 My name is Francisco Danz, I work in the analytics team in the technology department. We should be WikiStats on the graphs and I'll be facilitating this meeting this month. It's remote week, which means there's nobody in the room, everyone is in the comfortable pajamas, I hope, or comfortable toilets. My name is Francisco Danz, I work in the analytics team in the technology department. We should be WikiStats on the graphs and I'll be facilitating this meeting this month. Let's get started, can we get the next slide? Okay, I'm sorry for the bit of a delay. I think it's because I'm in like an 800 year old town in northern Spain. The ping is not as great as it should be. So this is the agenda we'll have to talk about today. First thing is what I'm doing right now, welcoming introduction to the agenda. We have a movement update with cool news about the Wikimedia movement. Danny's going to talk about the consultation about top pages. Greg's going to talk about the updated website design. Mcdaddy's going to do the movement strategy update. Then we'll have some questions and I've certainly some live WikiLove for everyone. So next slide. It's a movement update, let's see what we've got. So the Smithsonian brings images of diverse figures from the history of the U.S. women's suffrage through Wikimedia. Then we've got some really exciting news about the European Court of Justice, expedited in the case against the Turkish bloc of Wikipedia. There's a bootcamp launched by Indian Wikimedians to teach about the intricacies of vector graphics. Next slide. The Wikimedia Foundation research team has had a debate about designing ethically with AI and how media can harness machine learning in a responsible human-centered way. Then we have the fastest growing Wiki in 2018 by far Punjabi resource. They've been bringing the world's literally history to Punjabi speakers. It's very interesting. And a growing Wikimedia movement with training and learning at its core since 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation has tried and tested different curriculums to develop capacities in Wikimedia communities from all over the world. Next slide, please. And these are the events coming up in less than three weeks, about three weeks. We've got the Wikimedia. I'll see some of you in Stockholm. We've got the Wikicommission Pankophone, which I'm already regretting trying to pronounce that. It's 6th to the 8th of September in Brussels. And Wikicommission Deutsch between the 3rd and the 5th of October of this year in Wuppertal, Germany. Next slide. And we've got our own Danny Horn talking about the top pages consultation. All right, hi everybody. I'm Danny Horn. I'm Director of Product Management. And today I'm going to talk about the top pages consultation. Hidden away and unbeknownst to most of the readers on Wikipedia, there are literally millions of top pages, blank empty Wikipages, which are essentially the only way that Wikipedia editors communicate with each other. When people want to talk about how to write a particular article, they go to a blank top page and start writing their question. Next slide. But top pages on Wikipedia don't have different software. It's just a set of cultural conventions for how to write and code your response. And these cultural conventions can be kind of impenetrable for new people. For example, the idea that people can edit your comments, but they probably won't because of longstanding cultural agreements that you're not aware of, that does not make itself immediately apparent to people. So for new people, this lack of an interface can be shocking and difficult to understand. Next slide. So in 2012, Wikimedia Foundation started working on a new top page system called Flow. The intention was to replace the unstructured Wikitext top pages with a structured interface that's more familiar to current internet users. Instead of a big empty space, Flow has a text field you can click in to start a new conversation, and then there are clear signals for how to write and publish your posts. This feels more natural to people who have used other websites. It also does things like sign and date your post, posted in the right spot on the page so you don't have to do all that by hand. So this is a way better first experience for new people. It helps them to have those early conversations without learning a bunch of new Wikimedia. Next slide. But here's a message that was posted recently by a user who's been contributing to Wikipedia for 13 years. They write, test, trying to figure out how to post on this talk page, manual signature. Next slide. And then two minutes later, so much for this, what kind of talk page doesn't have an edit button? I manually constructed a link to https://www.mediawiki.org So basically, the user typed in a URL with index.php in it, the most natural thing in the world to do. Why is the software so tragically broken? So this is what happens when you don't meet the user's expectations about how software is supposed to work. You get confused, and then you get a new page. So basically, the user typed in a URL with index.php in it, the most natural thing in the world to do. Why is the software so tragically broken? How is the software supposed to work? They get confused, and they get mad, and they refuse to use it. And that is essentially what happened with low. Foundation's been four years working on the product, and it's being used in about 25 Wikis, but the experienced contributors are biggest Wikis just won't use it. If we want to bridge this gap, then we need to step back and learn more, and figure out how to build a system that helps both new and experienced people to do. Next slide. What we did this spring is have a big global consultation about talk to each other, reaching out to both new and experienced people on a number of different projects and languages, and ask them what works for them and what doesn't. We had three important principles going into this process. Number one, openness. Yes, open-ended questions in order to learn and understand. Number two, deep sincerity. We don't have a predetermined end goal that we were driving at, and this is not an exercise to validate things that we were doing. Number three was inclusivity. We have to involve people with different perspectives from as many Wikis and as many languages as we can. Next slide. Phase one of the consultation was in March and