 All right, hello, and welcome to our session, Knowledge Equity, A Collection of Voices to Pave the Path, here at the first completely virtual Wikimania. My name is Lili Iliev. I work as a project manager at Public Policy at Wikimedia Deutschland at the Politics and Law Team. And together with me, my colleagues Anna Muskel and Niki Zeuner will guide you through this session. Anna is a senior EU policy advisor and Niki is a senior advisor global partnerships at Wikimedia Deutschland, and they will be speaking to you soonish. But first of all, I would like to tell you what to expect in the next 45 minutes. So let's look at the presentation. Let's look at the agenda together. And I hope we will be seeing it in a second. So in the next 10 minutes, just as a reminder, we will say again what is meant by knowledge equity in the context of the Wikimedia movement. And where does this intention come from? What is the strategic importance of the topic? And we will describe why we have chosen a publication, so a collection of voices in the form of essay pieces to work on knowledge equity. And in the following 10 minutes, we will briefly mention the specific topics that the seven women of the Wikimedia movement are currently working on and writing their essays. And then we would like to invite you to an open discussion about all of this and hear from you your questions, your feedback, what are the projects that you are working on connected with knowledge equity. All right, so let's get started with the term knowledge equity and what goals it is supposed to achieve. And for this, I will hand over to Niki. Thank you and welcome everyone. So I just wanna provide a little bit of context and actually, I hope we're on the slide on the strategic direction. Yes, we are. Okay, great. So in 2017, the strategic direction was developed as part of a lengthy process to figure out where is this movement going in 2030? And the strategic direction says that we will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us. So that's our lofty vision for 2030 and not just the vision but it's a direction we're marching towards. And there were two pillars sort of teased out from that strategic direction knowledge as a service and knowledge equity. Can you go to the next slide? So knowledge equity is described in this context and this is what we're reacting to and this is the context that we're working in with this publication is that we will focus our efforts on those communities and their knowledge that have previously been left out and that we will welcome people from every background to build strong and diverse communities. So what that means is that we need to break down barriers that make it hard for people to join our movement and those could be social, political, technical barriers. And so this publication is starting to think about how can we do that? Over to you, Anna. Yes. Buttons and muting as usually is a bit of a dance. Yeah, having said that and agreeing with the fact that the project actually fits into this whole conversation and was probably inspired very much for it. I also would like to say that from my perspective and from the conversation of my fellow authors, my feeling is also that the project is deeply personal in a way that we all have these conversations with colleagues and allies and friends that circle around those topics because nobody has a perfect answer to on how to do all those things and how to do them with integrity and how to do them sincerely. And when we were debating the topics, we were also saying, well, if there's anything that keeps you awake at night that you think, oh, I could have said that to this person or I could have done this to bring it forward then this is the topic you should be writing about. So this was a bit of anecdotal but still I think very real prompt for the seven people, seven women to get together and to write. Each of us writes her own look at it and we will tell you more about the topics that we chosen. It is of course not representative, it is not exhaustive. It is, as I said, deeply personal and coming also from our experiences and different paths of life. There is of course an overarching idea to look into those topics as in addition to the debate that our community of people working with policy topics but also other issues that structurally support the work of our movement could add beyond the basically everyday reactions to events. So to step back a little bit from our daily questions to something that is more overarching and more I would say on the meta level of the conversations that we are having or somehow maybe brings a bigger context or a broader context to them. And it's important because we are the movement that advocates for creating and curating and preserving knowledge. And the feeling is that within our group that we don't do this enough ourselves so it's also an opportunity for us to actually practice what we preach and to look at the thinking in a way that makes it less fleeting and more recorded and also up to the debate with everyone who is interested in debating those issues. So what's the goal, Lili? Well, the goal of the publication I would say is to making existing approaches to knowledge equity visible and discussable. And in dealing with, as you said, different aspects of knowledge equity, I think one question especially has come to the center and this question, there it is, seems to us to be essential and also suitable to deal with knowledge equity in a meaningful way. And it is, how do we make room for different needs and new forms of knowledge? And with this question in mind, we have come together virtually over the past months and identified topics that particular concern us and in the next 10 minutes we will briefly introduce these topics to you just to give you an idea what we are working on right now. And the three of us, myself, Niki and Anna, we will talk also on behalf of the four people who are not here live with us today. And these are Virginia Diaz-Gobernardo. She is a communications and public policy manager at Wikimedia Espanya. It's Nafsika Papa-Nicolaou. She is a chargée de mission à faire public du chef Wikimedia-François public affairs officer at Wikimedia France. Then Marie-Louise Goul, she is a project