 We are now live. Rosie, would you like to take us away? Hello, everyone. We're gonna get started in a minute or two. Are we still letting people into the room? Yes, everyone should be at a minute at this point. All right, let's get started as we have so much to cover. My name is Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight. I'm based in California. I've been a trustee since 2021. And I'm currently the chair of the Board's Talent and Culture Committee. Welcome to all of you to this open conversation with the trustees. It's hosted by the Community Affairs Committee. The goal of this call is to have an open channel of communication between the Board of Trustees and the Wikimedia communities. It's so that we have a shared understanding and accountability. As usual, this will be a 90-minute call with updates followed by Q&A questions and answers on each topic and then an open Q&A session at the end. We have a very full agenda. This is gonna include asking for additional community feedback about the Foundation's annual plan as well as engagement in it so far, themes and what we heard, outcomes, what's next. We have a few questions that were pre-submitted related to the Foundation's Form 990, which was published last week. As a reminder, this is an informational tax form that along with other financial disclosures is part of the organization's practices around transparency and the commitment to increased openness. We'll take those questions along with annual plan questions and then something new. Wikis celebrate. A new way we're elevating and celebrating extraordinary Wikimedians and how you can be a part of it. Thanks everyone for being here today. I'm excited to talk about these updates with you. Just remember these conversations happen once every quarter and the next opportunity is going to be in person at Wikimania in Singapore in August. And after that, another online happening in November. Instead of piling on the introductions at the start, this time, I'll ask everyone to please introduce themselves when it's their turn to speak. I'm gonna pass this over to you, Elena, now. Thanks, Rosie. I'll be the first to introduce myself. My name's Elena Leppen. I am a Lead Movement Communication Specialist with the Wikimedia Foundation. I will be helping facilitate today's discussion. Let me explain a little bit about how today's gonna work. It's gonna be totally unsurprising for those of you who have been with us on these calls in the past. But like Rosie mentioned, we have a series of updates that we're gonna go through about things that the Foundation and the board have been working on together. After each update, there's gonna be a question and answer short period of time about that particular update. So we'll go updates, Q and A, update, Q and A. And then we'll save about the last 30 minutes of the call for an open Q and A, where we can ask any questions that we didn't get to about any of the agenda items, and also any other questions you might have for the trustees. We'll encourage you to ask any questions you have throughout the call in the Zoom chat and the YouTube chat. We have people monitoring both of those chats and we'll make sure your questions get asked. If you're here in the Zoom room and you want to ask a question live, we really encourage that. As always, just raise your hand in the Zoom chat. We will add you to the queue and then I will pass you the mic so that you can unmute and ask your question directly. We have a handful, like Rosie mentioned, of pre-submitted questions on a couple of different topics today that were sent to us ahead of time. So we're gonna be getting to those as we can, trying to interspersed those with the questions that are asked here live. And if there are any questions that we don't get to in today's session, we will post those answers on the meta page for today's event. We're also gonna post a summary of the call on that meta page. You'll be able to find a recording of this call at the YouTube link that was published and also on comments as soon as we're able to get it up there. And all of that will also be on today's event meta page. This call is covered by the friendly space policy, as always. And with that, I will pass it to Vicky and Lorenzo to get the agenda started and see you again when the Q&A begins. Thanks. Hello. My name is Victoria Doronina. I'm interested since 2021 and I am opening celebrations and commemorations sessions. So we want to celebrate some of the projects and affiliates that have important milestones this month. Czech Wikipedia turned 20 and a number of other Wikipedia also celebrate best day, including Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, Indonesian, Swedish and Spanish. Wikimedia of the Levant and Wikimedia Ukraine celebrate the eighth and 14th anniversaries, respectively. And I want to say that Wikimedia Ukraine is especially close to my Eastern European heart. And I am amazed how they're doing great work while there is a war in the country. For example, recently they had Wikipedia loves movements. So for upcoming events around the movement, we have Wikimedia Haxon starting tomorrow in Essence, where Mike Peel, our newest community elected trustees will be joining. The Edouviki Conference will take place in Belgrade at the end of the month. Shanee, Ruzi and I will be joining. So I'm looking forward to it. And huge congratulations to everybody who's celebrating and meeting up and having conferences online. We just had the Queer Wikipedia Conference, which was hybrid as well. Lorenzo. Thank you. My name is Lorenzo Laza, I'm based in Italy and I'm a trustee since 2011, like Victoria and Ruzi that I've just worked on. So we want to take a moment to recognize some of the Wikimedians who have passed since our last conversation together. Some of them are Joe Peel, known as Mr. Impossible on Wikim. Worked at the UK National Archives and was involved in the Wikimedia community in the UK, editing Wikidata, English Wikipedia and commons since 2011. Blibayu, who was one of the founders of the Wikimedia very community. He worked to preserve Balinese heritage by digitizing and dungeon ancient manuscripts owned by individuals in Bery. And his work inspired Wikilore's manuscript initiative. And David Goodman, user DGG, was a member of the English Wikipedia Admitration Committee, a co-founder of Wikimedia New York City, a co-founder of Wikim Conference North America and a prolific contributor of English Wikipedia with over 300,000 edits. And Daryl Linn, and for to talk about him, I'll pass it to Shani, that knew him better than me. Thank you, Lorenzo. Daryl was nearly a 20 years Wikimedian. He's one of the founding members of Wikimedia Israel, a longtime board member and organizer of Wikimena Haifa, that many of you remember. And he's also been quite well known internationally because he's been everywhere, right? Many of you have known him and have worked with him as part of the steering committee for Wikimedia along the years. He founded the coolest projects every Wikimedia. And he's just been doing everything, glam, education, on a personal level, I can share that when I joined in that Wikimedia that he organized in 2011, he soon became a really good partner. And we've ran countless, countless workshops and talks and courses and collaborations together. So a huge loss, like all the previous Wikimedians that were mentioned here today, our hearts are with all the families and all the community members who've lost these people. So condolences and we want to celebrate them and just show our gratitude for all of their tireless efforts to bring free knowledge to the world. So thank you from all of us to all of them and may they