April, and we gave people these four questions as promised. We want to discuss the topic with your community, what tools work for you and what problems block you, how do newcomers use talk pages, and what blocks them from using it, what do others struggle with in your community about talk pages, and what do you wish you could do on talk pages but can't due to the technical limitations? Next slide. And then volunteers on 20 Wikis hosted conversations on this topic. Wikipedia is in 15 languages as well as Commons, Wikidata, two dictionaries, and an in-person beat-up. And we also conducted two rounds of user testing with people who read Wikipedia a lot but haven't edited because they don't know how, and they could represent the perspectives of people who are just starting out on our platform. Next slide. Next slide. And people talked a lot. We ended up with the equivalent of about 320 pages to read and process, and we analyzed it, and then summarized our findings in a big phase one report. So I can tell you some of what we found. Now, obviously, we're conducting a consultation about talk pages and hosting most of those discussions on talk pages. So unsurprisingly, most of the people who responded were pretty comfortable with talk pages. But we learned some very useful things. Next slide. First, very active contributors who participate in complex discussions and workflows really like the flexibility of an open, unstructured Wikitech talk page. For those users, an open Wikitech field gives them a sense of mastery and fine control, and using that fine control just to make things easier for other people would make it impossible for them to do their work. But there are a lot of things that experienced contributors have to do manually that the software can help them with, or watch listing a particular thread or archiving old threads. Next slide. Meanwhile, new people in that environment are just completely lost. What they need is a reply link that puts their posts in the right place, and a clear place to start a new thread. They need automatic signatures and dates. Also, one thing that came up in the user testing is that when new users look at an article page and then the corresponding talk page, they assume that there must be a talk thread that corresponds to each article heading. We never thought about that, but when it came up, we said, yeah, okay, we can see how that's really confusing. You're supposed to read and interact with the article page and the talk page in a completely different way, but they look the same, and the design of the page doesn't help you to understand the difference. Next slide. Another thing that we learned during the consultation is that there's a volunteer from Russian Wikipedia named Jack who built the house, who created a user script called Convenient Discussions, which solves quite a few of the problems that both new and experienced contributors have. Jack's tool requires you to add a little code to your CommonJS page. It only works on Russian Wikipedia, and it adds some JavaScript on top of the Wikitext talk pages, which adds little reply links at the end of posts that you can see here. Next slide. And when you click on the reply link, it opens up a text field for you to write in. Tastes your signatures, the placement of the posts so that people don't have to do that manually, and it even lets you watch the specific discussions on the page in a way that works pretty well most of the time. So this is the kind of thing you can find out when you're open to learning more about what our users are doing. It's a big inspiration for the new product direction that we came to. Next slide. So this is the heart of the new product direction that we have for the next year. Unstructured Wikitext talk pages need to be improved and not replaced. What we're planning to do is build a new default experience on top of existing Wikitext talk pages with a clearer design and better tools. Next slide. So there were many experienced contributors who were saying the thing that is perfect about existing unstructured talk pages is that it all works the same. It's just an open edit window, and so you only have to learn how to do this once. That is not actually how product design works. The way that works is that the design should actually express what you want people to do and how to do it. We don't want people to start posting talk threads in the middle of the article page, and for most part we don't want people posting article content on the talk page. So we need to give people cues in the user interface to help them to interact with the page in the way that we want them to. So that's going to be a new design that's a default experience for new folks, basically how they're supposed to interact. Next slide. Experienced people who want to use Wikitext should be able to opt out of the new experience and just use Wikitext to give them the sense of fine control. But to add the tools that experienced people really want, we may need to make some small to medium changes in Wikitext conventions and practices. For example, to let people watch this specific discussion, we need to change something about the way that headers are formatted to help the software recognize where an individual discussion starts on the page and where it ends. Next slide. And we know that experienced people are actually okay with changing Wikitext conventions sometimes because of the ping feature. This is a feature that was created about six years ago that lets you send someone a notification by typing a special template like ping and then the person's username. There's a couple of rules about it and using it is a little tricky and you have to learn how to do it correctly. But once it came out and just started to spread, people changed their habits because it enables a feature that's incredibly helpful. So we know that it's okay first to change things on the Wikitext level and ask people to adjust their habits as long as that change is directly connected to something that provides real value for them. Next slide. So that product direction was the outcome of phase one and then we're currently in phase two, May and June. That was about getting specific feedback about parts of that product direction. Those discussions have ended and so we're currently writing up our findings in a phase two report which we'll publish on Wikitext before Wikimania. And then at