 I mean, we have half an hour. All right, let's start. All right, thank you. And welcome to the oddest panel seating I've ever experienced. And look, our fourth panelist running up to the stage. Perfect. Perfect timing. Because if we're not standing up, the cameras can't see us. All right, you know what? Let's make this a standing panel. I was not prepared for this, but let's stand up. It's half an hour. Welcome to this, but I will wander around and be visible. Excellent. Bridging the gap. Trying to figure out how we can best work together in the movement and specifically, we'll scratch the surface of what keeps us from doing so. My name is Johan Jonsson. I'm a Swedish Wikipedia and also working for the foundation where I handle part of the communication around product development. And this is the panel. Sam, who is a product manager, moderator tools. Runa, director for language and content growth. Sakti, who is the regional manager around Southeast Asia here. And Julia, who is a communication relations specialist working with fundraising. All these people work around the community in some way for the Wikimedia Foundation. If we had a lot of time and had a big conversation, it would make no sense to have just foundation folks talk about this. But we have 30 minutes. So we are going to scratch the surface a little bit and hopefully bring some clarity to a few of the things which makes this difficult. So very, very briefly, what are the issues we're facing when we're talking about the communities and the foundation having this gap and not always understanding each other? Sam, you have the microphone. Microphone, I'll start. So I wanted to talk about this a little from the sort of product perspective. So I work in the product department, building tools and features for the community. And I think for us in product, I think we in the community are pretty aligned, big picture. We want our products and tools to be as easy to use and feature rich and inviting as possible. But I think then the sort of gap arrives because there's just simply too much for us to do. Like there are so many different platforms and tools and skins and projects and ultimately only so many product teams. And so although we might both want all those features to be as good as possible, there's only so many things that we can do in a given year. And so I think the foundation is constantly trying to find what is the most impactful project we can do? What is the most requested project we can do? But ultimately we're going to miss things. There's going to be projects that simply don't quite make the cut given the limited number of things we can do. So that was all top of mind for me is that sort of constant prioritization that we're doing and how that may or may not line up with one community group to the next. Hi, so I'm also from the product and tech department like Sam. So besides the thing that he's already said, I primarily work with language support among other things, but that's a pretty front and center part of my work. And when you're talking about languages, you're actually connecting them directly to individual communities of various sizes. So the moment you are having that perspective of the people who form a certain language community, you see how small or big or connected, well connected, ill connected far away. They are from the entire movements core in a way and how they are connecting to different parts of it. And that could be like the technical part of it. That could be like the awareness part of it. There could be like other opportunities talking with each other. So I think the gap that I see and that I try to like constantly focus on the levels of the areas that we are working on is to make things as equitable as we can in terms of participation because the doors have to be kind of like more open for people to come through and be part of the movement, do what they need to do. Not necessarily everybody has to do the same thing, but if they're doing something, it has to be satisfactory and as easy as possible, not just from the product and tech part of it, but also from the other opportunities. So yeah, I work mainly with communities around fundraising and it's a topic which can be quite heated in the movement. Many people are not particularly interested in it. Some people are very interested in it and one of the things I encounter a lot as I try to do reach different communities. So on the one hand, the English Wikipedia is our biggest fundraising campaign in December. We reach the English Wikipedia community. What are the for us where we reach the right people to have discussions with? On the other hand, there's the international campaigns which are the non English campaigns from Japan to Brazil, Mexico, Italy, spreading across the globe and will also try to reach communities on those wikis, having the same conversation, talking to people about collaboration on fundraising, messaging in order to also I don't want to educate or kind of make people understand the importance of fundraising, why we fundraise the way we do, how we include community feedback and how important it is to bring our community on board, but ultimately also why we need to raise funds in order to fund our movement in order to have wikimania and other things. So finding places of having meaningful conversations with volunteers in different communities is one of the things that I keep working on. So I work for the partnerships in Southeast Asia around four years now and I can see that there is a thing that we that I personally believe very beneficial to improve the connection with the communities, which is interaction, direct interactions is very essential. I'm coming from the academic backgrounds and we love to generalize everything, right? We love to generalize. Let's make similar things here and there and here and there, but believe it or not, according to my experience in Southeast Asia regions, each communities are different. Their difference is how they perceive themselves as a community. The priorities of the wikimedia projects that