rest in peace. I will move now to some board updates before handing on to NET who will continue with the agenda. So some board updates. And I didn't introduce myself properly. So hello everyone. My name is Shani Aminstein-Sigalov. I'm the vice chair of the board of trustees and the chair for the community affairs committee. Since our last conversation, the Wikimedia foundation board of trustees met in person in New York city between March 8th to 11th. The official board of trustees meeting was held on March 9th. We handled various board business issues such as approving the December meeting minutes and approving an update to the talent and culture committee composition which you've already heard about. We have now Rosie to chair this committee and this is also a good opportunity to thank Raju Narisseti who's also with us today who chaired this committee before her. The board also approved the universal code of conduct enforcement guidelines which was a milestone that many of us have been looking for forward to and it's finally happening. It's not complete yet. As many of you have heard it's going to be an iterative process and now there's going to be a committee but these are important steps in the right directions. During this meeting we also had some time that we spent with the movement charter drafting committee members as well as with the Wikimedia endowment board. Now that was actually the first time that these two boards met together in this constellation and it was a really good move that we'll try to continue making in the future. Our next board of trustees meeting will be virtual, a virtual one in June. Some trustees have also traveled to movement events so Lorenzo and Luis attended the Iberacombe in February and Raju and Lorenzo joined Wikiconference in India in April and as Vicky told you next week where all some of us are going to be in Serbia for the Wikian Education Conference. The last portion of the March board meeting was dedicated to the annual planning process and the strategic discussions and this is a good point to move to NET and Selina to get us started with the official agenda for today discussing the foundation's draft annual plan and community feedback period for it. So thank you. Thank you, Shani. My name is Natalia Tynkiv. I'm a Ukrainian Wikipedia serving on the board of trustees since 2016. I'm the chair of the board since 2021 and I am going actually to pass on to Selina who will talk a bit about the draft annual plan that is being discussed now and tomorrow is the last day to give the feedback. I just wanted to reiterate that this is still a draft and your feedback is welcome and we are going to do a lot of still conversations based on the feedback that we receive. The annual plan is supposed to be approved during the board meeting in June. Selina, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Nat. And my name is Selina Deckelman. I am the chief product and technology officer for the Wikimedia Foundation and I've been here since August 2022. So in terms of the draft plan itself, there's a host of things that are different. And the first thing I wanted to highlight is that the plan has increased transparency, particularly around finances. And if you look at the plan, the draft plan, the finances section includes our fundraising models, revenue streams, and expense reduction practices. In the foundation details section of the draft plan, we're sharing budget breakdowns, department level objectives, and information about the foundation's global employee benefits or compensation principles and increased visibility for executive compensation. The foundation has been long committed to openness and transparency and this latest version of the annual plan, it represents an important step forward in this area. And in addition to the annual plan, we will also publish details about our financials and our budget in several other places, including in the form 990 that the foundation published last week. Another way that the year's plan is different is the focused engagement on product and technology priorities, which I care a lot about and have been working really closely with a number of people on getting published. So product and technology are taking center stage in this year's annual plan and the departments published early stage, a early stage draft in February about their intended work areas, which we called buckets, which inspired lots of bucket memes for the coming year. And the first bucket is wiki experiences. This is about ensuring that we continuously improve the experience of volunteer editors and editors with extended rights, which is inclusive of admins, stewards, patrollers and moderators of all kinds. And sometimes people use functionaries to describe these folks. The second bucket is signals and data services, which describes the work to collect, store and provide analytics and machine learning capabilities for wiki experiences, data and metadata. And we're gonna use that data to improve contributor experiences, empower communities to create and share free knowledge and develop what we refer to as at scale data products and services, meaning that we're providing services to a very large number of people globally. And finally, we have the future audiences bucket, which is about exploring ways of reaching new free knowledge users and contributors beyond our existing movement. So as discussions evolved, we also published draft objectives and key results to make this work measurable. And these are being discussed in a series of community focus groups to further refine the intended work. And you'll find information about the buckets and how we're planning to measure success on the goals page of the annual plan draft on meta. And there's a link right there in the chat. And we've held discussions on the buckets, on measurements and on external trends that could impact our work over the next year on wiki and in community calls. And I just wanted to go into a little bit more detail about these areas. So in terms of the on wiki engagement, for the first time ever, we made translated copies of the annual plan summary available on local language wikipedia's. And this is an effort to bring discussions to where volunteers are already are. Translated summaries have been posted locally in over 30 wiki pages where community members can engage and ask questions in their own languages. We also have the full annual plan translated, it's a draft still, but we'll become not draft into 10 languages on the meta wiki homepage where the foundation staff are answering questions on the talk page. The annual plan summary is translated into an additional 17 languages and posted locally on as many village pumps. So there's content currently in 27 languages. In terms of on wiki feedback, we're hearing engagement across a variety of topics. And those include machine learning, technical collaboration, the foundations approach to budget savings and layoffs, our environmental footprint, our work on equity topics, the influence of China in the free knowledge movement and the language around how we describe different types of users. This engagement is primarily in English on the meta wiki page, although we are monitoring across languages on multiple channels. And we've gotten feedback this year that the plan feels more thorough and transparent than in years past. So we hope to keep building on this model because I feel there's always room for improvement. In terms of the community calls that we've held, this process began in February at the last of these conversations with the trustees. And then in late March, there was a community call about external trends focusing on the opportunities and