doing this for a long time, and the results of the elections are always good. They're always interesting we get great people to the board. And so, you know, I think we can improve on it we should always keep improving to wiki after all that's what we do. I, you know, fundamentally, I trust the process. I'll just maybe jump in quickly to add that the board kind of requested before the selection from our staff, three main changes. I'm on record saying that in the past but I'll repeat maybe for those who may not remember so our three asks for this. The first round of elections was, was to a move to a single transferable votes to do extensive outreach, so that we do have more participation in the third request was to have an evaluation form for each of the nominees or the candidates in the process. From this perspective, this was a huge success. I just want to note that just because the numbers that some of our stuff from that team can probably share in the chat or later on. The numbers show that we actually did reach out to met much more people than we did before. We have been cultivating new relationships with communities that we've that have never been involved in this work has not known the foundation have not known what the board does. And so, even on that small portion of the work that is success right there and there. I'm happy to share that the teams working on that continue to cultivate these relationships so we can see the fruits of that now with the drafting the, the whole efforts of drafting that the movement charter and all the work that continues to to be engagement with our broader community so I think, as Jimmy said, yes, we can always improve and do more but to me that was definitely very simply successful efforts to to broaden our scope and to reach out to communities that we've not reached out to before so that was good. And the technical part of moving to a single transferable vote. That was a big technological effort as well and I want to commend again our stuff for fixing problems till the very last minute to make that happen. I think the next rounds are going to be smoother and easier in that sense so we, as always with new stuff we learn as we go. And we continue to improve the process but yes all in all, lots of trust and lots of. And I'm very thankful for all the work that went into it to make to making sure that this happens and that we do have a platform that can do exactly what we wanted to do. Elena, up to you. I have a quick question a follow up question to these answers in the zoom chat about the community idea for regional quota as part of the board elections. Is there any thought about implementing that in the future or is there any documentation around the decision to not include that the last time just wondering the history of that. I can try to take it very quickly. Yes, there have been talks so first I'll say it was important for the board, even in the previous round to not make uninformed decision. We wanted we did quite a large console along and complex consultation with the wider community that our staff facilitated. Again, lots of input from different parts of our communities, which was great. These input went back to the board and our decision was to focus on these three changes that I that I mentioned before, and not doing too much. We actually wanted to know if, you know, as you change things it's not smart ever to change too much at once, because then it's harder to track what's working and what's not working. So we thought these three changes are changed enough, and we wanted to reevaluate after this election process and learn from it. What's going to happen next is regarding quotas. By the way, the community from if memory serves right correct me if I'm wrong. It's all on wiki, but from memory from what I remember the community actually did not like that idea of quotas it was mentioned, but then was not really supported. There are different pros and cons to, to everything we will have to reassess, and that is already in the in the ropes it's already happening the. There's already a report on the previous elections from the team that was facilitating everything and lessons learned and lots of things that we're now laying out actually an actual outline so we can get to the future. In the coming election process at the end of the year was a bit more air and much more prepared, and some of it will be rediscussing if we need to change something else. And what would that be and then again the board will not make a decision without hearing the community input on that. So I hope I answered. Yes. And then the last follow question pertaining to the election is about the election committee. There's a question about whether the board governance committee is planning to review whether the election committee is fit for purpose, and whether it's considering any changes to the election committee. To prevent any issues similar to the ones that have already arisen about representativity. Thank you that is a good question. First of all, I want to take a moment to thank the election committee. They are doing quite amazing work as volunteers, investing quite a lot of time and effort into making this happen. Of course, as always and not everything is perfect. And we always have a play a place to grow and I think one of the pain points this time that kind of emerged this time or this round of elections was that some roles were not well defined. So it wasn't really clear who's the owner of specific things, and that created some confusion. So that is definitely part of the our lessons learned from the previous process. And we are going to the election committee is going to before the next elections right, we're going to have a media. The meeting strategy and governance facilitators will facilitate discussions between the Community Affairs Committee, the governance committee, the elections committee and staff members to better understands what the roles and