they have sometimes they're less focused on wikipedia, but other wikimedia research project. And again, the cultural aspect is also important. So as the foundations itself, we need to be aware of it and understand from this cultural point of view. It's always a bit weird to have this conversation from the foundation perspective because we are the minority in this. This is more to present our view than to explain the problem in itself because we're just a tiny corner. But what are the different ways in which the communities and the wikimedia foundation understand decisions and prioritizations and how things come to be because quite often we end up where there are in communities one understanding, or many understandings with one dominating understanding, which is different from the understanding in the wikimedia foundation. And how does that happen? Yeah, so on the product side of things, I think something that I see quite often is there's a kind of group of users, maybe it's a whole wikimedia project, maybe it's just a subset of that project. They have a product or tool that they need worked on that doesn't fulfill some of their needs at the moment. And obviously for them that's the most important thing in the world, right? That's the tool they use every day. It doesn't work for some reason. It doesn't have a feature they need. And to them it seems very obvious that that thing should just be fixed, right? I just need this button being added or I just need something that seems fairly simple. And I was a volunteer before I joined the foundation. Absolutely participated in those kinds of discussions where I said like surely it's easy just to add this one button, right? It's only a small thing and it would be very impactful for me. But then I think at the foundation we're seeing that issue 200 times, 300 times, all of these little groups that say I just need my one thing fixed. And so it's, I think sometimes then it's just a process of us trying to figure out, okay, how can we possibly have the most impact, which is the one that is going to affect the most number of users or be the biggest difference from where something is now to where it could be. And then trying to go back and communicate and justify that to all of those other groups that had their thing that they really needed to work on. Can be a real challenge. One good example of that is the, there's a project we're working on at the moment on my team to improve some software on English Wikipedia for the patrollers, for the new page patrollers. That's a project that we hadn't worked on for many years because ultimately it's a piece of software only used by a few dozen editors. And so it was quite hard to prioritize that, you know, that we were always comparing it to, well, we could work on this thing that is for all administrators or all patrollers or all active editors. But for them, that's a critical process, right? It's a thing that doesn't work. And so I'm glad that we're finally spending some time on it. But it's going to be hard in the long run to say that we should work on that rather than some other big project. So that's something I've been thinking about and trying to figure out how can we strike the right balance between those small projects and the, maybe big projects. I think I would have said the same thing as Sam would if Sam has. So I'll pass it to Julia or Shakti for a different perspective. Sure. So from the fundraising, it's also very much of like, we need to fundraise. It's how our movement is funded. How do we communicate that in a way that people understand but also see how the money we raise is used, how they have access to it. So the kind of whole life span of the fundraising from the banners, which is on someone's home wiki and disrupts readers and might bring people into spaces with complaints where you don't want them. So that's why we try to do the fundraising campaigns as short and efficient as possible to interrupt the projects the least. But like then also explaining why it is necessary and how the whole life span of the funding works in the movement is something to kind of work on to also, yeah, understand the need of the fundraising. Well, from the partnerships perspective itself again, when we're engaged with partners, impact is really essential. We need to create, you know, impact that able to cover, you know, more regions and also benefit to the community itself. So the key is communications in here. We need to find the middle ground whether this kind of collaboration should be beneficial for them as well. So when we have a good communications with them explaining to them and become a good listener, I think it will create a consensus and also mutual understanding between the foundation and the volunteers. So sticking a little bit to the question, what do we need to do better at the foundation around the specific things you just mentioned? Because we talked about our perspective, but it's not like there's this one perspective and people just need to understand it, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a huge topic. I'm not going to have the answer, but for sure some of the things that I'm thinking about is this question of how can we make sure everyone feels heard, even if we're not going to prioritize the thing that they're particularly interested in? What can we do to support them or how can we integrate their view into the thing we are going to do? And also like maybe I think something we've been trying to do for a long time is not only listen to the loud voices in the movement, it's very easy for someone to dominate a conversation on English Wikipedia. I love the bludgeoning policy or guideline that it's very easy to take over a discussion just by saying a lot. And so I think we've tried to stay clear of not only listening to loud voices, but I also think sometimes we need to consider that maybe they're being loud for a reason, maybe there's something we should be paying attention to and trying to balance kind of the very broad consultation with also the sort of quite specific listening