 We are so happy and grateful to be standing here today with all of you. We honor and give special thanks to the Mari and other indigenous peoples of Aterua and New Zealand for welcoming us to our beautiful islands. Our journeys here were long, very, very long, and our bodies would have not arrived, though our souls are still arriving without the extraordinary hospitality and support of Rewinsei, Fiona Filtsend and Matariki Williams. Kia ora. Thank you so much. We feel so privileged to be here with all of you today. You who are creatively finding old and new ways to bridge culture and heritage with digital technologies. Very few places in the world hold this deep, difficult, and joyful work quite like all of you do. In fact, our decolonizing frames and methodologies have been deeply inspired by some of you. We would like to particularly call out our feminist sister, Yvonne Underhill Sem, who teaches at the University of Auckland, and the extraordinary Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, whom we will come back to many times in this talk. Perhaps being geographically on the edge of the colonized world and two days' flights away from almost anywhere else has meant that many of you understand what it's like to be on the margins more than many others who are more centrally located. It's a gift to be here with you and to learn from you. Yes. And as we stand here, we don't stand here on our own. As black and brown women from Brazil and India, now living in the US and the UK, we would not be here without the wisdom, generosity, and courage of our communities. With our relative privilege, our living in the intersections of many different worlds, we would like to bring into this room those who could not be here. The many brilliant voices, faces, bodies, and minds who have inspired us and helped us become who we are. I'm Anasuya Sengupta. I grew up in India. I moved to the United States in 2007 completely accidentally. And two months ago, equally accidentally, I moved to continents once again to live in London. I've been active in feminist and social justice movements much of my life and I have worked for many years to put feminist organizing into technology and technology into feminist organizing. I grew up on the Deccan Plateau in southern India, learning that deserts are rich and resilient places, not arid and sterile, as we often think of them. And as I grew older, I began to realize that even as I speak six languages, I love English and the worlds it opens up for me. But I am a privileged creature of colonization. I began to realize that as someone born into a Hindu Savarna or upper caste family, even as I drew and draw comfort from my community's rituals and practices, I am a privileged creature of caste, one of the most brutal oppressive forms of social discrimination in the world. And yet, I also battle patriarchy and the precarity of income. And when I left India, I learned what it meant to be a woman of color, something I had never known before, to be present in a room and still to be completely invisible. I recognize that power is dynamic, that I am simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. And when I'm not confronting my past or rabble-rousing online, I take long walks by the water and in the forest and I make and break bots and poems. I am Adele Verana. I was born and raised in Brazil until life also unexpectedly brought me to the US. I live a couple miles away from Silicon Valley, where most of the technologies we use and critique are being created. But way before I landed in the belly of the beast, I looked for my place in the world among the sugar cane plantations you see in this image. That is a beautiful version of it, let's be clear, in order not to depress you all. You are welcome. I identify myself as an Afro-Brazilian, but the multitudes in me carry the shadows of my country's colonization. My ancestors are indigenous, African and white. I know very little about them because my colonizers intentionally erase the history, cultures and knowledges of my ancestors. So in the quest of finding myself and my origins, I left academia and decided that my calling belonged to the communities of practice and resistance that I'm part of. But it was only after moving to the US that I realized that the invisibility and racism that I'm so familiar with in my daily life now could be find in a URL. And we're basically 24 hours with me on my phone. And is that what brings me here today? And when I'm not reimagining the internet with fierce love and radical honesty, I get no sleep as I try to raise my two boys as strong outspoken feminists and anti-racist little beings. They're fabulous, my two godsons. We also want to bring into the room our companiera, Ziko Bauters, who is Dutch-American, has studied in Cairo, now lives in California, and wishes she could be here. She sends you her greetings. We all met at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia. And over 2016 and 17, when we left the foundation, we came together. As friends, as fellow travelers, and as crazy dreamers, to create Who's Knowledge, a global multilingual campaign to center the knowledges of marginalized communities online. To imagine the internet having the textures and richness and diversity of the physical and the metaphysical worlds that we all live in. Yeah, so now let's explore these words a little bit more together. So please turn to your neighbor and ask each other these three questions. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the words printing press? What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the word university? And what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the words California gold rush? Go ahead. Please go ahead. Don't be shy. Yes, talk to each other. So now, thank you for having this exciting conversation. So we would like to begin by sharing with you the first things that come to mind for both of us. So with the printing press, Korea and China printed books much before Gutenberg's Bible was published in 1454. Woodblocks, metal, movable types, they had it all. China printed woodblock books from the 7th century AD and movable type from the 10th century. And a metalloid type, Buddhist doctrine, was printed in Korea in 1377. Perhaps you thought the oldest existing university was Oxford or even Bologna. You may be surprised to know that the oldest existing university in the world is in fast, Morocco. And it was founded by an extraordinary Arab-Muslim woman scholar Fatima al-Firi in 859 C. In fact, the University of Bologna was founded in 1088 and Oxford only in 1096. And the California gold rush. The gold rush was a period of systematic genocide for the Native American communities of California. One account has minus killing up to 50 Native American people in a single day. How many in the room had similar thoughts of ours for all the three questions? Please give us a show of hand. Drinks for both of you. Okay, yes. For any two, for one. All right. More drinks. And how many of you had entirely different first thoughts from ours? Everyone else. And that, dear friends, is a quick and dirty exercise in the differential effects of the preservation and curation of knowledge. Who we are affects what we create, what we curate, what we want to remember, why and how. And as part of the Glam community, as libraries, as archives, as museums, as memory institutions, as keepers of cultural heritage and knowledge, we need to constantly ask ourselves, whose stories are we telling and whose are we not? Do we have the right to be the storytellers? And what is our responsibility? So the California Gold Rush offers us some significant perspectives on this. In November 2016, our compañera, SICO, attended the annual gathering of Wikipedia editors from North America and facilitated a discussion with Michael Connolly-Mishquish, a scholar from the Kumi'i Nation, a Native American community whose lands stretch across what we now know is, or call, Southern California and Baja, Mexico. Mike is an engineer and economist who teaches at San Diego State University. He also happens to be an expert in Kumi'i environmental science and cosmologies, including of physics and astronomy. So SICO asked him what Wikipedia articles he would like to work on with a bunch of enthusiastic, experienced Wikipedians. We imagine that Mike had never quite got this kind of invitation before. So SICO expected him to suggest the page on the Kumi'i or possibly on Kumi'i astronomy. What she did not expect was we need to edit the California Gold Rush article. Mike had realized that the entire Wikipedia article on the Gold Rush was written pretty much from the white settler perspective and couched entirely in the language of progress. The section on the impact of Native American peoples was hardly detailed. And yet, for Mike and indigenous communities across California, the Gold Rush was a systematic, state-sponsored genocide. Even more telling for Mike, as he looked at the Wikipedia article, was the picture that it originally displayed, the one on the left with the white people under attack by the violent Indians. That day in San Diego, SICO and the other Wikipedians working on the article with Mike changed it to the picture on the right. That is the picture that the English Wikipedia article carries today. We want to step back for a minute and offer the disclaimer of two people who are passionate Wikipedians and Wikimedians and who love the sense of possibility that the internet in its many forms offers us. Yet, like many things, Wikipedia and the broader internet deserve our best efforts at tough love. In particular, Wikipedia and the broader internet needs this tough love because they have become in many ways the default digital glam for our world. They hold history, they hold memory, they hold knowledge. But whose history, whose knowledge do they hold? We know we cannot look forward without looking back. We can imagine our futures only by confronting our complex pasts and present and by recognizing that we have privileged certain histories, certain memories, certain knowledges over others. Indeed, as we've brought ourselves to the brink of catastrophic chaos as a species with excellence, some of us are scrambling to listen and to learn from the histories and wisdoms of those whom patriarchy, colonization, capitalism and other structures of power have deemed invisible or unworthy of attention so far. So what do we know now about knowledge in the world? According to the research by Google a few years ago, only 130 million books have ever been published in only 480 languages. But language is a proxy for knowledge, a way not just of speaking, but of thinking and dreaming, of doing and of being, of understanding the world around us. Speaking Maori offers us the richness of Maori ways of thinking and being that English cannot. When we think in Brazilian Portuguese or in Canada or in any of our other languages, we are inhabiting different systems of knowledge. And there are over 7,000 languages in the world. Only 480 of those are represented in books and only about 500 of them are enabled technologically on the internet. So it means that only a fraction of humanity, only a fraction of our human knowledges are represented in books or online right now. So the breadth and range of our knowledges are oral, visual, non-textual, experiential and embodied. A friend of ours, Achalprabhala, made a wonderful film called People Are Knowledge that we urge all of you to watch, looking at what oral knowledge might mean for Wikipedia. And what oral knowledge means for all of us? For me, it means that I can have a thread of hope in finding out more information about my indigenous and African ancestors. At the same time, it means that I understand that acknowledging and preserving our oral histories and knowledges is part of a deeper process of reparation and healing for me and my communities. For me, it means that I can be inspired by a woman singer-saint called Akka Mahadevi, who grew up on the Deccan Plateau in South India, as I did, fighting caste and fighting patriarchy, as I do, in the 12th century. Her vachanas or sayings are still sung in my part of the world to this day. Let's now look at who is online. Over half of the world is online, and 75% of the online population today is from the Global South, from the formerly colonized worlds, from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and the Middle East. Nearly half of those online are women and girls. And we look at this. It is data from 2017, and it might be even higher now, but here you can even see that half of the words internet users are from Asia and the Pacific Islands. So now for Wikipedia, our favorite, largest online public knowledge site. One in 10 editors is estimated to be identifying themselves as either female or non-binary. Only about 20% of Wikipedia's knowledge is produced on or by folks from the Global South. And then this map, we had that lovely mapping keynote this morning, maps tell us many things, and maps are arguments, and in this map you can see that in 2012, geotagged Wikipedia articles show that more Wikipedia articles were produced within and about the tiny circle of Western Europe than the entire world around it. That is slowly changing. The map may not look as stuck as it did seven years ago, but we have a long way to go. So the internet often feels like the newspapers we've read growing up in Brazil and India right on the sea. Very much so. It often seems like the knowledge we know best or share most is that of about one billion people from the United States and Europe? 