responsibilities for the coming, for the coming round of elections should be. So hopefully that will be better next time. Thank you and we continue to get follow up questions in the chat about the board election so I'm just going to close those out and then we'll move on to some of the other precent questions. One comment about the previous question about the community idea of regional quotas just an observation and a suggestion that the language about how we talk about allocations of regions is important if we use the term quota. That may be an immediate turn off to many folks so did want to echo that comment from the chat, and then a question about the infrastructure for conducting elections in the future. The question is, can we get a better long term solutions for conducting these elections that maybe it shouldn't be up to a team, doing a specific election to actually create that infrastructure. So they're wondering if there are any thoughts that have gone into that. This is a complex question that I cannot answer at the moment it will be re evaluated in the coming months and we will share more information as we get closer to to the second round this year is going to wrap and we're going to move to 2022 and then we will be smarter and wiser by then. Thanks so much for that. And we just have a general question about the boards relationship to the Wikimedia foundation this person wants to know whether the board will continue to oversee the Wikimedia foundation into the future. Is that one for me. Yes, please go ahead Jimmy. So yeah, definitely 100% I mean the board is the board of the Wikimedia foundation. There's, there's no that that's so tightly integrated into the nature of the organization that that camps change. We can, we can change how the board operates we can change this and that but the board will oversee the committee foundation. And then we also anticipate the movement charter will clarify different roles across the movement. There's likely to be an element of power sharing when the global council when it's created. And that you know there's there's a lot of discussions we had going forward look forward to seeing that. I mean the important thing to understand is the global council is not going to replace any boards of moving organizations, the global council is a new concept. It doesn't replace the foundation it doesn't replace the affiliates, and they all of the, the foundation and all of the affiliates are all existing legal organizations with bylaws local legal requirements and that's not really open to change. But, you know, a lot is open to change and so that's that's what the, you know, next levels of conversation are really about. Thanks so much. I'd like to turn now to a slightly different topic question that we received ahead of time about Wikipedia in general and areas of the world where journalism or academic publications are not common so citation requirements are difficult to me. And once to know, how can Wikipedia better represent the large areas of our planet where academic publications are not common. And how can we enhance access to Wikipedia and those societies, perhaps through the use of other types of knowledge sources. That is a great question I'll just mentioned briefly that some of the questions that we get are not necessarily questions for the board of trustees not in my mind at least. There are definitely questions for for all of us as a movement I can share what I personally think but it's not necessarily just related to the board so just wanting to flag that. I will say about that that you know knowledge equity is not a goal that we as a movement even can achieve alone. It requires collaboration. We have partnerships with with so many other organizations you know academics media mass media representation of marginalized communities. And they don't necessarily improve. And that limits the citations and primary resources that we can can use as a community to build from. We're hoping in terms of what the Wikimedia Foundation and the board is is working on we're hoping that the equity fund that was recently launched will help us to build that strong ecosystem of free knowledge with partners working together to to address these barriers to knowledge equity. We're hoping that this ecosystem will help the movement to achieve the goal of becoming the essential infrastructure for for free knowledge, as we all want to be. We are partly there but there's so much work that still needs to do to happen for us to get there. And I would say investing in non traditional sources of knowledge is one of the five areas that the that that the equity fund is is looking to fund is looking to invest in. In this round we've founded a foundation called Reese that that is called search, the search for foundation they are a US based nonprofit working on a site to collect oral historical citations of black females and leaders in stem. So this is quite exciting work and we'll see how that goes but the equity fund is actively looking for and asking our communities to recommend other organization that can help us do that type of work. So we're definitely looking into diversifying our efforts around this around that and continuing to do all the outreach that I think all of our movement is involved in right from women in red and we have Rosie here who actually started this project. Women in red to to other projects about shrinking knowledge gaps and this all ties all these different efforts from different directions end up making an impact at the end so we will continue to do that and again it's it's a joint effort it's not something even just the board does or just WMF or rather the Wikimedia foundation and our staff does or our volunteers in the in the movement we all of us need to be working and focused on that. And we need to continue to partner with other like minded institutions organizations volunteers individuals who are working towards the same goals and I think