Wikimania, we'll have a session in the community growth space that talks to people about it. And that will be the end of the talk page consultation because after Wikimania, then the editing team actually starts to use that product direction. They start working on improving top pages as their next big project. Next slide. But even when the official consultation is over, the editing team is still going to be working in partnership with our communities to figure out how to make this product direction real. And they're going to continue with the same principles and spirit that the consultation was based on. Openness, sincerity, and inclusivity. It's going to be a lot of work and it's going to take a little while, and I'm just really excited about taking those next steps and you will be hearing more from all of us at Wikimania and then in the future kind of going into the fall. If you'd like to learn more about the project, you can go to mediawiki.org, look for top pages consultation 2019, and also I'll be happy to answer questions after the presentations. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Danny. Next up, we have Greg talking about the updated website design. Hello. So next slide. So a few years ago, the communications team was tasked with taking a look at turning wikimediafoundation.org into a place to tell our story. So next slide. So with that in mind, one year ago this month launched a soft launch and updated version of the website with a very different scope and with a much more focused purpose and with a lot less content, much more manageable. Next slide. And with that, we had a lot of accomplishments over the last year. We had more donations come in, increased traffic. We saw higher engagement. We got a lot of really positive results out of it. Next slide. But we also recognize that we could do even better. I think anyone who's ever worked on a project like this understands that it's iterative. You can kind of wait until you get everything done that you want. But frankly, if we did that, we would still be building the website today. And we wouldn't have gotten all those gains from the last year. So we took everything that we learned from the experts that we worked with on the first design, all of the amazing feedback that we received, all of the things that we learned during the soft launch. And we worked with the design team within product who did a fantastic collaboration. It was really, really wonderful to work with them. And we came up with the updated design that we launched earlier this month. And I wanted to go over some of the highlights of that new design and some of the things that you might find very interesting. So next slide. The first thing I want to note about the site is that it is audience-driven, meaning that all of the sections are really with the thought of who the primary audiences for this website are. And for us, that is essentially people not yet familiar with our story or external audiences, sort of a simple way of thinking about it. So generally, we wanted to speak to people who are just learning about us, are potentially interested in partnering, are potentially interested in becoming a volunteer, or maybe interested in donating. Whatever their interest in joining our movement is, we wanted to kind of help them understand who we are and the work that we do. So all of the areas are directed at audiences that essentially we identified during the first phase as the target people who really want to learn the most about our organization and our work. Next slide. So to speak to those audiences, we begin with this really captivating bureau, which has some really exciting elements from all around the world. You see there's the Wikipedia globe throughout it. There's a reader who's navigating over a puzzle piece throughout the whole thing. It's a really fun mural. If you get a chance to take a look at it, you can have a lot of fun finding a ton of little details. Next slide. And you also, if you visit the office soon, as of about two weeks, I believe it's being installed next week, the mural that's on the website will actually be making an appearance in the office wall at the San Francisco office. So that is a mural that will cover that whole wall. It's really, really cool. We're super excited about it. So next time you're in the office, please definitely check that out, but you can get a sneak peek of it right now on the website. Next slide. So with that captivating mural, we then want to support it with really compelling imagery. So we know that images, particularly images of our community, help tell our story and help really visualize things for people. So we found ways to integrate as many images as we could, while also not getting too heavy on bandwidth. So there's clever use of colors and overlays and things like that to allow us to reduce the footprint of the site, but really have a very colorful and very image-influenced presentation. And all of those images, next slide, support the engaging and informative text that we developed. So we actually wrote all of the texts for this website from scratch, every word, everything. Some of it certainly is borrowed from other places as we found the wording, worked very well, but we really spent time thinking about what would work best in the space that we were creating for these audiences. So it's very engaging. It's meant to be very succinct. And we try to be as informative and really get across the points that we hear the most as far as questions or inquiries here at the Foundation. And in the communications department, we've certainly seen a decrease in the number of inquiries we receive, which is showing us that people are getting the information that they're looking for from the site. Next slide. And of course, all of this text needs to be multilingual. We aren't just an English-only organization, and we realize that our previous site was really limiting our ability to speak to all of our audiences. So the multilingual design isn't just about having the site available in multiple languages. We really tried to integrate it into all areas of the site. So even on the English site, you'll see the vision statement appears in other languages. You'll notice that next to headers, there'll be a translation in another language of that header. We also tried to integrate more into the code so that accessibility issues are addressed around languages. And