14% of the world? The English and online knowledge do not look like us, the majority of the world, whether on the internet or in books. So what's going on? Why have we not been able to honour the acknowledges of the majority of the world? And obviously at the heart of this is the process of colonisation and imperialisms of knowledges. And I guess, as we do, our responses have to equally be those of practices of decolonising ourselves and our knowledges. So we think of knowledge not as a binary, but as a continuum between embody and disembodied knowledge. Embodied being held orally, visually, audibly, and disembodied being held as an artifact. Books, journals, microfishes. We tend to privilege disembodied knowledge in multiple ways. And we've learned from some dead white men, one of whom is Michael Polany. Polany was a Hungarian British scientist who did pathbreaking research in the physical sciences. He also had some fascinating insights into knowledge as he pushed back against a positivist vision of the world. Polany said essentially that formal knowledge, which we're calling disembodied knowledge, comes out of tacit embodied knowledge. When you make embodied knowledge explicit, you create formal knowledge. So when a dancer dances, her knowledge of her art is embodied. But when she dances and it's captured on video or she talks about her dance in an interview, it gets recorded, preserved as video audio, metadata slapped on it, it comes into one of your museums or archives, that becomes disembodied knowledge. And of course, this is a recursive, bi-directional relationship. Disembodied formal knowledge cannot exist without embodied knowledge. And once created, it in turn further affects all of our embodied knowledges. So as Glaming institutions in the digital world, how do we use the possibilities of digital technologies to bring embodied knowledge online in more creative and full ways? Let's also address the two versions of authority that we are at play here. People's authority, example as the legitimacy given by an individual or a community of people who offer a particular system of knowledge and institutional authority or the legitimacy offered by a formal scholarly edifice like a university. In other words, at the heart of the colonizing knowledge is the act of making explicit the multiple forms of embodied knowledge and the authorities that legitimize or delegitimize them. It's also the act of making explicit the ways in which power and privilege are embedded in our ways of knowing. So Miranda Fricker, a feminist philosopher, calls these hierarchies of knowing epistemic injustice, the wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. She grows further and she draws distinction between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice is when you deflate the credibility of someone. When you disbelieve someone because you disbelieve the entire community that they come from. For example, the police on the streets of America and black men on the streets of America being confronted by those police. Hermeneutical injustice is when you don't make sense of the social experience of someone different from you because you disbelieve a concept. So you don't believe them because you don't believe or understand the concept that they are holding. For example, a woman who experiences sexual harassment but who lives in a culture that lacks or undermines the very concept of sexual harassment. Both of these experiences might sound a little familiar to some of us. And let's use Wikipedia to illustrate this further, shall we? As the largest repository of free and open knowledge in the world, Wikipedia is often the foundation of that database for other content providers, let's say, like Google. So the information on Wikipedia gets amplified across the internet just as its silences and gaps do. So in order to be the encyclopedia that supposedly all of us can edit, Wikipedia has different policies and guidelines. One such guideline is that of notability. Who is notable enough to be on Wikipedia, you might ask? Only those who are significantly mentioned in reliable sources. So not those who are notable in their own communities, those who are significantly mentioned in secondary sources, reliable sources like books, journal articles, well-known newspapers, some well-known blogs, and so on. At the core of this is a form of testimonial injustice where certain of us are not seen as notable enough. All of us marginalised by power, privilege, and publishing. Women, black and brown folks, queer folks, indigenous peoples, we're not talked about or written about or seen anywhere near the kinds of levels that white, cisgendered men from Europe and America have been. And let's look at that on Wikipedia, where 17% of all biographies on the English Wikipedia are of women, and a fraction of those have images. So the invisibility goes deep, both online and offline. We have been working with Wikimedians, Glaming Institutions, and feminist organisations to bring women's faces from around the world onto Wikipedia. This year, for instance, we brought nearly 4,000 images online, including this one of Sojourner Truth from the Smithsonian. And even as we bring the faces of women, of non-binary folks, of black and brown women who inspire us from around the world, we also continue to try and change what constitutes a reliable source, the authority of knowledge on Wikipedia. And that is still a form of hermeneutical injustice. Oral knowledge and oral citations as a way to bring multiple forms of knowledge online to Wikipedia is still really difficult for many Wikipedians to accept. The concept of orality