challenges in the AI space. Over 100 people attended that call and requested ongoing conversations on this topic. We're hoping to work with communities to alternate hosting more regular calls about AI and its potential impacts on wiki media. Following that external trends call, we hosted, or sorry, we joined for additional community calls where affiliates and community members shared their plans for the coming year with us. So our intention here was to do two-way planning. And we got to talk about how best to draft our plan with the rest of the movement. We've also run four community focus groups on topics in product and technology. There have been over 600 participants across all of these calls. And we were so happy to see so much interest and engagement. Our plan will definitely be stronger thanks to everyone who came and contributed to the discussions. Some of the key themes that came up in these calls included working with affiliates, addressing the gender gap, access to foundation grants, support for copyrights, IP blocks, and how support will be divided and delivered to the different wiki media projects. In our product and technology focus groups, there's been particular attention around the topics of moderator workflows, IP blocks, and community technical support. So the feedback period for the annual plan closes tomorrow, May 19th, after a month of open discussion. And in the coming weeks, foundation staff will post a translated feedback summary on the meta page that captures the major recommended changes to the annual plan which were heard across the community channels. And this feedback will then shape our finalized annual plan, which will be sent to the full board for approval in late June and published in early July. And at this point, I think we are turning to some pre-submitted question and answer. Yeah, thanks, Selena. Yeah, so we have some pre-submitted questions on the topic of the annual plan as well as the foundation's financials more generally. Before I get to the pre-submitted questions, I just wanted to actually take a live question or two. We have one live question from the YouTube chat. And I'd also encourage, if anybody wants to ask a live question here in the Zoom room, feel free to raise your hand and we'll pass you the mic. But I'll start with this live question from YouTube. I would like to know the trustees characterization of the growth of executive compensation and whether they think reducing it to historical levels is preferable to layoffs. Hello, I think I can take this question. So the numbers, if you just look at them as numbers can seem really big, but they are also very different if you look at the same numbers for the salary in the USA or if you are somebody like I am from Ukraine or if you are somebody from Europe. We are building our compensation levels based on data. So we are trying like there is data across the USA because we are the American-based organization and we still need to balance. We need to be able to have people working for us who have graceful, not another word, sorry, like a normal way of taking care of their family or being able to earn money but also being able to do good for the movement for the humanity, if you will, at large. So we are not basing our compensation details or like, oh yeah, okay, we have more money than we are going to give our biggest salaries. We have less money than we are going to do something else. Like we are going to reduce people's salaries. We are looking every year, we are looking at the data. We are also having rules that we are not, the data that we are using, we are not going for the maximum. It's like 75% of the bandwidth of what the USA executives are receiving. So it's not, there is also no way of returning it back to historical unless we actually start a point or taking, sorry, hiring people who are really rich and they can't just allow to be philanthropic and not receiving salaries. But that's, I think it's also not sustainable to just expect that rich people who are able not to pay for the, don't need to care for the bread in the morning can just come and work for us. So I don't think that this is sustainable and something that we can do, we just like can return to what was a few years back taking into account in the economical situation. But that's a thing. We are not basing the salaries on whether we are fundraising or less money. We are using data for that. Existing in the countries where we are hiring and of course in the USA, we are based. Thank you for that answer Nat. Great, so I will move then if we don't have anything immediate in the Zoom chat, I will move to a question that was sent to the ask cat at wikimedia.org address ahead of time. This question is about the foundation's new severance policy, the severance policy is mentioned in the annual plan. It's also was mentioned in a post published on Diff last month. I think we can probably share the link to that Diff post here in the chat. Thank you, Lisa. That's great. So this question may be for Marianna since I know that you helped shepherd the severance the creation of this new severance policy. It's a few questions has a few parts. So bear with me. The first part of the question is, is the one month of severance pay entirely based on the last month's salary the last year or previous years? That's the first piece. Will this policy affect severances for executives? And then there's a separate piece about exceptions to the severance policy because in the annual plan it does mention that there may be exceptions to this policy. So in terms of the exceptions, for staff that are exceptions are there particular staff members that are able to negotiate exceptions when they join the foundation? Do they negotiate their exception when they depart? Or is it something that can be discussed during their tenure? And then finally, how many staff are considered exceptions and will there be a maximum number of exceptions? So Marianna, feel free to tackle that however you want and we can repeat some of that question if need be. Thank you, Elena. My name is Marianna Iskander. I'm the CEO at the Wikimedia Foundation and very happy to be in the Zoom room with many familiar faces and glad to see we've got folks joining us on YouTube. I do have all the parts of the question. So I do intend to try to answer all the separate pieces. And Florence, I know you submitted some of these questions and you're here. So I will pause if I haven't answered your questions at the end and just make sure that you feel like the questions you submitted did get answered. I just wanna maybe take a step back and offer a bit of background and context and then try to work through the different components of the question. So it's important I think to recognize that this was done as part of a holistic effort to look at our approach to staff across the Wikimedia Foundation. This is 50 plus separate countries as well as many jurisdictions within the United States. And the idea was to harmonize where possible the approach that we would take in the US and in other countries. This was called our global guidelines, the amount of complexity that was involved in trying to harmonize all of these policies took over a year. And we have been communicating about that in a series of diff blog posts, the latest of which Lisa put into the chat but there were two that preceded that as well. So I just wanna try to provide some holistic context for how the severance policy came to be. I also wanna spend a minute on what the intentions were behind setting the policy and that was to communicate a standard to staff at all levels, including senior leadership. The idea of trying to, as I said, put guidelines in