our strategy for 2030 is really directing us in that in that direction in that sense so it's exciting to see how it's going to unfold. Thanks for that I want to take a question that we got from the YouTube chat that touches on this idea of, you know, the work that's being done to increase representation and underrepresented regions and of course this is a question as Sean mentioned for the whole movement. But I did want to get your perspective on how we can increase engagement with communities in the East Asia region, especially Korea and Japan, which are really underrepresented. And you may draw again from some of the initiatives you've already mentioned but if you want to talk specifically about that region. That would be wonderful. I'll actually ask Jimmy and our staff and our new trustees to jump in if they have something to share but I will say, from my perspective, this region and more largely the whole Far East and I would say emerging communities in general. The developing world in general our markets that we want to get to. It's part of our goals for the coming years to really expand our efforts to to get to places in the world where either there is no infrastructure right and there's just no internet and we're as a global community are investing some of our efforts and trying to find ways to bring knowledge to these places in the world that's one aspect of it. But the second is for the parts that are connected to the internet. How do we expand how do we get to Japan to Korea to all these places where we still don't have a really active communities. It's, it's always again efforts happening in multiple directions, and our stuff. Some of our stuff are working on specific projects to do that. And I would be really happy to if people want to jump in and just share some of the incredible things that we're doing. And Jimmy if you have anything to add please please do so. The one thing I would say is because Japan and Korea were mentioned in particular. Let's not misunderstand. So every region around the world is unique and has its own context. Japanese Wikipedia is incredibly successful. I've been reading articles at times I'm not sure about currently but according to Wikipedia in June 2020 it was the second most visited Wikipedia after English. So, to imagine that we don't have a strong community there is mistaken, but the point is that community is not very well integrated with the international movement. It's not going to be any Japanese representation in in all of our movement organizations I mean a bit but not not very much. And that is a really it's fundamentally a language barrier issue. More than anything else obviously translation efforts can help, but in terms of hanging out together and wiki mania and things like that it's just tough that in countries that have. Japan is a very wealthy country, and it's a large country so people have perfectly great careers and lives in Japan without learning English. Whereas in a lot of smaller countries and poor countries learning English is really much more fundamental to people to interact on the international scale. That's a very local question about Japan. In other places in East Asia, the problems will be different, the context will be different and so on so forth. So I suppose my only point is, in all of our diversity and outreach work, we always have to keep in mind, there, there are different contexts and different solutions and different approaches and different problems that we'll be trying to solve or not solve in different places. To quickly add to what Jimmy said is that I know some of our staff are and again it ties really deeply to the 2030 strategy some of our staff are working on capacity building trainings of all sorts and it's, I think it's an exciting work that is yet to unfold and to be really implemented but some of it. I was reminded of it just because Jimmy specifically mentioned the context. And so it's maybe important to know that when the Wikimedia Foundation is working on developing something like that like a training or capacity building option for our volunteers for our communities, it is very important to make sure that it is adjustable, that it's built in such a way that we can adjust the information to different contexts to different cultures. So it's not just one solution fits all. So this work is complex, but we were doing it it's it's already happening. Amanda and the rest of our staff is there anything that you want to share more. I will jump in here a little bit. So Jimmy already mentioned the success of Japanese Wikipedia it's the second most active from a content interactions perspective. The product platform strategy actually is focused on different emerging communities so smaller and medium sized wikis. If you look at any of the specific ways that our teams interact with local communities. You'll see a lot of direct activity with the Korean community for example the growth team worked really closely with them on developing newcomer features. And we give you a whole host of other examples across the globe, but East Asia is absolutely part of how we view you know the communities around the world and we work very closely with them in different aspects of product development. Thanks so much Carol. Anyone else want to to jump in before we move on to the next question. Okay. So this is a series of questions that have come in live about the movement strategy process, generally. So the first question is about regional hubs and maybe some of the other items from movement strategy that may be resolved in the near future. Now we're waiting for the drafting committee and the global council. Is the board of trustees going to wait on making any decisions about regional hubs. And does that equate to communities being in a blocked situation about advancing on some of these recommendations. I think that we are in a stage of a block. We, this whole work is meant to be gradual in any case right people