it used language and design in some really clever ways to try to help reinforce the notion to people that we are indeed a multilingual community and not just trying to reach you in different languages, but that it's really a part of our culture. Next slide. We also have integrated the blog, which has been really helpful in helping people find those stories, the in-depth pieces. So we sort of introduced them in a gentle way on the site, but some people, certainly Wikimedians, want to know more. We want to get into those details. And having the blog integrated right into the site has allowed us to create a real seamless experience for someone where if they are on the research page and they're interested about a very particular topic that we mentioned, they can click for more information and read a whole in-depth coverage of that topic and really hear the full story. And all of those are archived on there so they can click through and find other stories that relate to it and really find a full experience and really get a full narrative sense of the information and the knowledge that they're seeking about our work and our story. Next slide. And of course there's a lot more to go over. It's a demonstration on a site that's already up so I just feel a little weird doing that, but I did want to kind of point out the main things. But there's a lot of other things that we're really excited about in this updated design. It loads faster. We believe it's more engaging. We really focus a lot on user testing and we spend a lot of time talking directly to people who are using the site and showing them mock-ups and trying to get the best understanding of whether version A would work or version B would work. We're really proud of that. We also believe it's more accessible and we're going to continue to work on that. Next slide. And there is of course more coming. The site isn't done. We're going to continue to work on it. We're going to continue to get user testing. We're going to continue to work on ways to help with recruitment. We're going to continue to look at ways to make right to left support even better. We're going to continue to look at ways to make it even more flexible. And of course, we're going to be adding more languages. We're going to hope to add a number of more languages very soon and continuing to add more languages over time as we are able to. Next slide. So with that, I want to invite you to check it out. Go to wikimediafoundation.org. I think it's a beautiful site. I really hope you're able to use it as a way to direct people to find out about the foundation and the movement. If you've got feedback on it, we'd certainly love to hear it. And next slide. And with that, I want to make sure we thank everyone. We've had hundreds and hundreds of people who have been involved with the soft launch and hundreds of people who have been involved with this updated design. This is very, very much a movement-wide effort. And we really appreciate all of the help that we've received from all the different departments and all of the help we've received from members of the community, as well as everyone's patience as we go through the iterations and try to tweak and make this site something that we can all be really proud of. So with that, thank you all very much. And I will pass it back over to Francisco. Thank you so much, Greg. The new website looks so cool. And the mural is awesome. So next up, we've got Muradad Porzaki talking and giving us an update for the movement strategy. Great. Thank you. I also love the mural, Greg. Yeah, let's get going. Brendan, please. Hi, everyone. My name is Muradad and I'm the Information and Knowledge Manager for the core team of movement strategy. I'm really happy to be here with you today and particularly to give everyone an update on movement strategy. There's a lot of excitement in the core team and even more so amongst the working groups. And I'm really looking forward to share some of that with you. Brendan, take it away. Great. So where are we at? Wikimania is getting close and as per plan, the working groups are developing their draft recommendations for our movement's future. Movement strategy working groups are drafting recommendations as we speak. And for that, there's a lot of momentum and excitement and I can testify that they have been working very hard and contributing a great deal towards making us the essential support system of the ecosystem of free knowledge. Working groups are collaborating with each other, sharing draft recommendations and joining each other's calls and office hours. And we at the core team are really happy to facilitate this collaboration. Working groups are also eager to engage with everyone at Wikimania and looking very much forward to receiving your input on their draft recommendations. And we plan to publish the draft recommendations before Wikimania for better preparation and wider input. And we also aim to translate the draft recommendations into a few major languages for wider dissemination. Next slide please, Brendan. Great. Yeah, working groups they mostly work and connect virtually and coming together in person has proven beneficial in the past both at Wikimedia Summit and during the scoping phase. Some of these working groups have organized meetings in the last month and to help them consolidate the efforts and move things forward as we near the end of the recommendations drafting process. These in-person meetings they provide a space for working groups to collaborate in real time and they dive deeper into discussions and ideas. They also allow them to focus all their energy on the tasks at hand especially when there are so many elements to consider such as community conversations, research, external experts and advisors as well as input from other working groups. Other members have not been able to join due to travel complications or other issues. The core team has been has tried to facilitate remote participation where we can and we're getting better at it as we go. And referring to these points we're sharing blog posts a few weeks after each meeting the one from the capacity building working group in Singapore has been up for a while and so when this presentation is uploaded you can always click the hyperlink. There's one coming up from the roles and responsibilities working group meeting in Utrecht and others will follow suit and yes, so