place, but knowing which I know many of you can appreciate it's impossible to predict all future possibilities or legal developments at a time that a policy is written. And that's why we have introduced these as guidelines that will need to be reviewed regularly. To get into some of the specific questions that were asked, the severance policy does contemplate that the one month is based on the last month of paid salary to answer that question. What I can say is that the policy is, it's still too new to comment on why there might be exceptions and what those might be. I think if I tried to anticipate, they may relate to local laws and requirements. We are working with employment legislation and regulations across a lot of jurisdictions. And so that makes standardizing very difficult across the context of all staff at the foundation. It could be unique circumstances that were difficult to imagine at the time that the policy was devised. What I can say is the purpose of the exceptions clause is to anticipate exceptions, not to create a loophole. The last thing that I wanted to comment on in terms of the specific questions, and again, if you haven't had a chance to look at the details, the Diff post does provide a bit more detail on the policy language itself. It does contemplate already a natural limit of nine months. We have staff at the foundation whose tenures exceed that in number of years. And the thing that I would say in closing is that it's difficult to predict in advance every possible circumstance in which an HR matter may need to be addressed. And what I hope that you're taking from this is a very clear intent to standardize practices where we can and to create exceptions processes, which is quite common in HR related matters across the board and in all organizations. We'll continue to review the global guidelines as they come into sort of lived practice as well. Thank you, Mariana, for all that context about how the policy came to be, what the future will be for the policy. If we have any follow-up questions about that severance policy, feel free to add those in the chat. We're happy to take those. The next one is another pre-submitted question that's probably also for Mariana. That question is about donations on behalf of foundation staff to the foundation itself. Is there an incentive system in place to invite foundation staff to make donations to the foundation or to other Wikipedia entities such as doubling their donations? Thanks for the question. I think that many of you know that our staff participate and contribute to the movement in a wide range of ways already. There is not a specific program in place to answer the question directly, but we do have some staff who choose to be donors of their own accord and give monetary donations to the foundation. Thank you. Let's go to another pre-submitted question. This one has to do with severance packages that were disclosed as part of the Form 990. I think a few of our speakers today have mentioned that the foundation's Form 990 was just released for this year. The Form 990 again is a document required by the US government in order for the foundation to be able to keep its nonprofit status. It's 501C3 status. And in the Form 990 there was information about a number of severances for C-levels that departed the foundation. So this question I think probably go to Nat who approved these severance packages and when were they approved? Is there a way to look at previous board resolutions to find information about who approved them and when? Yeah, so these as all HR related issues regarding the CEO is of course the board's approval. So the board approved it. The HR committee or now talent and culture committee are usually involved as a committee from the board in working from these questions. Then they go with the proposal to the board and then the board needs to vote and approve because the talent and culture committee by itself cannot of course pass such a resolution. Because this is HR or sometimes also some legal questions when there are resolutions related to this nature usually it's personnel like in most cases they are not published publicly. The Wikimedia Foundation publishes all the information that it can publish but the resolutions of this kind are not published. They are usually kept on the board Wiki and with the legal department. So publicly you won't be able to go and look at that especially this is a mutual separation agreement and the documents are kept confidential. Thank you. We can take, let's see maybe we'll take one more pre-submitted question at this point and then save the others for the open Q&A at the end. This one is about executive compensation disclosures in this annual plan. So this may be for Mariana or for Selena but it notes that in this year's annual plan Mariana's and Selena salaries were disclosed in advance because as we discussed they are disclosed in the form 990 but they were disclosed proactively this year as part of the annual plan. Is this type of disclosure something you're planning to make regular practice? And can you talk a little bit about that? I'm happy to take that question. I mean, I think as we've communicated here the executive compensation disclosures are already required and so that is part and parcel as Elena has said of a number of forms that the foundation publishes on an annual basis, not just one. I will say that it's not clear that this type of disclosure will be necessary now that it has been disclosed in future years but the intent certainly is to continue to use the annual plan as a place to increase visibility, transparency and accountability of information from the foundation, I think with the intentionality that we I hope demonstrated this year. Thank you. With that, let's move for now on to Wiki celebrate. I'll pass it to Rosie to open this topic. So we'll give the floor to Rosie and Merida to talk about this new initiative to celebrate Wikimedians. Then we'll take some questions on that and then we'll get back to open Q&A for anybody who has any questions on any topic. So prepare your questions. Rosie, go for it. Thanks, Elena. Well, we have a lot on our plates as a movement and you've heard some of that already. Sometimes with everything we're working on or working towards, we forget to celebrate the amazing contributions made by members of our movement every day. So we're kicking off a new initiative to celebrate a different Wikimedia in each month which we're calling Wiki celebrate. And we have no shortage of wonderful contributors to celebrate. I'm gonna pass it over now to Merida to share more. Merida. Perfect. Hi, everyone. As Rosie mentioned, sometimes we do forget to celebrate. My name is Merida and I'm from the movement communication team. I'm so excited to introduce you to a relatively new initiative called Wikis Celebrate. It's a lightweight and easy way to celebrate Wikimedians regularly. And as Rosie mentioned, we have no shortage of exceptional and amazing Wikimedians to celebrate in our movement. Next slide, please. Okay, perfect. So Wikis Celebrate focus in particular on Wikimedians who may not have been previously celebrated, especially long-time editors and contributors. Each month, the celebrated exceptional Wikimedian receives a very limited edition Barnstar which we'll see in a second. Under user page, a dedicated media page, a dedicated page on media, where also you, their friends, their colleagues are welcome to come and add celebratory notes and a diff blog post as well as social media coverage. Next slide, please. So that's the Barnstar. Click. There should be some nice visual effects there. Okay, perfect. So for the first month, we kicked things off in