understand that, yes we understand that there's a need for a global council, but it will take time for it to to form, and then, even as it formed. It will take time for free to start working properly so it's, we're talking about processes and maybe goals for the short, medium and long term that are going to be different. And so the board is considering all of these. We're not going to not make decisions because of different things but we are going to make wise decisions or at least we aspire to. And we will not make any decision that will block us from right from doing something in the future, for instance, so we are trying to be conscious of the fact that we know that some changes are coming, but we're not not making decisions, or stagnating just because of that, if that makes sense. I hope I answered if not just ping me in the chat. Thank you. In terms of the drafting committee specifically. There's a question about how the board will engage with the movement charter drafting committee. So all the board engage with the drafting committee and in negotiations about future movement governance. There's a lot. This is the observation that there's a lot on the table in terms of roles and responsibilities, and I expect many of the upcoming decisions will need board involvement and decisions throughout the process. So the community affairs committee until everybody gets used to the fact that that that's what the CC means. So the community affairs committee which is a board committee is already shepherding kind of or falling closely on everything related to the movement and the global council, and we will continue to support these efforts. We will have two liaisons from the CC joining the work of the drafting committee so we will be in the room, we will not make decisions, but we will be there to guide to give the board an objective to be involved in the process and to help the thinking process around these difficult questions. I think the board has to be in partnership with the rest of the other parts that are involved in the process, mainly our volunteers or community selected members to do that type of work and our staff working on this. So it's like a triangle of different people, different perspectives, different portions of our movement, different aspects of it, but we all need to be in conversation to make informed decisions. So the board will be there every step of the way to support the process, but try really hard not to interfere too much. We don't think it's our role to make those decisions. It's our role to shepherd this or to facilitate and to support to guide this process to fruition, but not necessarily to, it's a decision, it's a broad decision of the movement of how exactly it needs to happen. So the board really thinks of itself as that, as a guide, as a body that has a perspective that maybe other portions of our movement does not have, and so needs to be in the room but not necessarily influence the process per se. Thanks. So given what you said about the role and responsibility of the board in this process, this question that we got from the YouTube chat may be better suited to the team overseeing this work, the movement strategy and governance team. And if so, we can follow up on the meta page about that, but I did want to get anyone's thoughts in the room today about whether we can have reporting templates in the future to make sure that we collect information on what's going on in relation to the movement strategy initiatives. I assume this question is aimed at being able to more easily follow and easily understand everything that's happening across the world around movement strategy. Anybody in the room have any thoughts on whether we can have reporting templates to collect that information, or any other sort of infrastructure to collect that information. I'm not sure exactly what's meant by reporting templates. You know, in terms of what we want there, we are definitely in a lot of conversations with the movement strategy and governance team, and there are a bunch of facilitators that are in constant communication with communities, you know, around the world. So I'd like for me to tighten up the communication loops if that's if that's what we're maybe talking about. And if there's a proposal for what a reporting template like that might look like. I know myself, Maggie, Kim, in particular are very interested to hear from you so definitely open just would want to learn more on what we what we mean exactly. So I'm not either dodging the question or committing to something without fully understanding what it is I'm committing to. I think that answers the question Amanda and that question came from YouTube chat so if you would like to follow up with any additional questions about that or any suggestions about what a reporting template might look like. I want to do that in YouTube chat. I want to turn back to another question that was submitted ahead of time. This is about licensing and the United Nations. So the question is, the UN produces a huge amount of content that's useful for Wikipedia. The person says they are very close to convincing them to change their licenses to be able to share that content on Wikipedia. They want to change their licenses to 4.0 Wikipedia doesn't accept 4.0 text yet despite the board agreeing in 2016 that we might so the UN is then less interested in changing their licenses. There's also an observation that a large number of journals use 4.0 text, which we also can't use. What are what are your thoughts on that, can you help with that. Yeah, so, I mean, this is clearly the direction of trouble. The 4.0 license, in my view, is an improvement. It's clearly the way the world is going. It's clearly the way that we need to go. We did a consultation back in 2016, in which we got community feedback and basically the feedback was good. There are new terms, so database rights, which require an amendment to the Wikimedia Foundation terms of