as embodied knowledge is still really difficult to grasp for those of us... How shall I put it? Living in the stranglehold of the Enlightenment. We like to gently remind our friends that the age of Enlightenment is also the age of empire. So now we come to Linda to Hawaii Smith, one of our deepest inspirations. And I'm a re-scholar currently at the University of Waikato in Hamilton. She urges us not to use the colonisation as an empty metaphor, but to recognise that it has to be embodied in practice in acts of remembrance, reclamation and reparation. In her book, Decolonising Methodologies, how many of all of you here have read this book? More drinks. Shots for Linda. In her book, Decolonising Methodologies, Linda to Hawaii Smith says, it appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed these ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and their own nations. And she goes on to say to Indigenous and Alai researchers that Maori research is related to being Maori, is connected to Maori philosophy and principles, takes for granted the validity and legitimacy of Maori, the importance of Maori language and culture, and is concerned with the struggle for autonomy over our own cultural well-being. For us, what this has meant, as our friends in the disability rights movement put it, nothing about us without us. As we work on bringing multiple knowledges online, we centre the leadership, the design and the decision-making agency and autonomy of our communities in what they want to share, how they want to share it, and where they want to share it. And among the many we work with, there are three communities we centre in honour today. They inspire us and challenge us, and so much of what we have learned to do and to be is because of them. The Dalit Bahujan people are a set of communities from South Asia that have been oppressed by my ancestors, by the caste system, for millennia. Dalits are those formerly and pejoratively known as the untouchables. We support Equality Labs, which has organised Dalit History Month in India and the diaspora for the past few years, and is bringing Dalit history and knowledge onto Wikipedia and other parts of the online world. We also work with OKIR, a feminist LGBTQI group in Bosnia, Herzegovina, which collects oral testimonies and histories for a queer digital archive. On their website, they have transcribed the interviews into text, which you can read in translation. And we've supported the Kumiwai Wikipedia initiative, which adds knowledge of the Native American Kumiwai people onto Wikipedia and beyond, and we talked about our journey with Mike Mishkwish a little earlier. And then, with the three communities, we collectively created a set of resources around how they are bringing their marginalised knowledges online, called Our Stories Are A Knowledges, and in this, they described the colonising experiences in their own contexts as deburmanising, curing and unsettling. We would love for you to look at this resource more closely, and it includes a section on how to be a respectful co-conspirator in this work, and it's called How To OI and Be A Good Guest. In order to do this work deeply, with unusual and unlikely allies sometimes, we have begun holding what we call decolonising the internet convenings. The first was last year in Cape Town, South Africa, where we brought together over a hundred activists, scholars, librarians, archivists, museumists, and of course, Wikipedia and techies, to talk about what a decolonised internet might look like and how we get there. We had exciting, inspiring conversations, and I think it was particularly because of who was in the room and what their online and offline experiences are and were. Yes, because when most of the room is women from the global south or people of colour, then the conversation around the internet is very different from largely white, largely male, largely silicon valley based conversations. What we focused on was both critique and possibility. We recognised that the internet can harm us, but it can also bring us together. And we acknowledged that digital technologies can have the deep creative potential to hold our remaining body acknowledges in brilliant, new, multiple ways. If we centre the leadership and design of those who hold this experience and have this expertise. And this year, we held a smaller version of this decolonising the internet convening in London about languages, about how we create a more multilingual embodied internet. We're also bringing out a state of the internet's languages report next year, watch out for it, for us to use for awareness, advocacy and action and we hope you'll help us make sure we're including many languages of the Pacific islands as we do so. And now we would like to bring in the voices and faces of some of our friends who have been working so hard to bring the knowledges of their people online with respect, dignity and integrity. The short video excerpts we are about to share with you and you watch it from a panel we held in South Africa in July last year after our decolonising the internet conference and it was called Centering Knowledge from the Margins. So as you can see from left to right Kelly Foster and Afro-Caribbean Archivist from London Stan Rodriguez, a community scholar and teacher from the Kumeyaay community Persephone Lewis from the Shoshone Band of Indians from Nevada, USA, who teaches at the University of San Diego and next to her is Dumisani Andubane a South African who almost single-handedly built the song of Wikipedia and next to Dumie is Tenmuri Sanderarajan a Dalit feminist organiser and musician who's based in the US works in India and across the Dalit diaspora. Well, let's see if technology is magic. So now we are going to watch Stan and Perse introduce themselves so let's see if I can do this from here. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Stan Rodriguez. I'm an Ipai Kumeyaay from the San Isabel Reservation in San Diego, California. Our tribe is on both sides of the border half in the United States and half in Mexico and it's an honor for me to be here and I would like to also thank the native people from this land for allowing us to come into your land into your territory. We say in my language that it makes my heart feel very good and we praise you. My name is Percy Lewis. I'm from the Yanba Band of Shoshone Indians so I hold a dual citizenship in my tribal nation which is in the traditional territory of what we know is the state of Nevada in the United States as well as of course a United States citizen. I also would like to just thank the indigenous people for having me as a guest on their traditional territory and I currently work at the University of San Diego. I'm a tribal liaison so I work with the 18 tribes which include the tribe that Stan is from in our county and then I also am a professor of practice in the Ethnic Studies Department. Thank you. Now Percy is going to respond to the question why it is so important for you and Kumeyaay and Shoshone peoples to bring their knowledges online? Thank you. So for me it's really important because I live in the United States which is a settler colonial society and honestly I wasn't really engaged in online spaces. I used it of course but a couple of years ago I really began to realize just how absent we were from that space and I really saw it as a parallel and we were in workshops a couple of days ago and somebody made the, you know how there's these analogies of the land and the internet and so I really saw settler colonialism continuing within these online spaces. Online spaces that have become some important to students and to of course the youth in our communities our reservations are very isolated didn't have good internet access for a long time but like the rest of the world now because of mobile technology a lot of our youth now have access and I want them to be able to google Native American and not see statistics alcoholism and suicide rates I want them to be able to google images and not see typical Native Americans in headdresses or things like that and so I really have felt like it's my duty to engage in online spaces and I'm fortunate because I'm able to do that through my position at the university I have lots of workers, my students that are very happy to feel like the work that they're doing is contributing in some way right instead of just writing a paper they're able to actually engage in something that is going to go into an online space so I've been very fortunate to be able to do that. I'm also in San Diego which is the traditional territory as I said of Stans tribe so I am also a guest in that homeland so I definitely privilege Kumiai epistemologies knowledges and perspectives in the work that I do with my students when it's appropriate right because there's times as a Shoshone woman that it's not appropriate for me to engage in their knowledges so I work closely with the local community to be able to do that but I think as the internet continues to dominate and grow even more our presentation this morning those students are begging for Wikipedia right we have to be very cognizant of how we're not marginally marginalizing folks and then how as marginalized people we don't marginalize others and so that has really come to the forefront for me we could listen to all of them forever and we'd be happy for you to do that too but with Stan and Percy's words in mind let's come back to our glamorous lives in Aotearoa, New Zealand and what this journey of ours might mean for all of you here and I want to give a quick shout out at this point to our friend Liam Wyatt who coined the term glam he'll be so pleased to know that the glam minister took on his title with such enthusiasm this morning and we believe there are a few set of ideas and conversations from our decolonizing the internet work that might be interesting to explore here today the first is not to see the offline and the online as the binary but as a continuum especially in glam institutions as an example physical libraries especially public libraries are already at the cutting edge of community service in so many ways while digital libraries especially those with easy access are at the cutting edge of equity and diversity in so many ways as well so how do we combine these what does this offline online hybrid of for community and inclusion look like we know many of you already think about this and we would love to know where your work is taking you the next continuum for us is the relationship and potential partnerships between radical transformative community led archives libraries and memory spaces with long established formal glam institutions what happens when we are willing to be challenged by new and old ways of understanding knowledge new and old ways of oral testimony and new and old ways of preserving memory the beginning on the left of this picture is that of the black culture archives in London the first and only institution of its kind a people's archive for black history in the UK in 2014 it brings together objects documents publications and oral histories of the black people of Britain over centuries and enables the African Caribbean community to tell its own stories and its own history in its own voice for the first time it took 33 years and a lot of extraordinary people and passion to make it happen one of them in more recent times is Kelly Foster whom you saw earlier in our Wikimedia panel interestingly also founded in 2014 was the People's Archive of Rural India or PARI a fascinating digital archive and living journal of life in rural India and one of the first people to be featured in PARI is the man on the right PV Chinatambi Chinatambi is from an Adivasi indigenous community in a remote part of Kerala South Indian state from which my mother comes it's nearly a 20 kilometer hilly hike from the nearest town to his village home and tea shop library he has 160 books in his collection and lends out about 40 a year so 25% is not a bad lending rate you can get a free cup of black tea every time you borrow a book my friend Sainath who founded PARI called Chinatambi the most extraordinary librarian he has ever met and another significant learning for us is the continuum of openness while we believe deeply in having our many knowledges freely, openly and lovingly shared in the world we also know that for many of our communities their deep knowledges have been brutally extracted and abused openness is not binary, it is a process of becoming so we honor the rights of our communities to hold some knowledges sacred to share some knowledges and not others we also recognize the risks of bodily and digital harm that could brutally again affect our communities as they bring their powerful transformative knowledges online so we honor their rights to have safe spaces in