 Hello, welcome everyone. This is Emna Mizuni. I'm a volunteer Wikimedia from Tunisia, and I'll be facilitating this session today. So finally, a year and a half after we're coming together, it's a very good time for us to celebrate. And of course, look ahead. As we celebrate our 20th birthday, the Wikipedia 20th birthday. So during this session, I'll be joined by members of the Wikimedia Foundation's leadership team. They will talk to us about their work and how they are doing to support our movement. And of course, while we're keeping with this Wikimedia team, past, present, and future, we'll have fellow Wikimedians joining the Wikimedia Foundation's leaders who have been around for years, as well as the new leaders at the foundation. So first of all, let me say thank you to everyone, staff and community members who have put together this session. And as I move forward, let me introduce you to Amanda Keaton, the general counsel and a member of the transition team leading the foundation during the search of our new ED. Amanda will be joined by Zino, who has contributed to Wikimedia projects since 2006 in a number of roles in the English Wikipedia. Zino also is contracted by the foundation since January, 2021. We facilitate the community discussion about the universal code of conduct. App to you, Zino and Amanda. Hi, I'm Zino and I'm happy to be here today with Amanda Keaton, general counsel for Wikimedia Foundation legal department, along with the legal team. She oversees the community resilience and sustainability wing, which includes trust and safety, community development, human rights, and movement strategy and governance support. Amanda, thank you so much for sitting down with us today to talk about your work in the legal department and as part of the foundation's transitional team. Thanks, Zino. So fun to be here and I'm especially excited to be in conversation with you. Is this your first Wikimedia? This is. I joined right after Wikimedia in 2019 and unfortunately was unable to go because my son was born about a week and a half before Wikimedia that year. Oh, well, congratulations. It's my first Wikimedia too. And I'm looking forward to meeting some other contributors off Wiki for the first time. All right, we're newbies together. Here we go. Here we go. So you started, as you said, with the foundation in late 2019. What did you find most surprising coming to an organization with a large volunteer body that is deeply involved in the making and the outcomes of many decisions? Great question. So when I started, obviously, Wikimedia was a household name in my own experience. And so I had this amazing awe and reverence for the work as a reader. But of course, really stepping into the foundation and understanding the role of contributors, the amount of passion, time, expertise. It added this extra layer of pressure because really this whole amazing experiment in human collaboration has completely been driven by volunteers. And so getting almost the luxury to do this in my day job really amped up the level of the stakes for me, really, if you will. And so that was a little bit of a surprise. I also think in my role as a lawyer and given that I have a professional responsibility to uphold as a result of being a lawyer, I have thought a little bit about what it would mean to practice law in the open, so to speak, but really thinking through the complexities of what that means and how often we really wanna share and be open with our communities about our legal strategy, but how challenging that can be because we certainly don't want to expose the foundation or the movement and certainly not the volunteers to unnecessary or undue scrutiny or raise the stakes for them in a way that could jeopardize in certain extreme cases their life, their liberty, their ability to participate in the projects. And so really balancing those two commitments, with the openness and transparency, but also really respecting the confidential privilege nature of so much of our work is such a fine line to walk and such a careful balance to strike, especially when you consider that the brain trust that we have in this movement is immense. And so I always find myself wondering what would community members at large, what would a specific community member think about a particular decision or a particular pathway? And sometimes it's just not possible to ask, but we're challenging ourselves to do that whenever we can. Thank you for that. That brings me to my next question is that there's actually a lot of work done by the foundation in the area of human rights and public policy that does happen behind the scenes. It's usually unknown to most. What are some of the things that you can tell us that would be intriguing for volunteers to learn about the foundation's efforts in these areas? Yeah, great question. So I think there's a lot that's interesting in this moment and we see free knowledge and the internet in general under attack in many ways, especially as we've all lived behind our computers for the last 17 months. And so in some ways it's almost reignited the tech lash because our lived experience is so now informed by our life behind screens. And so I think for us, we're really thinking about what that means for the future of free knowledge and how we can continue to keep people safe. And some of that work is extremely out in the open like the universal code of conduct or I would even say the movement charter and ultimately the global council and thinking about the ways that those strategic projects can actually benefit us and really keep the power to the fullest extent possible in the hands of the volunteers who have made our projects what they are today. But some of that as you've alluded to necessarily has to be done outside of the limelight so that we're not flagging from a