the hyperlinks are included for that presentation. Next slide please. You know a process like this has never been done before across our movement as such and we're learning as we go along. It's been a wiki paced learning curve. I sometimes refer to it as a learning climb and we're so grateful to the working groups for their dedication and determination. And there are lots of ways for people for communities and affiliates to engage with movement strategy and that's a great segue to bring us to the strategy salons. Next slide please Brendan. Thank you. So over the last month we've kicked off a small grants initiative for strategy salons. These are in-person events around the world that are being hosted by affiliates and they are four wiki medians together together talk strategy usually around a few thematic areas of their interest and to discuss our future. Next slide. And salons are taking place from June to September and the content from these discussions are being shared with the working groups. We have so far held salons in different parts of Africa including Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Egypt and Morocco. We've also held salons in Bangladesh and Hong Kong with many more countries to come and we're really excited for that. So check out the reports plus photos and videos and it's on our meta page. Next slide please. Great. And in addition to the strategy salons the core team is also supporting larger events in a few regional and linguistic hubs. These regional events sometimes referred to as summits they bring more people together sometimes 10 to 40 people to discuss strategy and there are two coming up in the next two weeks in Estonia and Armenia there's a big one happening that we're super excited about in East Africa in Uganda I mean for East Africa in Uyanda and back in June regional strategy summit took place in Bangkok for the ECF region and I'm so happy to have Jamie and Kartika here with me on today's call to share some of that magic with us. Next slide please. Okay I'll pass it on. Hi everyone I'm Kartika and I'm Jamie. So the output of the salons and also the larger regional strategy summit like ECF is intended to help the working groups in the recommendation drafting process. We are actually joining this presentation right now from Aman and in here we having our very first in-person meeting within the community health working group. So last month Jamie and I took part in the ECF strategy summit over 35 participants from across the region and many backgrounds gathered at the East and Southeast Asia Pacific regional strategy summit and in Bangkok it's contributing to the diverse regional voices to global conversation on the movement strategy. We had participants from all across the region like Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand Thailand, Myanmar and also some countries that never have representative affiliate like Timor-Leste. Among the participants there are also another six working group members and one of the strategy liaison from the region. Next slide please. Okay. Hi, this is us. Auntie Wan Yeah Auntie Wan we share stories and identify opportunities and blockers relating to non-thematic areas together and we did by deliberating in open discussion format and build a real-life community experience that we share with each other everyone is happy to be there and really willing to share from and learn from each other. On the second day we regroup and choose one of the thematic area that had the most input the day before just in day one. And we further discuss and consolidated our input for the respective working groups. Both Kaka and I are from the community of working group and we joined that group to be able to take back input from the region directly to our fellow working group members. And now I'll do it back to you. Great. Thank you. Next slide please, Brendan. So yeah, thanks for sharing your experience. So yeah, there are still many ways to get engaged with strategy. You can come hang out with us anytime at the strategy space at Wikimania. So the nine thematic areas has a designated time. So if you want to talk structural change around an area that interests you, come support your favorite working group at their session. We've also just released our community survey which is a really easy and anonymous way to provide feedback. And we are now in the process of sharing it across multiple channels, languages for that later this week. Next slide. And actually that's it from us. Thank you so much everyone. It's been a pleasure to speak with you and thank you to the foundation team for continuing to give movement, strategy, time and space. And that's it. Back to you, Brendan. Thank you. Thank you, Merda. Now we have some time for some questions. Our own James Forster is going to be monitoring the IRC for any questions and if there's anyone who wants to ask you in the hangout, that's over cool. Do you have any questions? So far I've not had any questions from IRC. I don't know if anybody on the call or on IRC would like to add one right now. Otherwise this is going to be quite close and fast. All right. Let's move on to the next slide then. Yeah, if you have any ideas for the monthly activities meeting, follow this link. We're going to finish it up now. Oh, no, sorry. Next slide. We've got Wickey Love live coming now as the last part of the meeting. If anyone wants to show any appreciation to anybody, give someone a shout out or thank you. Please, if you want to hangouts open your mic or you can again leave your appreciation on the IRC channel and James will really love that. Wickey Love to our host Francisco from Aman. Thank you. Thank you very much. Wickey Love to all the folks who for various reasons have to be in the office this week or next week doing background work that helps us keep the organization going while the rest of the team is doing their best to enjoy working from home in our pajamas. Thank you and thank you, Brendan for hosting in the office. Shout out from Brendan. In fact, Wickey Love to the legal team for their work on resolving the turkey block which I'd also like to second. We got some Wickey Love on the Hangouts chat. Wickey Love to SACTI for being such an amazing participant in ESEAP 2019. With that, we're going to conclude with so much everybody for being here in Hangouts and on the YouTube stream. I'll see you everyone next month. Thank you.