which they create their knowledges and move towards opening up those spaces at the time right for them we ask ourselves open for what open for whom open by whom and open when we know you think about these issues really deeply at Tapapa and all of your different institutions elsewhere so we'd love to learn more from all of you too and as we bring this journey to a close we leave you with the questions we ask ourselves constantly to all of you our friends in the glam world we ask what is culture heritage who and what arbitrates its distinction from knowledge who participates in curating and preserving this knowledge and how offline and online and whom do these processes of creation and preservation impact and how also offline and online we ask how we can dream together we raise Linda to hear Smith's voice one more time to resist is to retrench in the margins retrieve what we were and remake ourselves the past our stories local and global the present our communities cultures languages and social practices all may be spaces of marginalization but they have also become our resistance and hope these are the questions we ask ourselves and each other and all of you as we dream of possible futures from the margins and beyond how have I benefited from colonization, racism or the comforts of the status quo what from my own past do I choose to carry forward and what should I let die whose knowledge is still missing and how can I support and honor people who best hold these knowledges and finally we leave you with the most important question of all what kind of ancestors do we want to be thank you thank you thank you we have time for questions there are some box bouncing box mics I believe they're about to get thrown into the audience surely you've got some questions for Anasuya and Adali go and we've got time as well come on don't be that New Zealand audience that has no questions we're just gonna come on just throw it at someone there is one, sorry here's one down here right done they're soft they're all nice I've always viewed lack of participation on the internet and very similarly to colonialism to factor who got their fastest with the mostest and whose voice is loudest because of it I can see how your efforts can produce a real tangible result and sort of evening up those scales and making sure that the people who are latest to the party also get to argue over how much music gets played but what efforts in particular can you see are being made to make sure that people are getting to the party not just that once they're there they can actually speak out and be heard but what organisations, what efforts can you see to get people into the digital life so they're to make sure they are being heard digital access online access what efforts are you seeing that you can speak out about and tell us to help and support so thank you thank you for your question and I think what I want to start with is also acknowledging that when we think about access we usually think about having access to the internet, having a mobile phone that then allows you to be online and I think our frames and the way we're thinking here is just pushing that boundary a little bit not a little bit, a lot further than that because then access to what what is it that you're reading and then can you also produce it if the minority of the world is producing what the majority is reading and consuming and taking as knowledge something needs to change so that is the expansion of access and the frame that we then now is posing to all of you right access goes beyond just having internet access per se and at the same time there are many organizations around the world working on digital access and as Adele says we're helping, we're working with them to sort of expand the way they define it one of the most interesting sort of pieces of work in many parts of the world are mesh networks right so ways to get internet access to the last mile to places that are very remote and using communities who own and cooperate together to run these mesh networks there are wonderful networks for instance in many parts of Latin America and Asia including one that we love greatly called Rhizomatica in Oaxaca there's a feminist infrastructure group that we work with closely called the Association for Progressive Communications that has been working across the world to make sure that feminist communities, women's communities are also online in different ways and I want to continue to bring back exactly what Adele said which is that one of the ways that we often think of access is that sort of this binary are you online or offline and we urge you all to think more deeply than that because for many people in the world the internet doesn't look like your browser, it doesn't look like Firefox and Chrome, it could be Facebook help or it could be Google search, most often it's just the smartphone right most people now understand that it's online as a smartphone but in different parts of the world they're using this in multiple creative ways Malaysia has the largest number of messaging apps in the world Asians talk a lot just saying Indonesia is the social media capital of the world there are extraordinary numbers of Bahasa apps in Bahasa Indonesia so around the world using the internet in different ways ways and define the internet in different ways but access has to mean ultimately for us the ways in which the gaps between the internet user and the internet producer shortens and let's have multiple parties right because then it's not only the corporate party of the ones that came first but also what are the alternative ways that some of these communities are then leading and creating right like to be online Hello sorry I have a question thank you so much I thought that was totally brilliant in my language we would say Mandangu I wanted to ask a question about preservation of knowledges in an appropriating world in a world that will reduce so from an indigenous Australian perspective I really appreciate the links between complex data management orally historically and then how that brilliantly translates to the digital world but I know there's huge fears within my community of having secret sacred knowledge appropriated or taken as a general standing for everyone when there's a much greater complexity than that and you know if one person puts something online will that be seen to represent us all so I just wanted to ask you