line actors giving them almost a playbook if you will about really how to attack our mission. So again, it's that careful balance. We have a saying on Wikipedia called don't stuff beans up your nose which means don't tell someone what kind of wrong things they can do with beans because maybe they didn't think about that. So looking to the future of our communities how have you and the transitional team continue to support the movement strategy initiatives to keep us moving forward towards our 2030 vision? Yeah, so I think there's a couple of ways that we're really thinking about this. Number one, we wanted to really trying to be careful not to co-opt the movement strategy. The movement strategy has been written by and for the movement that we have. And so we're really trying to get some explicit indications that many of the recommendations are ripe for implementation. And then we're thinking about how do we pair those recommendations for implementation with the resources including many fine human beings that work inside the foundation so that we can continue to really implement them in partnership together. And in some cases that means funding work that happens outside of the foundation and that's gonna be really exciting. In some cases, that means working with our movement of volunteers to figure out how we can implement them together. And I would say, that's what's happening with universal code of conduct. That's what's happening with the movement charter. And then I think even just taking one step back thinking about the spirit of the movement strategy recommendations and really knowing that we wanna ensure equitable decision making, for example. And we want to reflect our global aspirations which is one thing that's so exciting to me. So even things that really are the foundations, problems to solve, challenges to grapple with like the representation on our board of directors is being done in service of many of the principles that have come out of the movement strategy. So I think it's really amazing to see how far reaching the implications of the movement strategy have been and will be for our entire movement and the work that we do. Thank you so much for sitting down with us again today. It's really interesting to hear about some of the work that's going on behind the scenes and look to hear more in the future. Thanks so much, Zino. This was fun. So thank you so much for both Amanda and Zino for the emotions of the 2019 and the beginning into the Wikimedia movement, also for the insights. And now we're gonna move to a new topic, another topic and we're gonna talk about the funding. Funding has always been a very hot topic within our movement and personally as one of the lead organizers of several Wiki conferences, I know firsthand how critical grants and funding could be for any event or any get-together for the movement. So let's dive into the foundation's approach to fundraising and what it means to our communities. For this, we will have Lisa Grohl, the chief investment officer of the foundation. So Lisa leads the fundraising strategy as well as the partnerships team that works closely with the movement to create impactful partnerships that could expand our movement. She will be joined in the conversation with my successor, the 2020 Wikimedia of the Year, Sandra Sertay. So for personal reasons, we pre-recorded the conversation a few days ago as Lisa was unable to make the live panel due to a family commitment. Let's play it now. Welcome to Wikimedia. Thank you for joining us. And I have a couple of questions for you. So the first one is about fundraising. I know that as a nonprofit, the Wikimedia Foundation raises funds. What are the various ways that we do that? For those who are not familiar, but are at the conference to learn, what are some of the ways or the various ways that we raise funds? And could you share some of the approaches with us? Absolutely, thanks for the question, Sandester. So the main way that we raise money is through donations from our readers. And about 8 million people every year donate via the wikipedia.org from about 30 countries around the world in different campaigns that we run. And those donations average about $15 USD. So it's a great way to support the site and the movement. It aligns our values to our readers that we're here to serve. The other way is through grant-making foundations as well as major donors, where now the endowment is about to become a revenue stream as that hits the initial target that we set for it. Investment income from the endowment will start feeding back into the foundation now as a revenue stream. And lastly, earned income, right? So things like enterprise and other services that were also supporting the movement through sales or other types of services that are fee-for-service. Thank you. Now you mentioned enterprise. I would have saved that question for last, but now that you've mentioned it, I guess, that would be my next one. Recently, I was reading in my Kindle app and I noticed that when I encountered a certain word or concept, Kindle gave me the option of looking it up on Wikipedia so that I could get more information or context to what I was reading. And I saw that Wikipedia would immediately bring value into another app that I was using. And I thought about Wikimedia Enterprise anytime that happened. So I want to know, could you tell us a bit about what Wikimedia Enterprise is and anything else you add about the future of Wikimedia Enterprise? Yeah, yeah. Well, it really relates to kind of the future of the internet, right? Where Wikipedia content used to always be read primarily on wikipedia.org. And that's not necessarily the case anymore. It's everywhere. It's in apps like you mentioned. It's used in voice assistance. It's used in search and knowledge panels and in ways