and engagement that we need to do to make sure that we're really prioritizing the right work that solves as many problems as possible. I want to build upon what Sam just said as well as Shakti because so I work from India, which is like way far away from San Francisco. So I have a perspective for the local regions around me as well. So while English Wikipedia is a pretty big presence in my country, the communities over there are much like not associated primarily with the English Wikipedia. They're associated with their local dictionaries, Wiki sources with their local language Wikipedia's or for, you know, local activities and stuff like that. So when we are trying to understand what exactly we need to connect on, we probably have to look a bit deeper into like what exactly is the need for that group of people? Is it a natural alignment for them to come to the more prominent platforms like, you know, on fabricator where we have our issue tracking system or on top pages of different Wikipedia's or are the local gathering spaces more, you know, more friendly or less intimidating for people to come and make like, you know, natural connection points with the foundation folks who want to like, you know, mutually understand each other's perspective, understand how they're building priorities, what exactly are the challenges they are both facing while they're trying to move in the same direction of like, you know, movement growth. So there could be those little spots of interactions that we can customize around our around ourselves and see if we can maybe utilize them, scale them up in other directions and then also like, find them, find how they connect into the more conventional interaction spaces. Yeah, I want to build briefly on what you said because I think the whole listening to people is absolutely crucial from a fundraising perspective. Yes, we need to fundraise, but we need to tell people or explain to people why we fundraise the way we do fundraise and also give people the space to collaborate with us on this. So it's not just the one way conversation but the listening and hearing people's input is really important. Like, for this year's English campaign, for example, we have an extensive collaboration page which is on Wiki where people can already input now like five months before the campaign. So having this listening and collaboration aspect to it hopefully helps us to all move forward together and making it the whole communication but also the whole aspects around it better. We just had a meeting. I don't know, maybe 15 minutes ago, right, with one of communities in Asia and we are aware that I think cultural sensitivity, it's also important. Are you agree with me, Sam? Yes, cultural sensitivity. This is something that might quite difficult to explore one by one because culture is various across countries. However, even though it takes time, it's worth it to build a good understanding and see how our volunteers across cultures mindset how they perceive something how will they think even though it takes time but it's worth it. We have talked a bit about how one can try to bridge the gap. Why is there a gap? How has the gap formed from the very beginning? That's a really terrifying question. I have one specific thought though on this which is that software development is really hard from a product perspective. It's especially hard in MediaWiki more so than in other contexts. I mentioned this sort of thing of when as a volunteer I thought I could just ask for a button that did a thing and surely that's pretty easy. It turns out MediaWiki is really hard to develop in and projects take a lot more time than you think they're going to just purely from the technical side of things ignoring obviously all the design iterations and trying to make sure you're building the right thing. MediaWiki is a really complicated ecosystem and so when I joined the foundation I would sort of and we started working on sort of product solutions. I'd be sort of assuming that things would work way quicker than they did. Again, an estimate for an engineer and someone told me that yeah, you probably need to at least triple that estimate and I was like, wow, okay. That's very surprising to me. So it's a lot harder to just fix something than it seems. It's especially hard to kind of jump around and fix a bunch of different things. The different communities want you to work on. So it's a huge topic. That's not the whole the whole answer, but I think that's one thing that sort of contributes to this is that you know, when you look at something like the wishlist survey that I don't know if really wants to add anything to that, but it's really hard to jump around to all of these disparate places in the MediaWiki ecosystem and just make small changes. I think about the wishlist, I think your first point covered it also. I'll not repeat on that, but to your specific question about how this may have formed, the specifics of what may have contributed to how things are right now or what they were and where we have gone. Those could be like, you know, very specific and you may get a different answer when you ask different people, but on the general side of things, like when you have projects starting at a certain scale, a small scale, even the Wikimedia movement started much, much smaller than what it is right now. And when you keep growing, there is of course, like, you know, the challenges of scaling up when you have more people in the setting, little groups form here and there, trusted groups form. People are not talking to each other or trying to build their own little, you know, interest areas. And if the connection points are not built out very well as it grows and I'm not saying that we did a bad job of anything. It's the general tendency of any, any project growing to a bigger scale. Things like this will happen. Things like these gaps are inevitable. They will happen. It's just identifying them and making sure we are addressing them much sooner. And it's possible that we didn't address a lot of these gaps earlier