the honor of Women's History Month with Penny Richards, a retired teacher that takes pleasure in writing articles and collaborating with folks around the world on the comfort of her home in her pajamas. Penny has been a major contributor to Wiki Project Women in Red as well as women's biographies. The hope for Wiki Celebrate was actually to connect Wikimedia celebration with in-person events, especially as the movement returns to in-person events. And so for April, and in honor of Wiki Conference India, we celebrated Meenakshi Nandini, a prolific editor and admin on Malayalam Wikipedia, scientific articles, healthcare, women's biographies and articles related to history, botanical plants and paintings are among some of her favorites. And upcoming next slide, please. So the celebration continues for May we'll be celebrating and collaborating with Hackathon and Edu Wiki Conference organizers. And it doesn't end there. You are warmly invited to nominate Wikimedians that you think should be celebrated as well with an easy nomination form on Metta and the link of that. They've already been shared in the chat. Great. Thank you so much and back to you, Rosie. Thanks so much, Muratad. I think we're moving back though to you, Elena Rice, you've got some... Yeah, I can take it. We're gonna see if we get any questions about Wiki Celebrate. Let's see if we get any in the YouTube chat or the Zoom chat. One thing that I think may be of interest, Muratad, I know people know you as coordinating Wikimedian of the year as well every year. How do you think that Wiki Celebrate is different or similar, like, you know, how does Wiki Celebrate work to complement what you've already been doing and what the movement's been doing to celebrate people every year at Wikimedian of the year? Great. Thank you. Well, actually, this idea for Wiki Celebrate comes from the movement. Last year, as you may know, about three years ago, we kind of reimagined Wikimedian of the year. We added more categories. We started celebrating newcomers, media contributors, tech contributors. We created a category called Wikimedia Laureate for old-time and established contributors. And this was received very well. We were able to cover regions and folks that we had never celebrated before. Last year, we got some great feedback. And one was, how can we keep celebrating more often, more regularly? How can we also connect them to different regional events because sometimes people want to celebrate someone in their region? And so that's where the idea of Wikimedian of the year came about. It's easy to do lightweight. And it kind of connects the virtual and the in-person gap. I think Wikimedian of the year is still happening. And this year, it'll actually go in-person again in Singapore, which I'm really excited about. And of course, coming to you live from Singapore again. But Wikimedian of the year goes on every month. So please nominate. And as regional events and thematic events happen too, we'll be connecting with them so we can keep celebrating each other because, like Rosie mentioned, we get so caught up in our work and we forget to bring it back to where it matters, which is contributions of thousands of volunteers over 20 years. Amazing, thank you. Exciting to see more attention being drawn to all of the diverse contributions that we see around the movement every single day. So really cool initiative. OK, if we don't have any questions from the chats, let me just check really quickly on that. Then I think we can move to open Q&A. And yeah, get back. We have some more questions left about the annual plan, a couple of questions about the Form 990. And of course, if any of you have questions about any other topics, feel free to drop them in chat as we go. Let's turn to AI and machine learning. Selena, you mentioned that this came up in a number of community discussions and that there was also that external trends call that we hosted, I think it was last month. So wondering how the foundation plans to work on AI and machine learning under this annual plan. Yeah, thanks for that question. Again, my name is Selena Dekelman. I'm the Chief Product and Technology Officer. So in this annual plan, because we had the bucket structure design. And then when this work came up, we found there was actually this really nice ability for us to say, oh, where does this work naturally fit in with our upcoming plans? And to the teams, it very clearly fit into the future audiences work. And as we said in our draft plan, we expect for future audiences work to represent about 5% of our overall effort. And as we can see that the use of generative AI in society is expanding pretty rapidly, and our content is already being used in ChatGBT and other AI assistants, we're interested in exploring and having some pilots in this area. So our goals are really going to be all about testing and learning at this time. And that's because the change, like I said, is just happening so fast. We're going to need to learn a lot rather than making some large new investment in any one particular area. So we also understand that the topic of AI is one that's inspiring a lot of strong views. And that makes sense. It's very consequential and relevant to our communities what happens in the development of this technology. And we're actively looking for volunteers who are interested in being thought partners to help shape our work going forward. So if you are interested, please send an email, and we can drop this into the chat, to future audiences at wikimedia.org. And I think that's, I guess, like one more thing there. It's just thinking about the question there was this, I think I should also say that machine learning has been part of our work for quite a long time. And I, you know, we have a team that at one point was called the scoring team and is now the machine learning team. And then even in the earliest days, we had bots that were machine learning assisted bots that were helping us watch and moderate content. And so that work, it fits under the signals and data services bucket of our product and technology priorities. And we're, you know, we're gonna continue providing the same capabilities that we've provided, you know, in recent years to volunteers and staff. So for example, that ML work, it supports aspects of growth and suggested edits. And the team is also working on prototypes to investigate ML powered interfaces that, you know, support the work of the future audiences bucket. So that's like the full, the full answer. Thanks. We have a quick follow up on that from the chat here in Zoom. Will Wikimedia have its own chat GPT? I don't know. If we, if we did, I'll just say, I think it would probably be a little bit different. I use really interesting to think about and, you know, the opportunity to learn about large language models and whether training our own model like fits into our world, I think is interesting. I also think that the knowledge as a service vision, you know, some of the things that we already do fits really well into us providing data to other, you know, to the large language models exactly how we do that. It might require some changes, honestly, to our infrastructure. So that as we're kind of exploring the ML powered interfaces, you know, with our team, we're kind of looking at, does the technology and infrastructure that we have today, does it support scaling, you know, asking those questions and kind of exploring like, do we need to make that better and how? And then, you know, and I think there's some other opportunities just to make, you know, prototypes and kind of inspire, you know, the folks that we have. We have, we have a lot of really great prototype engineers