guys what do you think for some advice you have about like appropriating techniques and how to protect information that's such an excellent question and I wish we had the answers and I think our answer and my answer would be discomfort has to be a second skin right we have to have the awareness of knowing when we or someone else is doing something that feels inappropriate we may not know quite what it is but just having that sense of discomfort and then as you know someone earlier your colleague brilliantly talked about the CC licenses asking right we can't afford to be gatekeepers for our own communities and yet we also have to be protective of what is sacred knowledge what is appropriate to be shared and in the ways that we work in our communities we ask each of our community organizers to be talking with multiple community leaders and multiple elders but also multiple young people because you know again one of the things about the digital world is that many of the elders feel very inadequate faced with this while their young people are all on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and whatever latest messaging app there is and one of the Kumiye elders said to us and this was very poignant to me she said I need you to remember that till 1978 in the USA Native American culture and religion was banned it was illegal for us to practice our faith and our cultures so for us even forget even sacred knowledge even talking about our practices in public is very difficult for us but you know my son doesn't have any trouble so one of the things is this really interesting mediated conversation between generations and I think many of those we work with especially people like Persephone whom you saw are part of that kind of conversation and convening of consensus and consent from within the community around what gets shared and how I think we need to be very careful about what we do for ourselves but also who represents who are gatekeepers again asking the difficult questions not necessarily having the answers is probably the way to go and I would like to add that I think our communities are right to be right like defensive to sit in this comfort and to not trust given everything and all the processes for generations that we have been through and one other thing that we as whose knowledge sees that if we are then leaders of the design of this processes and the technologies then we don't need to trust someone else because we then are defining what is it that we want to share what the platforms and experiences that we would like to see in the world are being created so it is about seeing more of us sitting at the tables and behind the computers that are coding the technologies that we use in our daily lives any more questions I can see a hand up there it is so hard Hi thank you so much really appreciated that kind of following up on what you were just speaking about and using the example of decolonizing Wikipedia do you have examples or advice of those situations where somebody does try and edit and change information and then gets sort of basically slapped down oh we've never heard of that I'm sure that's never happened of course but hypothetically hypothetically it happened to me it happens to me a lot I think one of the interesting things about this and I will make a meta point and then make a practical one is that part of what we say about Wikipedia as Wikipedia is that its greatest strength is that it's enlightenment driven and it's greatest weakness is that it's enlightenment driven if you are a Wikipedia you need obviously access to resources of internet access the computer leisure most importantly leisure who gets leisure and then you need the facility of a discursive epistemology argumentation on Wikipedia as you've clearly hypothetically found for yourself when you make an edit if that edit is disputed by someone you have to then come back and argue for why the edit is appropriate in the first place so there are a few things to remember as practical tips and we can do a little editathon afterwards if you'd like we'd actually be happy to do an edit on the fly have your citations ready so the references are most important again as we've pointed out that is a limited thing and yet of the ones that you can have them ready make the baseline comparisons so for instance my first Wikipedia article was an African Nigerian feminist and it had a speedy deletion notice on it five minutes after I put it up I had eleven references I'd already been a Wikipedia for a while and what it was was notability so they claimed that this person who by the way started the first pan-African women's funding network in Africa was not notable enough and so I had to argue that New York Times is not everyone's local newspaper and that Nigeria has one of the largest populations in the world narratively Antarctica has more articles about Antarctica than of all of Africa there are more articles on Wikipedia about Antarctica than all of Africa so sometimes you have to come in with data for your argumentation the other big big trick is to have a Wikipedia in your pocket find us we exist and we have networks for you know, when one of us is tired or offline and we pass it on to someone else but we are really there are networks of Wikipedians who recognise how limiting this can be for newbies for people from around the world for those who don't like arguing in this way and yet have expertise and we're very very willing to support Kia ora thank you very much for that talk you alluded to this a little bit already one of the this is true of the western world and of the global south but one of the places where we all have the opportunity to share knowledges and to see representations of our culture is in the walled gardens the Facebooks, the wee chats how does that intersect with the work that you do do you want me to tell it do you want me to start oh the joy questions you know we live in a world where we're complicit in capitalism right, we're all participating in it and so even as we critique we are on Facebook one of the reasons for us being on Facebook is that many of our communities are on Facebook why is that because Facebook has one of the best localization localizations in the world their language rendering is actually superior to many other platforms so many of our communities actually live on Facebook in their own languages so we have to recognize that and at the