assistant in the politics and law team at Wikimedia Deutschland and Alison Davenport. She is public policy counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation and unfortunately she cannot make it with us here today live, but we will do our best to speak on her behalf. So Niki, can you start with your topic? Thank you, Lily. So the topic that I chose kind of chose me because I ran against it for all those years that we were working on the movement strategy, the topic of volunteerism came up again and again and discussions around how can we make sure that volunteers from new parts of the world and from marginalized communities join us. So our movement traditionally is built on volunteerism and as we attempt to open it up to these new communities and people who come from the global south from marginalized communities, I think it's really worth checking our assumptions on volunteerism. So asking questions like does this Western Northern model that we built our projects on still work in these contexts? If we assume that everyone has the same privilege or the same understanding of volunteerism that in itself may constitute one of those social and economic barriers for people joining us. So in my essay, which I'm still working on, I look at sort of our version of Wikipedia, Wikimedia movement version of volunteerism. I also look at criticisms of volunteerism over the years and then in search of solutions, I've reviewed some models for volunteer remuneration and looking at sort of what the pitfalls are, the benefits are and how that could become a model within the Wikimedia movement. So that's my essay. And I think I'm also supposed to talk about Virginia's essay. So I'm going to move right into that. So Virginia is looking at the community of trans and non-binary folks who also are already part of our movement or who might want to join our movement. And she, in her piece, she will explore how cisgender people can better support trans and non-binary communities in the defense of their rights within the Wikimedia movement. So she's looking at the current situation, what is visible at the current map and what's missing in the context of knowledge equity. She will provide some insights on new research and also finally, she will reflect on possible new paths that we could build towards a more inclusive digital territory. So she does this from a cisgender person's perspective. So she doesn't speak for the trans community, but she really would like to look into how can we make our projects a safe and welcoming place for those communities. Back over to Lily. That's me, yes, where I'm speaking for Marie-Louisa. And her topic is what does Hannah Arendt have to do with Wikimedia? So something very specific. And she wrote like a super short summary that I will read out for her now. So she says, in my essay, I want to discuss what Hannah Arendt, so the famous political theorist, one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century or one of them, anticipated about the collaborative authorship of Wikipedia and the importance of plurality for our construction of the world by our knowledge and discussion. Arendt coined the term of plurality, which she sets at the center of our speaking and acting and our connection to the world. It is this term of plurality I want to follow to make apparent the importance of diverse perspectives in order to approach objective and nuanced knowledge. Yes, that's what she's working on. And the next topic is what I am working on. It's called the knowledge that is missing three thesis for more diversity in the Wikimedia communities. And I thought about these three thesis on the occasion of a collaboration between Wikimedia Deutschland and a woman's network in the German speaking wiki world. It's called FemNets. And the goal of this collaboration is to better support female authors in networking and organizing conferences on gender gap and all the detailed questions about it within the wiki world. And the three thesis that could maybe be used to stimulate forward thinking for more diversity are thesis one, Wikipedia needs an update like regarding communication culture. The second one is Wikipedia must represent knowledge equity in 2030. And the third one is Wikipedia needs new alliances. So in my essay, I would like to elaborate a bit about which steps are important from my perspective, especially on the part of Wikimedia organizations in order to actively support more diversity in the communities. And now I'm handing over to Anna, I think. Thank you. So my topic is, as you can see, I write about what I know I'm a senior policy advisor and I want to write about policy and policing the global village, which is the EU legislation and how it actually can help knowledge equity. My title is a working title. So bear with me for a moment. I'll try to explain what I mean. So definitely in the EU, because the countries agreed to collaborate together and to cooperate and to create Europe that has no borders in many senses of the world, legislation becomes definitely one of the key drivers of sustainable change in any area because we can agree together on the principles and on how to make things work better or how to remove some certain barriers. We see it online also that sometimes it's easier to travel between European countries than to, for example, access content that originates from other country. And then therefore in the EU, I think we have a unique chance to change realities for all people that are in the EU. And specifically, I mean not only the citizens of the EU, but everyone that is here. And also present it as an example to other parts of the world of how also we can do it in a deliberative manner. Interestingly, the premise behind creating the United Europe is basically the same as the one behind internet. If we think of the framework of the global village, Europe also has this dream of a situation where as our anthem says, all people will be brothers. It's not very gender friendly, but the text is old as you may know. So it's worth exploring how those two realities come together and what we can actually do to help everyone to take part in the sum of human knowledge and how the EU could do it better. And also specifically, what is the part that our movement