that are even less visible than that. So Enterprise is really responding to this big change in the internet on how Wikipedia content is surfaced, how people get answers to their questions using our content without necessarily visiting wikipedia.org. So Enterprise, one of the things that it does is it gives us a revenue stream that doesn't depend on that. It doesn't depend on people coming to wikipedia.org reading the article there and making a donation. So it really makes us a lot more sustainable, a lot more durable through diversification. So I will move to the last question that I have for you. And it's about this new grants strategy or grants program that we have. Why the refresh? Yes, what does it mean? Yeah, thank you for the question. So we've been using the same kind of grants approach for over six years, I believe. And since then, right, we've adopted the 2030 strategic direction and now we have the movement strategy that's taking shape. And it was time to reimagine how we think about grant making. And we've also learned things over the years. We've learned lessons that led us to also wanna adapt it a bit. So the main thing that it does is really moves decision making outside of kind of a centralized way more to the people that are closest to the problems and closest to the opportunities. So we're setting up regional grant making committees around the world. And we've also hired regional staff. So there's a program officer for Africa. There's a program officer for Latin America. So they're talking to people who really understand the cultures, often speak some of the native languages and really are better able to serve the committee. And the committee itself are people who are from the regions and have relationships in the regions and have worked themselves as volunteers in this movement in their own corner of the world. So we think that's gonna really make the decision making better and also help overcome challenges that are unique to each region. That might not be global challenges, but challenges that really affect just a particular place. So that's the goal is to get the decision making closer to the people doing the work and also investing in a couple other different portfolios. So one of the things that we've learned, particularly in emerging markets, it's really difficult to set up a charity. It's really difficult to start an organization, just even the legal side of doing that is a significant barrier. And so what we've learned is that oftentimes the most effective way to get work done is to partner with a like-minded organization. And the new grant making strategy sets aside funds for that, particularly for emerging communities where these challenges are really significant. So that we also think is gonna help really kind of increase the amount of work that's being done in emerging markets in particular and help us really center on that goal of knowledge equity and serve those places that have been underserved a lot better. Thank you, Lisa, for joining us. Thank you, Sandra, sir. Welcome to you, Emna. So as we move from this very, very important topic, I just want to highlight that we have an etherpad where you can post your questions to all of the speakers and they will get back to you. So we have the final part of our session now. We move with our final speaker, Tobi Negren, the Chief Product Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. He leads a team focused on supporting the reading and editing experiences of our projects. Tobi will be joined by Derek Alenghi, a Wikimedia volunteer software developer from Kanerun, and he is also the co-founder of the Wikimedians of Kanerun User Group. Thank you very much, Emna, for that beautiful intro. And I'm happy to be with Tobi on this conversation. Nice to have you, Tobi. Thanks for the opportunity. So I just have a couple of questions that we'll run through. The first one is you've been working with our projects since 2013, since you joined as the Director of about eight years, and now you're Chief Product Officer at the Foundation. What do you think is most unique about your work and what direction has the products, especially Wikimedia taken in that regard, to meet the demands of its users? Thanks, Derek, and it's great to meet you. And I wanted to say thank you for your work on the projects and particularly your work supporting technical contributors. It's people like you that really make the movement what it is today, so it's great to meet you. So I have a little story that I like to tell, and I'm gonna tell it. So when I joined eight years ago, if you had asked me if I was going to be at the Foundation in eight years, I would have told you no. It was my first, the Foundation is my first nonprofit, and honestly, my background is in corporate, like internet product management and engineering management. So I thought I'd come here for a year, year and a half, sort of do my thing and then go back to corporate life, but I did not. And there are two reasons why I've stuck around. The first one is I actually think this is the most interesting job in the world. We like to say when something happens in the world, it happens on Wikipedia. We've all seen our volunteers just jump into action when anything happens. It's really amazing. An average day might be intermediary liability in India, interventions for new users in Africa, new JavaScript frameworks. It's a fascinating place. It's a fascinating place to work. Second thing, and I think this is more of an answer to your question, working at a mission-driven organization with our community is really the most unique and special thing about the foundation and the movement. We have every page, every project that we have has a project page where we interact with our community, ask and receive feedback, test different things. I really like