and prototype product managers at the foundation who get really excited about opportunities like this. So we're just taking, you know, taking that opportunity to look in a couple key areas and, you know, maybe you'll see more prototypes from us. And you'll see that, like some of our staff have already been like posting their own blog posts about mashups, you know, just using existing APIs, which I think is a great way for us to kind of explore the space and kind of see the limits of what we have today and, you know, what we might need to improve. Thank you. Kind of in line with that question, but more broadly about the product and tech work happening under this year's annual plan, there's a question about, so you mentioned focus groups, other community calls on Wiki feedback being gathered. What has changed in the annual plan as a result of this community feedback? So what can community members expect from like the first draft to then is different in the final draft based on the information that you've got from community members in this process so far? Yeah, this is a great question. And there's a group that's trying to collect like a comprehensive list of this and we'll be sharing that, you know, on Wiki once, you know, once we've finished with the collection tomorrow. So you've got one more day to get your comments and questions and suggestions in. And just this morning, my time, we were talking about commons and some of the issues that we at the foundation see and some of the issues that community, different community members and different communities have raised around moderation. And initially we had targeted licensing issues and managing licensing issues that have kind of grown in a queue that we have visibility in at the foundation. We propose that to the community and through these community conversations, the folks attending those actually proposed a different way and a different set of goals. So I think that's like one like very clear example where we shifted from just improving an existing, you know, basically like a patroller workflow to looking at, you know, are there ways that we can manage the intake of images and provide feedback to people at that stage and try to reduce the flow of images that need to be reviewed overall. So I think that's like one example that I have lots of other ones, but I just say that we're planning to share that as like a whole report at the end. Thanks for the question. Wonderful, thanks so much. Next question about the annual plan has to do with grants. So yeah, just general question. What is happening with grants under the next annual plan given especially the current financial situation at the foundation? Maybe Mariana, do you want to take this one? Sure, and I might ask for help because I don't want to misstate any of the specifics but the annual plan document has a section on the finances in which there is specific language related to the grants program. The headline message is that the grants budget is increasing even though the foundation's overall budget is decreasing because we have made cuts in other areas. There have been questions during this open feedback period about specific grant programs that I know have been asked and answered in some of the meta pages. And so I'd prefer to point people to some of the specifics but the general headline message is that the grants budget has increased in this year. Thank you. In a similar line of questioning, we have a question about what's going to happen with movement strategy next year under this annual plan. There's been a little bit of restructuring and maybe movement strategy doesn't sit in the same place in the foundation that it used to. So people are wanting a little more context on that and on the future of movement strategy. Sure, I'm happy to take that as well. I mean, I think it's probably not helpful to think of movement strategy as a team. It's the strategy for our movement and for the organization and has to live in every part of both the foundation and I think our affiliated entities. So some of you may recall that last year, the foundation began the process of centering our annual plan in movement strategy, specifically with the strategic direction that was set in 2017 of knowledge equity and knowledge as a service. This year's plan builds on that by being more specific about the movement strategy recommendations and internally the work of applying those across all our teams, product and tech, communications and the like. I have as a specific matter been working more directly from the office of the CEO on some of the movement strategy components like the engagements the foundation's had with the movement charter drafting committee. So the intent really is to ensure that movement strategy actually is more embedded both at the CEO level but certainly in all components and all pieces of the foundation's annual plan and own direction. I hope that helps. Thank you. We have a quote here in chat from Maggie Dennis. Movement strategy is like the air that we breathe. It's all around us getting a lot of love here in the chat. Great. Let's see, we have a number of questions still left about the annual plan but I think let's skip quickly to the 990 and then we can wrap with the remaining questions about the annual plan. In the 990 it mentions the concept of a mutual separation agreement with regard to departures of sea levels. And so this person is just wondering what is a mutual separation agreement? And yeah, can you explain that a little bit? I'm not sure if Nat this one should go to you. Yeah, I can take that. So I don't know if this person asking the question is from the USA or not, but as a foreigner for me it was interesting to learn that in the USA people can leave of their own accord. People can be fired when the organizations have to say once it, but then there is like no policies or at least it's not on the state level whereas there is some time by the state decided that for example, the rules, you can't just fire a person in Europe for example or in Ukraine at least, you can't just fire somebody without giving them some period of time unless it's something very serious criminal. So there are always like rules by the state level. Whereas in organizations in the USA it's all decided kind of on a more granular level and mutual separation agreement it's just exactly what it is. That's when the individual and the organization decide that this is time to part ways and they agree that this is what is expected from the individual, this is what is expected from the organization and they agree on the terms of how they separate. I'm sure that you can find some official term somewhere on Wikipedia maybe even, but this is like the human speak that's exactly when organizations and individuals decide together that they are part and quays. Thank you. All right, let's do the last question that we have about the foundation's finances. This is about the, let's see, we have disclosures about the foundation's finances in the form of 990. It was also mentioned today that disclosures happen in the annual plan and other places. What are the other places? Where is there more information about the foundation's finances beyond the annual plan and the form 990? Is there anything else? Nat, do you wanna take this one? Yes, so the annual plan is just what it is. It's a plan, what is expected to be done and with the resources that is expected to be done to be received for that work to happen. Form 990 gives a bit of a different perspective because the time terms are different. Our annual plan is for the year that starts in July and ends in June, whereas the form 990 for most things provides a calendar year, but annual