same time Facebook makes many of these communities feel incredibly unsafe so part of what we can do is our relative privilege of being both of us we might be unusual in Silicon Valley and yet we have access that many of our communities can't so we bring their stories we bring their critiques we bring their challenges and we try and successfully sometimes not so successfully in other times make Silicon Valley a little more I'm trying to use my words carefully and I'm not sure why but really for Silicon Valley to recognize its power, its privilege and its brutal shadow on the world today part of what we are terrified about is that in the world of capitalism tech capitalism is different from financial capitalism because financial capitalism all they wanted is profit they've done that really well but with tech capitalism there is a god complex there is literally a version of the world in which Mark Zuckerberg will say I'm here to improve the world I'm here to make the world better and that is frightening when you're not willing to listen to what the world actually wants from you and so holding holding to account and at the same time recognizing that as Adeli said again we have to be in these spaces we have to be the coders we have to be the designers we have to be the UX and UI folks we have to be in internet governance forums right we have to be the ones who are designing and architecting this thing rather than being what we are now experience we're user experience we're the end user it's time to stop being the end user and to be the producer need the box can someone throw the box over here I love this all black version of it I mean really that was a fumble but that's okay yes almost perfect thank you thank you as well as as well as information and knowledge that comes from marginalized community there's an enormous amount of writing and pictures and other material about marginalized communities from outside which we continue to digitize what should be the status of this how do we contextualize it do we continue to put it out there or not that's such a brilliant question and my question back to you is that are you asking them right are you asking these communities which of these images they want to have out there right like which are sacred for them because as we said here nothing right like about us without us so I think the first place to start is where that community is sitting and having that dialogue and asking those difficult questions and once then right like they come back to you with the answers is that yes that is something we would like to have shared with the world how them to do that with love, integrity, respect and solidarity and I think the political frame for this is interesting right because as you said I mean I say this to glam institutions in Europe a great deal our people's histories and knowledges are not in Indian Brazil they're sitting in London and in Amsterdam and in Berlin so there's extraordinary opportunity but when you shift the frame to being one from sort of patronage well where the glam institutions we will you know sort of with munificence and benevolence open up our collections to this is reparation I think it shifts the way you do the work and I know glam institutions are struggling with this and we our heart goes out to you and this is the right struggle to be having these are the right conversations to be having to have the conversations around what reparation, reclamation, return look like even if you're not able to actually do it though we hope you can having the conversations I think is key is the starting point how these are great questions I wish I had answers to all of them we'd be solving the world's problems right now hello do you mind if I I'm over here following on a couple of previous questions about infrastructure and the importance of being part of the building of knowledge structures and technical structures I'm curious of your perspective on the notion of the internet versus internets or even intranets for instance I know I'm aware of at least a new content management system that I've referred to which is aimed at the storage and communication of indigenous knowledge frameworks within a community not necessarily for outside audiences but sort of storing that knowledge for the community itself and what's your perspective on like that as a strategy as opposed to or as in relationship to using social media platforms that are commonly held like Facebook and Instagram another excellent question and yes when you we use internet with the capital I we're assuming multiple internet right so literally the internet is over 65,000 networks right now connected by a technical standard called a boarded gateway protocol for those who are nerds and as we said before there are multiple different forms of internets that different communities use and I think it's a both and answer and the reason we say this is again depending on the community and what they want to share with the world there is deep, deep value in having space within one's own communities and we know Mukritu very well and love it and at the same time part of what we think is a foundational crisis of the world today is the crisis of our knowing that we do not know each other as fully and as well as we could or should and so how do we get to know each other better if we aren't able to share some of our knowledges, some of our ways of being and doing across different communities one of the reasons that we talk about Wikipedia a great deal with tough love as we have is that Wikipedia is one of the places it's the fifth most visited website in the world if you're someone who is Guarani from Latin America and you want people to know about Guarani history and knowledges you get on the Spanish Wikipedia right and you write about your peoples and their histories again based on what you'd like to share but without that none of us may be able to ever know what the Guarani people are or what their histories are without visiting them in Colombia or Venezuela as the case might be or Brazil that's right they span a very large area so it's a both and I think and again I think it needs to be community led with a strong sense of allyship and co-conspirator what's the word co-conspirator territoriality? I have no idea I've just made that up some thing partnership so much easier we like co-conspirators the all blacks have gone to sleep yes thank you so much again