use. We've got there's there's legal implications to be thought through. There's more technical requirements than that we would have thought initially changes to the interface changes to the text. So there's a lot of details to this, but I agree that it's it's it's important that we move it forward. And I think that the UN piece is actually a good clarion call to say, actually, there's demand from it from important partners. And so I think that this should hopefully light a fire under things to move a little faster on that stuff. I can't really speak to a specific upgrade date that that would be beyond my my knowledge set by a very wide margin but I'm definitely thinking that this is the way we're going to go and it'll just take some time. If there's anything that I can personally do to help with the UN. That would be great. Just to keep them happy and warm. I'm happy to have a call with anyone there. Just to say, you know, whatever needs to be said. I don't know who this question is from but whoever it is amazing and thank you for for working on this I think it's really important. The, the idea, not just for Wikipedia of getting the content that the UN produces that we find valuable, but also just for the broader free movement free knowledge movement to have major organizations, releasing things under free license. You know I remember 10 years ago, free licensing was a very hot and common topic of conversation. Now it's just kind of boring part of the infrastructure world but it's still crucially important, we need to make sure that partners are excited by it so that's, that's my personal. Thanks Jimmy. I'll just quickly note to your question. I feel free, revealing, right, the person who asked this. This comes from John Cummings who has been our Wikimedia in residence with the UN for quite some time now and I think he is working closely with Eric Luth on this which Eric should be in the room so Eric if you have anything you want to add please go ahead and unmute and share. I will add that like Jimmy already mentioned, some of the requirements to actually implement it are much more complex than we originally anticipated, it will take more money more efforts and more technical development to implement that. So it's something we cannot commit to doing right now, but it is something that we are looking very closely at and monitoring and will continue to work on and see how we can, how and when we can implement it. So we will, the CAC will help keep track of this important issue as Jimmy said. So thanks for that question. And Eric if you have anything to add please go ahead. Oh no Eric, I think your audio is quite garbled. Eric you sound like a gnome. Sorry, we cannot really hear you properly. If you'd like to rejoin, we may be able to hear you better. Also, if you'd like me to just share the observations you've made in the chat I'm happy to read those out loud for you if you want to respond in chat and tell me to read those I will otherwise we can wait for you to rejoin. Thank you Elena. Okay, he says he's going to try to reconnect so we can pick that back up as soon as he gets back. In the meantime, I want to turn to a pre submitted question about something that you as trustees have thought a lot about, especially those we've been part of the Community Affairs Committee, which is about the relationship between the foundation and the communities generally. So the question is about if you think that the perception of the foundation within communities has changed in recent years. Do you think it's more negative now than it was in the past, maybe more positive than it was in the past is more negative, or even if not what could be done to address some negative perceptions that communities might have about the Wikimedia foundation. I'm pretty well fixed to answer this since I'm old, and I remember high points and low points. Definitely, I would say that the, the attitude of the community towards the Wikimedia foundation is not at an all time low, not even close. And we can all remember specific incidents that were very bad. But also, I can remember in the very, very sort of going way back when the foundation was really too small and not functional and there were a lot of demands that people had that things that Wikimedia foundation should be doing but just simply didn't have a capacity to do. And so that's, you know, I think, I think we shouldn't sort of accept the idea that oh it's a complete disaster and it's bumpy where human beings. There's going to be high points and low points and this and that and that's going to be true across the entire movement across all kinds of organizations all kinds of groups and things like that. The important thing is assume good faith and communicate. And so in terms of how do we improve on that. You know, I think it's hard to talk about this without really specifically saying, I'm straying into not the view of the Wikimedia foundation or the view of the board but my personal view, which I think is widely shared by many people but, you know, speaking for myself, I do think it's really about opening up lines of communication with the board so events like we're doing here today. Communication with the foundation I mean, when we think back on things that have been incredibly successful that worked really really well. Unfortunately, there are also things that have gone really really slowly. So huge community consultations where there's a lot of buying a lot of revision, a lot of work. And I think that stuff is really important, even though it does mean that as a movement and as the Wikimedia foundation, we're a little slower than we would like to be and we've actually had a couple of examples of that today where we talked about things that people would like to see change coming faster. But at the same time, I don't think anybody would say the Wikimedia foundation should start, you know, behaving like, well I don't want to sing on any particular