can play, not only in being the recipient of that changed reality, but also of being an actor that helps shaping it by the work that we do in taking statements and in presenting our projects, but also in sharing the learning that we have from our corner of the internet, where we collaborate and where we actually include people. So this conversation is ongoing, but we are already at some milestone of it. And this is what I would like to focus on and invite people also then to reflect and disagree with me perhaps. The price of admission is the title of Alison Davenport's topic and essay. How complacency around abuse and harassment can undermine the goals of knowledge equity. This is the longer, the byline of the title. As you may already know, all essays are very interesting because they look at those aspects of knowledge equity and what can we practically do from many points. I believe that Alison's essay has this sort of an overarching view that is kind of connecting the dots where we are already admitting through many our projects and actions and discussions around strategy and in other processes that there are knowledge gaps on Wikipedia and that our project need to grow more diverse and so does our community of editors. And Alison will question the expectation that marginalized groups must expect some level of harassing or demeaning behavior as the price of admission online, which basically is to say that we have also not only practical questions and dilemmas, but also an ethical dilemma, how we can invite people that potentially can have bad experience in our space and how we can make sure that this experience will actually be a positive one and that they are not the guests that nobody wants, but they actually become part of our community and that we truly and really make space and also question our behavior and our patterns of thinking in order to become a better community with all who want to join. So Alison will explore how Wikipedia can potentially avoid some of the pitfalls of social movements that have failed to protect their most marginalized members, which as we know is a very current and important conversation. And finally, excuse me, I'm dealing with buttons here, a super interesting and super personal take from Nafsika who is a policy manager in the community of France who she joined us at the beginning of the year with a very interesting experience dated to 2016 when she went to Greece, Nafsika is Greek and she went to Greece in pure sports to help refugees arriving mainly from Syria and Afghanistan during the refugee crisis to a transition camp and where nearly 4,000 refugees were placed and herself and a group of other volunteers provided support to have the necessary materials to live in and to settle in the camp like tents, blankets and other material necessities but also volunteers set up several tools to organize life in the camp and gave English lessons to help refugees to better communicate and to be better prepared into exiting the camp and starting a different life. And this is this personal experience that actually prompts her to also think about what is the role of knowledge and knowledge projects during the humanitarian crisis of this type. This is not the crisis that is going away in any way. If anything, it will be touching us even more and of course, especially the people that for different reasons have to go away from their countries. Also, what is the role of open knowledge actors for people who really need access to information in different ways? That's another question that Napsika lives into. How do we include these people? Because of course, it would be very biased and also kind of colonial to say that the only knowledge that there is in this exchange is the knowledge that we have. No, of course not. This is also how the people that come bring their perspective, bring their experience, lived one and also learned one and how this is an important frontier for us to explore and also to open up to those experiences that are also, of course, difficult because they become very personal and sometimes also connect with traumatic experiences. So how can we truly serve that mission and how specifically our movement plays a role and what are the challenges that we face and how we can be better allies in those conversations but also in those practices because conversation is only the beginning. So this is the topic that Napsika will, I'm very curious and eager to see the recommendations that she comes up with in that regard. Thank you, Lili. Lili, can you take over? Yes, I think we were thinking about having Niki to moderate a little bit and open the question. Sorry. Apologies. We have our script. I didn't read the script a little bit, sorry. Okay, so we would like to hear from the audience. First of all, if you have any questions and feedback, maybe and then if we have time we can go into some of our questions. So let us know in the chat, I guess, or in Rimo if you have questions on this project or on the topics. I'm also looking in the other patch right now and one question that, yeah, that occurs in the first site is by when would this book be available, which we can meet a project in Atlanta and make it available on, which he books, comments or works, of course. Shall we take that for Niki, you want? Yeah, no, you probably have a better answer. As the project is a bit of a spontaneous thing and happens a bit on the side of our regular daily activities, we decided not to set the hard date. But what we did discuss is that it would be great to have it ready, definitely this year, potentially having the first draft at the end of August, which of course with seven people doing very different things may go different ways. We don't know exactly yet how it's going to be available because on one hand, obviously we want to make it open and we want to make it accessible for our community. And perhaps it will have just a landing page of its own, but perhaps we will affiliate it somehow with any of the existing projects. I think it's a bit early to talk about this now because we really need to see the shape it takes in more detail to know this. My dream would be also to just publish it as a book, not only to make it accessible online, but to also have the paper