that. We have a team, community tech that actually takes project proposals from volunteers, vote on it and the volunteers vote, and then we start at the top and work our way down. And then next year we do the same thing. And finally, really respecting community values and workflows, we have a checklist called a riskers checklist after a volunteer that we use every time we build a new feature. And we use that checklist to make sure editors have the moderation tools and the workflows that they need. So I think it's really the community that makes this job and the foundation really unique. So as far as product direction goes, we have a medium-term plan with two priorities, product modernization and emerging markets. And so for the first part, we're actually rolling out updates to our core experiences, search with the visual media search on comments, editing via our micro-contribution work, structured contributions, a new user onboarding, reading, a desktop refresh project. And finally, talk pages. We're adding modern communication features like reply buttons, and that's going really well. And then for emerging markets, we're really focusing on mobile. With the exception of desktop refresh, obviously all of the features I just talked about are work seamlessly on phones. We're updating content translation to work on mobile. And we have our Nuka team that's actually based in India and Africa. And they continue to iterate on experiments like our KaiOS app, Wikimedia Previews. So we really can understand what free knowledge looks like in emerging markets. And so we're continuing to invest in areas for people who've been here for 20 years and people who are just starting out in the moment. Awesome, thanks. Thanks a lot for the detailed answer to that question. Yeah, and I'm particularly excited about the desktop refresh one. Especially as Wikimedia has had a stable interface for a while. So it would be really, really amazing if users begin to see some refresh and that we get some of the things that they have been demanding over the years to see on Wikipedia. My next question to you is, the world is under attack. So with pandemic, and we have seen a lot of readers and new interests on our project, especially on Wikipedia. How did that impact your team's work? I mean, for me, it really showed that the core model of community-driven knowledge creation worked and would continue to work. Like the core thing about Wikipedia and the projects was still just as vibrant as it was 20 years ago when the project started. And I'm just so proud of our community really for stepping up when the world really needed it. So I wanted to, so we're the product department, we like metrics. And so I wanted to talk about some of the metrics. So we actually saw record-setting numbers all through the pandemic. Probably not the exact way that we'd like to see these record numbers, but it just shows how necessary Wikipedia was to the whole world. So in April of 2020, see on Monday, April 13th, we counted more than 700 million page views. And for us, a page view is someone reading an article in a single day across all of the projects. And that was the highest we'd seen in the five years that we've been using our new readership metrics. In May of 2020, oh, and it was an increase of about 50% over the year before, right? So just an amazing jump. And then in May of 2020, we hit an all-time high in the number of active editors. And I don't know if you remember the Wikipedia is dying meme from the 2000s. We actually have more editors now than we had back then. And I think that's just a credit to our community. And just like the internet's gonna change, the Wikipedia will change, but this core, the core of the model of people volunteering their time to produce verifiable knowledge that hasn't changed. And we need to continue supporting them. Awesome. My final question would be, do you see any unexpected changes on or around our products in upcoming years that will better satisfy you in line with the 2030 strategic direction? Yeah, so that's a great question. So I think there's sort of two answers that come together for that. The first of all is recognizing that technology is an integral part of the movement, right? Like the Wiki was new technology 20 years ago and it really enabled the creation of Wikipedia. But also what's as important is movement strategy and how we're doing that. We're not making decisions, we're working with our community and asking our community for input about the future. And I think these two things come together in a really great way. And so from a practical standpoint, this means things like more mobile, right? Hearing that, we need to break down the editing process. We need to make it easier for folks. Video, oral histories, these are new content types that people really want. We need to meet the expectations of internet users around the world. More investment into projects like Wikisource and Wiktionary, people really want that. And I think finally I'll just put in a plug for our newest project, Abstract Wikipedia, which is essentially a way of ensuring that the encyclopedia can be written in all of the languages of the world automatically at the same time. So yeah, very excited about the future, but also really excited about how we're doing it, working with our communities to figure it out together. Awesome, thank you. Thank you very much, Toby. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks, Derek. Thank you, Toby. So thank you so much for both of you. And as we're wrapping up this session, I would like to extend my big regards and thanks to everyone who was involved here. But also I wanna stress and highlight that, yes, our movement is fascinating. It's very interesting. It's one of its kind. Let's keep in touch and let's see you around in Wikimania. Bye-bye.