Facebook. But, you know, where we just do things like shove it down people's throat and then roll back and apologize if people hate it. Like that's not a healthy way of functioning as a community movement. It really is about long consultation about building trust about communicating. It's about elections. It's about having people deep in the heart of the board who know and understand the community. I'd say the biggest mistakes that we've ever made came from not understanding community enough by certain members of the board and things like that. That is where we have to focus our attention is earning the trust on all sides, building the trust, communicating and taking things slow and assuming good faith. But it's not, you know, there's always things going on and people will always make mistakes and people will get angry about those mistakes, but in general, things have been much worse in the past and they've been better at times. So, yeah, that's my view. Elena and I'd like to jump in and just expand on what Jimmy said for a moment. So thanks first of all Jimmy for this perspective. I want to share some more and say first of all that, you know, as a movement it's important to remember that there is no one thing. I mean, that is the foundation community relationship, different people will perceive it in a different way in different places of the world. And so it's quite diverse and quite difficult sometimes to know exactly. We are trying to have a perspective that is wider than just maybe some loud voices that we can hear from from the bigger projects or the big the more the more well known languages. So not necessarily people who, and even from those who communicate on specific channels. So to be less vague, not just from English Wikipedia, not just the people who are vocal on Meta. So how do we really as a movement to me as a board members is interesting to try to be in a place where we can have a better sense of what is it that our community at large is thinking on specific topics. So I want to say two things on that. Besides the fact that you know different people will have a different perspective on that. I want to think that we're absolutely improving, especially in the past year I think we've made some really amazing efforts toward building trust and doing things right. So I want to acknowledge that and acknowledge our staff for working really closely with us on improving in that end. And it's going to be interesting as a movement to have better tools to actually measure that and continue to track it in a more in a more practical way right so I know our teams are developing some tools to measure what the community is thinking. So it would be interesting to see in the coming years how we are able to implement such tools to help us track what people are actually thinking so we're not only relying on a gut feeling of, or just, you know, some some loud voices specific cloud voices from a specific project but really get a fuller picture. So there's definitely work to be done there. I will also mention and that is my second point that the Community Affairs Committee was basically founded last February, especially for that we recognize that there is a missing, structurally a missing part in how we can facilitate this type of work and actually that is why we formed it so we now have a structure within the board to kind of do work relating to the community and it is we're working I just talked yesterday with Amanda about how this community is really working across departmentally with WMF staff, really because the work that we do touches that is related to the community touches of every single department and strategizing on that and really thinking, which is what the board is supposed to do we are supposed to be guiding and strategically thinking about things so we, we needed the structures to do that and we have the Community Affairs Committee and also a new team at the foundation that was founded again simultaneously with the CAC and that is my yours team working on communication strategy throughout the movement which is doing work and there are other departments and teams working on that as well. So I am definitely seeing change for the better in the past year, and there are so much more coming where that comes from and lastly and I will finish with this because it was a long answer I realize I want us to stop even thinking in that frame of mind of us versus them, to me the goal is to get to a point where we are all one thing we are a movement with goals and we now have the 2030 strategy that unite us all in moving towards solving really difficult problems right I don't think internally and again it's funny how Amanda and I were just talking about that yesterday evening. The problem is not internal right we have so many big problems out there in the world to tackle right fake news and totalitarian regimes and you know, people not connected to the internet, you know, big important problems, harassment that is happening online. So like we need to join forces and look for ways to work together. So that is what guides the board that is what guides our staff and I would really like to see the conversation and the framing of thinking about it change because it's all of us working towards these goals, rather than fighting internally to do things. So I hope I answered. Amanda you wanted to add anything. Plus one. Victoria it also looked like you had your hand up for a moment if you want to share the perspective of a new trustee any ideas. Yes, I wanted to say for people who are interested beyond the English speaking Wikipedia, from the point of view of Russian Wikipedia, where I understand the question about Japanese and Korean and it's true for Russian Wikipedia as well, not many people engage on meter and with wider movement. And this is the language problem. And for a while, Russian Wikipedia was insulated from Wikimedia Foundation, because they were making decisions that concern mostly the