version, which of course is an endeavor on its own and as it is a volunteer based project, we of course have to answer some questions of how we can make sure that it's edited correctly then and how to convert very convenient linking within the online text into something that works in a book and which basically implies editing and all that. So and then who could make it available? These are all the questions that we decided to deal with as we progress with the content, which is the important part, but definitely we will make sure that as we talk about it now that when it's out, we also find an opportunity to let everyone know that it's already there in many ways and through our community and beyond it because I think it's also important that it's not in a void, but that it actually prompts conversation and that we can be present and treat it as an introduction to that conversation within the community and also maybe to inspire other people to create their own versions of their own essays or however form they want to choose to continue that because obviously it's not exhaustive, it only shows part of the story. We are facing the fact that we are all from specific background with the same skin color with the kind of similar experiences in the way as different as we are. So also obviously it's not something that should be treated as the voice on the topic, but just as a collection of perspectives on it that can be taken forward and also debated and followed by something that is even more interesting and more diverse. Thank you, Anna. So as you can see, we have still more questions than answers ourselves, but that's good. I would add also that for us, these essays are supposed to be discussion starters and again, like Anna said, they're not the truth or anything, they're just discussion starters and some of them might be a little provocative just to get us more advanced in this conversation about knowledge equity. So I posted our questions in both the ETHAPAD and now I'm going to post it in the chat of the RIMO. I'm navigating between all these sites here. It's a little challenging. So any thoughts on our questions? One is maybe to hear a little bit about projects connected with knowledge equity that the participants are working on. That would be a good first question. Thing to answer for you guys. If you have any thoughts, and I know we just covered the topics pretty in a short way about any thoughts on volunteerism, any thoughts on marginalized communities such as transgender or refugees, any projects that you are working on that touch these topics, we'd be super interested in hearing about. So feel free to raise your hand. The other question that we have is basically the question that we're asking ourselves as the guiding framework question of the book, which is how do we make room for different needs and new forms of knowledge? So we have functioned as a movement that has developed its own rules, its own governance, its own ways to work together with volunteers and organizations. And the lofty vision to move out and welcome anyone who wants to join us from all communities all over the world might require some changes and might require some new ways of thinking. So that's where we come from and we welcome any thoughts from the audience. There's 48 people in the audience. I know there's wisdom in this group, so please share it. From my perspective, it would also be super interesting just to hear about what you are working on. If you are working on any projects connected with the spectrum of knowledge equity, for example, improving the gender gap in different ways and forms. And I would be really curious to hear about that or maybe what would be missing in such a publication because it can be widened by everyone. So there's a question, I think, in the... Will it depend? To my topic, actually, I'm wondering on the models for compensating volunteers, does that not sound like divergence from the concept of volunteerism itself? Should they be compensating that question? Yeah, this is obviously the key question when we talk about volunteerism. Can we even call it volunteerism anymore? And does this idea of volunteerism that we have been so successful with in the Global North, does it work in the Global South? Or does it work as the main basis for co-creating knowledge? What we call it then, then it might not be volunteerism, it might be activism, it might be community organizing. But this is exactly the kind of conversation I would love to see start. I can say that in the global context, in the context of humanitarian aid and development aid, those people who do get remunerated are still called volunteers, because they get paid less than what they would get paid in a comparable work situation. There is a question from Faye. Any thoughts about correcting an imbalance of sources, where national sources maybe 95% or 100% biased against the community, what is seen as knowledge? Can I take that one? I may just offer a few thoughts, because that's obviously a big topic that is around, and I think it's hard to say now as we are writing it, I think it would be difficult to discuss any of those issues without actually also at least trying to model some responses to the question, what is truth, what is knowledge, how we look for it. It's hard to say, I don't think any one of us has this as kind of a key thought if I'm not mistaken or one of the key things, but I hope that whatever will be produced can be sort of also read through that lens. Definitely if we talk about the situation of refugees, for example, just to take a Nazca project, some of them come from places where they flee situations where they cannot actually have their own voice represented in many ways. So this is also something that we can potentially offer some service to this, then there's also the issue of traditional knowledge that has different knowledge protocols as we may call them, not peer reviewed or media type of research and validation of sources, but other ways. So this is also where I think it would be a pity if the conversation is advancing without discussing that. It may also be that part of the conversation that we're having while writing can point us to the situation where openness or creating knowledge equity situation