reports would be the information where you can actually look up what the financials for the year or actual year were. Not the plan, but like deal funds, the real resources that were spent or received. So that's also another place to look for financials. Alina, I'm just gonna observe that a few links in the chat have also been added to amplify to Nat's answer. Obviously, we issue financial reports every year. Charity Navigator, which is another source that publishes on an annual basis, various information about the foundation's financial. So just wanted to highlight some of what was in the chat as well. Thank you. And if we can make sure that those links also make it to YouTube, that would be wonderful. Let's get back to the annual plan then. Just a few questions left. So in the annual plan section about measuring progress, one of the top level goals doesn't have a metric yet. That's the section for effectiveness, ensure our long-term sustainability by improving how the foundation operates and scales. It says in the annual draft plan that departments will publish their approaches separately on this. So wondering if you could speak about the process and timeline for generating metrics around this goal. I'm happy to take that one. I mean, I think that this is evidence that the plan genuinely is draft and it's ongoing work. This is a precise topic that work is underway now. So I would make a couple of observations. We made earlier reference to external benchmarks that the foundation uses, Charity Navigator is one. One of those metrics is the amount of budget spent on programmatic expenses. And although I'm aware that the compensation and severance payments are the main focus of the Form 990, I do wanna highlight there are other schedules and other information in the Form 990. And one of those was that in the 2021 year, the foundation's programmatic expenses increased by four percentage points to 77%. That is one metric that can be used to measure effectiveness. And in addition to that, having departments share their work as departments is part of what's contemplated, but we're trying hard to ensure that the work that we share out is not siloed and reported across departments. That's the intent of having these foundation level objectives as well. Thank you so much. Let's talk about specific elements of the annual plan. Selena, you mentioned that moderator workflows came up in your discussions with community members around the plan for this year. Can you talk more about that and how that may be integrated in our work for the upcoming year? Yeah, sure. Thanks for this question. Hi, I'm Selena again. So the kinds of moderator workflows that we're thinking about are coming from the combination of work that was already in progress and problems that we've identified. Like for example, we have to move this IP masking project forward, which means that we're gonna change the way that IP addresses make them not as visible as they used to be, not visible to the public and visible to editors with advanced rights. And so that has some consequences in terms of the tooling. So that's like an example of an area where we're collaborating with community and have been for quite a long time and prioritizing specific work to improve there. Another area that we're thinking about is community configuration. So there's a number of features that we've developed that through testing, we know increase the number of new editors that come in. And what we've heard is that when we increase the number of new editors that come on to any wiki, that increases the burden for the existing editors to review or sometimes make changes to manage either lower quality or just, there's more people. And so sometimes you just have to have more conversations. So giving communities the opportunity to manage that and figure out, should we turn this feature on? How many people have exposure to it? Should we turn it off? Giving more of that control to local wikis is something we're working on. And the name for that is community configuration. Another area that moderator Touls is looking at specifically is abuse filter, and are there ways that we can augment that with some additional machine learning models or just UX improvements? And I have a longer list there. So that's three examples. And what you'll see in the updated plan, we have these things, we call them hypotheses. And each one of these are our statements about the outcome that we're trying to achieve with the work of a team or a larger group that's working together. And through that, what we're doing is we're attaching different kinds of measurements or qualitative review to say, did we have the impact that we wanted to have with the work that we did? So that's what you'll see as we kind of come to the end of the planning cycle for both product and tech departments. Thanks. Thank you. And so in terms of also planning for the next year and allocation of resources, we have a question about, so you mentioned that part of the community conversations that you had were around how to divide resources amongst different wikimedia projects. Did you get any particular insight on that from community conversations and what is the plan for making that determination over the next year? Yeah, thanks for this question. So I would say, we're still, I'm not totally done with like the feedback cycle. So I don't think I have, I don't have like a complete picture across all of the various teams. So I'll just say, we are still kind of compiling that and reviewing it. We're definitely investing, continuing to invest in all of the wikipedia's and doing infrastructure work that improves the quality of the software across all of them. So that investment in media wiki, it affects basically every project. And there's also infrastructure projects that we do like investing in Kubernetes in the way that we deploy the software. And so improvements there, again, they affect and improve things for all of the projects at the same time. A specific investment that we are making in the coming fiscal year is in Commons and we're shifting the work of like one particular team over to Commons. Whereas previously we were working primarily with contractors like on the engineering side and we had just a partial product manager assignment. So we're making some shifts there. Overall, I would say that the feedback we were looking at is does the high level allocation of like 5% ish for future audiences, 30% ish for the signals and data services bucket and 50% ish for the wiki experiences bucket. Does that make sense to everyone? I think over time we'll be able to kind of refine that but I think the goal this year was just to kind of get into that starting position and start to talk about things in terms of our investment in like these infrastructure things that I'm talking about that improve things for everyone, investment in data, investment in improving the core user experience which is part of our movement strategy and then making sure that we're continuing to have some investment in that very far future looking and experimental space with the future audiences. So I'd say that from my perspective, we did achieve getting feedback on that. And then as far as the more specific areas, I would say I just need a little more time to process all the information that we've received about that for me to say. Thanks, Selena. So I have a final question about the annual plan and if we don't get any more questions in chat, we can wrap but happy to take any questions that people have wanna drop in chat. This was your first time Selena going through the annual planning process with the foundation and your work totally took center stage which is really