and we are, or we are doing them as we see they are like, you know, as we see them getting like, you know, easier to handle or if they are like, you know, causing a big, big fire of some sort and we suddenly have to like, okay, no, we can't like, you know, not pay attention to this anymore. So, and when I say we, I don't mean the foundation. I mean, everybody in the movement because everyone's like, probably struggling with their own issues related to how like, their little affiliates have grown from like, 10 years ago to now or their user groups have grown from before to now and, and all of that. So, possibly that's just challenges of us growing from like, a hundred percent, a hundred percent, Wikimania this time. And that's how it is. And I'm glad that we are talking about it because this is how things will slowly fall into places. We'll identify where are the challenges? How do we address them? How do we keep talking about them? How do we surface them? And onwards from there. Yeah, I don't have much to add to that. That was very good. I think also with the area I work in, I mean, fundraising, everyone has an opinion. We're all humans and we all like to voice our opinion. So it's finding that kind of safe space where we can all constructively talk together in order to bridge the gap that everyone's opinion has probably brought about. Yeah, well, it's going to be a long effort, but let's do it slowly, but sure, right? Slowly, but sure. Does it help with people who are active in both groups? And in that case, how? And with both groups, I mean, I mean, as community members and Wikimedia staff. Yes. No, but I given them both active on English Wikipedia and also member of staff of the foundation. I find that I spend a lot of my day actually either communicating with one of those groups, right? Either either speaking to to volunteers to to community members, editors about a thing that's going on at the foundation, trying to kind of add as much useful information as I can. You know, not not trying to be an inside mole or anything, but you know, try and like explain perspectives or elaborate on like how things are working or why something is being prioritized and vice versa. You know, the Wikimedia movement is a very complicated place and quite regularly at the foundation, you know, someone needs to work on a project and they know nothing about it yet. And so I along with plenty of other wonderful people at the foundation that are also community members. I do spend a fair amount of my time then kind of trying to explain or give perspectives on some community initiative, some tools, some some user group and try to bridge that gap and make sure that perspective is being heard. So yeah, that's generally a fair amount of my time is kind of those sorts of discussions on on both sides. It's funny that your creatures of habit and talking the same sequence. Yeah, but anyways, so I did not join the Wikimedia movement as a volunteer, although my entire career has been in various kinds of open source projects. But so I did not have the community perspective when I became a staff in the Wikimedia Foundation. But over the over the years, I think there's like I have, I don't consider myself outside the community at all. I mean, it's just a identity that we have built for ourselves how we are. Being in both places, I like I said, I can't really make that distinction where I am just wearing this hat or that hat. It's a blended hat for me. But I think it's interesting to like have a better peak into how the communities are changing. That gives a lot of insights into how the communication might need to be like, you know, changed in structure. Like for instance, if you're talking with people who have been in the movement since the last 15, 20 years, that's kind of like a different profile of volunteers who have a different connection, a different historical legacy with the project, how they showed up 20 years ago, how they're connecting now. Maybe they're using just one kind of device for all the work that they do on the on the Wikimedia platforms, whereas compared to like compare some of the newer volunteers or recent entrance. You'll see the perspectives being very different and their connections being different. They are their their ambitions being very different. So it does help to understand what exactly is the weather outside the offices of the foundation. If you may and see how the movement is like the dynamics of the movement changing and like building up on that and figuring out how to like, you know, build the perspective stock amongst ourselves and say, okay, if you're coming from this area, this demographic group or this region, like what what to expect? What what do you expect if you are having a conversation with the communities over there? We are approaching the end of this panel. So if either of you have something to add to this topic, that's fine. No, I mean like you don't come from the movement as such. Yeah. Do we have any comments or questions from the audience? This last two minutes, I got out of my own. I've been it's very good at not interrupting them so far. I'm one of those who have joined almost 20 years ago, which Runa talked about. And I think both on the community side and on the foundation side, it's sometimes easy to forget that if you have full, you want full control. So if you're working on software, you want to control your software. You think that all right, I'm I was hired for this. I know what to do. This is my area of expertise. And then you're someone who's editing and you're like, but I'm the one who uses these tools all the time. I need to control this. I'm the one who understands this. And in a sufficiently big circumstance, so to speak, you will always lack control. And that is incredibly frightening. And that is going to be frightening on all sides. And that is very difficult to solve. That is one of the things we need to patch all the time. And it's just not fixable. It's just human nature. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you panel. Thank you audience.