actually also means that we are not only open for the content, but we also open for new projects and new ways of working with knowledge, right? So that basically, encyclopedia is a Western knowledge protocol or one that comes from originates from Gobar North and represents our knowledge in a way that we consider good and unbiased, but maybe it doesn't work for other contexts and we have to also be very open in discussing that when we actually mean to make room for spaces. So not only the content itself that comes, but also the people bring with them, but also the projects that actually suit their needs better, right? I'm in ongoing conversation with my friend Alejandro who works with indigenous communities and believe me, they don't need the encyclopedia in their everyday life. They need mobile phones to stick them to trees in Amazons to hear if the foresters come, foresters come because it's dangerous to put people there obviously as they can be killed. This is the level of technology that is interesting and needed to them, right? So where do we go? Where do we enter with our know-how? We cannot figure it out by ourselves, right? We have to kind of shut up and listen to what the needs are and then we can respond and provide our know-how in service of the communities that are not with us. And I agree that the fact that we have certain way of looking at knowledge is also a barrier in itself in being together with them. So that would be my initial response to that question. Thank you, Anna. There is another more of a comment from Ashwin in the chats. He says, accessibility needs to be considered as it presents a very real-life challenge to those who have accessibility issues. These are not different needs, but unfulfilled needs, long-recognized, but on which progress hasn't been adequate. And I would agree with Ashwin absolutely on that. So let's take this opportunity where we say knowledge equity is important to us and this is part of where we want to go and address those accessibility issues. Absolutely. I absolutely agree. But I also think that having this situation where we wait for the Wikimedia Foundation to fix things is probably not something that we should carry into the future. So it needs to be other ways in implementing movement strategy and powering other people in the movement. And I understand there's funding streams for that planned. So I think we need to also change the way we address our issues and not make them something that we wait for the Wikimedia Foundation to fix, but take things into our own hands. That's just my very personal opinion. I'm going to look at the chat and see if there's anything else that we need to address here. We have about five minutes left. So this would be the time you can also obviously find us later. Maybe in the meantime, Niki, I wanted to add something. A very concrete project about having also a more effective, broader public discussion about what we consider relevant knowledge and whatnot because I think this issue of knowledge equity is for most people super abstract. And I think we will only be effective in finding ways to have more knowledge equity if we also have a broader public discussion about knowledge in general and what we consider important to have access to and so on. And one very concrete thing that Wikimedia Deutschland, for example, is doing is having a public event series broadcasted by a big radio station and it's called Knowledge Power Equity and we're trying to have intellectuals talk about what we consider valid, relevant knowledge. And I think this is also important just to make people think about, wait a second, is it encyclopedic, academic stuff that I consider relevant or is it maybe a little bit more? And I think this is also relevant and I'm super excited about this project, for example, just to give something very concrete. Thanks, Lily. So there's one last question which is a good last question. What is the desired impact you would like to see after the publication is made available and how do you see this to become prominent? Kind of, it's kind of an Anna question. I mean, I could say a few things about it too but why don't you try it out? Sure. So I think that a lot when we discuss, right, friends, we also talk about how great it would be to basically start the conversation on those topics. So we can sleep at night, right? So we can have those discussions in real life and not only in our heads. And also, so that would be that would be the desired outcome, one of them. The other is I really hope that, we can get more of the people from our movement to record what they think and what they, and we don't want to get them by making them but by maybe inspiring them and seeing, ah, if those seven women from Europe can do it, of course I can do it too, right? It's, please write. Please record your thinking. Please record your knowledge. Please share it with people because it's so fleeting and it's so precious the experience that we have and we kind of take it for granted and of course we don't have time and it's difficult and then we, you know, and writing is difficult sometimes but if you don't want to write, record a podcast, doesn't really matter but I would love this to see personally as an effect that people get more active in basically speaking their truth and sharing their experiences and connecting the dots that they see so that we don't only, you know, argue on internet and get angry at each other but that we actually can, you know, sometimes agree to disagree, sometimes, you know, have a basis to change our thinking and also change our mind and I think, you know, this is maybe the most traditional way to do it, that we sit together and create a publication but, I mean, it's as good as any, right? And everybody will have their own idea how to do it so to me that would be a great effect that there is actually this ripple effect coming from this for everyone that we continue the conversation and that we also, you know, record that knowledge and that thinking between us. So we're out of time. Thank you, Anna. Thanks everyone for listening. Please reach out to us and hopefully we've started some conversations here. Thanks so much. Any last words? No, thank you. Have a good week, you may need them. Oh, yeah.