exciting. So wondering and this question goes for Selena as well as Mariana who this was your second, right? Time going through this process with the foundation. Can each of you talk about some of the principles that guided your work on the annual plan and what you were hoping to bring to the process? Maybe we'll start with Selena and then go to Mariana. Yeah, that sounds good. Thank you so much for this question, opportunity to reflect. So I think for me the grounding in talking about what our mission is and what we're here to do, that was like a foundational principle for me. So there are two things that are always top of mind for me on the technology and product front. One is supporting our volunteers who produce the free knowledge that we then are able to distribute through the technology infrastructure that we've been maintaining for many years now. And so first focusing on are we serving the needs as much as we possibly can of the volunteers and there were clear gaps. So helping everybody understand what my priorities are for supporting volunteers. That was like a really important first step. And then looking at the infrastructure that we're using to share this information and to support sharing through the website but also other means, is that healthy? And then how do we determine whether it's healthy or not? So we have to start measuring. So that's at the heart of all of the questions that I asked and the people that I was working with like how they were doing their work. And then I would say the other piece of it was just having really clear deadlines and then being flexible at certain points when we needed to adjust them. But, and that was really the work of many, many people making sure that we were establishing clear timelines for folks that we weren't asking for people to make really big decisions about work that was happening in the coming year on one or two day timelines. You really gave them several months to, first of all, think about the direction. First of all, it's like support volunteers in the right ways. And then second, let's make sure this infrastructure that we have is very healthy or more healthy, work toward more health and from there start to think about the work that you might do. And so I think giving people that time to think that through, nothing's perfect. There's always like room to improve but I have gotten feedback that people felt that the process, there was two-way planning with the community. There was also like a good healthy back and forth between like management direction and ICs being able to like individual contributors being able to think about and propose work. So yeah, I feel pretty good about that. And I also see areas to improve and folks are already kind of giving me feedback in that direction and thinking about next year. Also good that they have like mental bandwidth to share their reflections. But yeah, I think that that's it. Focus on what's most important and let people know and then make sure that we have like a really good timeline so that people get that opportunity to do like the good deep thinking and reflection that they need to do to form a new plan. Yeah, so Marianna. Well, I'll keep my response brief just to be additive to what Selena has said. I mean, a lot of my reflections actually come from some of the earlier questions and comments. So I appreciate a chance to be able to reflect on it. You know, I think that aligning the foundation's planning directly to movement strategy has helped a lot. I mean, that is building off the past but being able to ensure that that's quite explicit and specific, clarifying our metrics which is ongoing work. But again, I see a real opportunity for some of that clarity from last year to this year. I think we have been really trying to take this principle of two-way planning seriously in our, not just the feedback period. So if some of you joined any of the community calls or even some of the engagement on Wiki, trying to ensure that the foundation's also planning against the work that is being done by volunteer communities, affiliates and others as well. I feel the need to really repeat the observation that was made in the presentation which is bringing multilingualism much more forcefully into our planning work. So having the plan available in parts in 27 languages also feels like kind of momentum in recognizing the need for more multilingualism in the important conversations that we're having. And maybe the last point which may not be as visible to our volunteer communities is how much internal work is happening to try to plan with a one foundation approach and not have different teams. I think to Selena's point, feel like they're trying to manage or figure things out on their own but a much more coordinated and hopefully less siloed. All of these things can continue to be improved over time which is why this feedback period has been so meaningful and so important that we are hearing on Wiki, in calls, whatever ways on village pumps, whatever ways are easiest for people to engage with us. And certainly the biggest change for me is last year we didn't have Selena. So it's been a lot easier to do the product and tech planning this year than it was last year just in terms of kind of clarity of leadership. Thank you both so much for those reflections. I think that's a really nice note to end on. I will pass it to Rosie in a second to close. I just wanna thank everybody for joining our call today. And the recording again is immediately available on the YouTube link and it will be up on comments shortly. The notes will be posted to the meta page shortly as well. If you enjoyed this call and you want to get automatic invitations, every time we do this with the Zoom link right in your inbox, feel free to write us at askcap at wikimedia.org. And we can add you to the list to receive those links and event reminders ahead of time. Rosie, would you like to bring us out? Sure, thanks for that, Elena. I wanna thank everyone who's on this call for joining us, for making the time to participate. I know we have a few more trustees who are on this call that maybe didn't speak yet. And if they're able to and wish to introduce themselves, this would be an opportunity to do so. I don't know if we even did mic checks for them, but I see Raju, I see Ezra. And if you have the inclination, please go ahead and introduce yourselves. Otherwise, I'll do a wrap up. Thanks, Rosie. Hi, everyone. Raju Narisati, I'm a appointed trustee. I've been on the board for about six years now and I'm on the audit committee and the talent and culture committee. Hi, everyone, Ezra here. And I have been on the board for a little over five years and I am currently the chair of the product and technology committee. Thank you both. Thank you all. As usual, don't go away. We're gonna be running a poll next to see how you felt about this call. We've got a new question in there. So please take a moment to respond to the poll. You can also email your feedback to askcacatwickmedia.org. Here comes the poll now, it's on Mentimeter. Please take a moment to take a look at that and give your opinion. I will also note that we've been told that the YouTube is about a five minute delay. So those of you that are watching on YouTube, please still vote. We will still look at this poll after the call closes. If we're not here, still on Zoom, we're still looking at the poll. So please take a moment to vote whether you are here in Zoom or watching five minutes delayed on YouTube. Again, I'd like to thank everyone who's joined us today and I hope to see some of you in person or online at Wikimania in August. Thank you everyone. Thanks everybody, see you next time. Bye-bye.