English, English language Wikipedia. So, when there was an announcement on the village pump, Russian village pump that I was elected, very popular answer was, we don't care. So what good for her, but it doesn't impact us. But recently to well known Russian Wikipedia users were blocked globally in all the projects and while one of them, she was going in this direction for a long time so nobody objected that was a global block which fall off the local block in Russian Wikipedia. And the second user is more controversial. And I looked at the discussion. And it, some people understand what was done. Some people blame Wikimedia Foundation for everything. So, I think there will be more Russian speaker users interested in Wikimedia Foundation and maybe board of trustees. And while probably at the moment the opinion is lower than it was a year ago, but this is because it was zero year ago. And I hope that this is the beginning of the process which will bring us all together closer. Thank you. Thanks so much for sharing that perspective from the Russian speaking community that's great. I wanted to just pass the mic quickly back to Eric, see if your sound is any better if you have something you want to share and then we will wrap up with a quick question from the trustees to the audience in the last minutes of the session. Eric are you back. I'm back. Did the sound get any better. Yes. That's great to hear. Thanks. Thanks also to the answer from Amanda. I actually happened to be at a meeting with several UN heads of education yesterday. And there's an ongoing trend at this point that they want to shift towards CC by 4.0 because they think, and like one of the major reasons why they want to do that is because they see a big value in having their information and all the knowledge that they compiled spread and disseminated on Wikipedia. So I'd say Wikipedia is one of the major reasons that this discussion is taking place at all within several of the UN agencies. So at this point, the Wikipedia license, the current Wikipedia license is one of the major blockers for this change to take place in effect. And that's why I also think that it's very good to hear that this process is restarted and will continue. I understand that it's hard to give the timeline of when things can happen and so on, but any transparency on where things are going in the process I think would be very helpful for our work onwards when it comes to getting the UN agencies on board. And if you can say anything on how we can follow the process and make sure that we align the work that we are doing with the internal work to change the license, I think that would be very good. Thanks for that. Based on Jimmy's answer, I don't know that we're prepared or that anyone's prepared to share a timeline just yet, but if we have any additional information on that, we'll definitely follow up on the MetaTalk page for this event. I have a handful of questions we did not have time for today, but thank you all for bringing everything that you did to the conversation. All the questions we will follow up with those answers on the MetaTalk page for the event within seven business days so keep your eye out for those. And I wanted to quickly before we wrap up hand it back to the trustees for a question to the audience. Thank you so much Elena. I'm, I've asked Margo to help me do a short poll, right? Margo, can you activate it now? Hi Shani, we actually were not able to find a good solution for that. Oh, okay, so let us, let me just go back to the document and we actually have some thoughts in chat and give us some other thoughts in the YouTube chat and the Zoom chat. Yes, so this is just an open question from us. I propose a question if we're getting, if we're getting better at doing this, you tell us, right? So we want to know, the board wants to keep having these open conversations with you all. We appreciate having the platform to do it, but we also want to know if this is working for you, how we can improve these sessions for the future, any suggestions, any feedback you can give us would be much appreciated. So please use the chat to send us questions and if you're listening afterwards after the event or if you're on YouTube, you can send your thoughts through the Ask CAC email. It's askcacatweekmedia.org and we would really appreciate some answers. So let's take a few minutes before we wrap up to get these feedbacks from you. And then we'll wrap up. Bye, folks. Thank you so much. Thanks for all the people who are sending us input. We appreciate it. And because we're at time, I will take a moment to just thank everyone for joining today. Our staff who've worked so hard to make this happen. There's so much going on to facilitating an event like that that is quite unbelievable. So thank you so much for so many people, so many staff members working tirelessly for this to work. And thank you for trustees for joining today. And most of all, thank you to you community members for joining us today on so many channels. Some of you are here in the room, some of you on YouTube, on Telegram, on Meta. It's really exciting to engage with you. We look forward to continue to doing so. The CAC will take the input that you're giving us now and we will share next steps for the coming year. I think our next meeting will be in January. It's moved from December to January, so we'll update the dates. You can always go on Meta to simply see AC, and you'll find our page. And there you'll see the list of when the next meetings are each meeting usually has its own sub page. So you will be able to follow on that and you can always ask this question around the year through the ask CAC email that I mentioned, ask CAC at wikimedia.org or in the talk page. Thank you everyone. Have a rest of the good day and we'll continue online. Be safe. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye. Thanks. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thanks. Bye-bye.