 I'll go ahead and start it. Okay. All right. Welcome everyone to Wikimedia Monthly Activities Meeting for August 2019. This is also our last monthly activities meeting, which I will be talking about a little bit later. My name is Gregory Barnum. I am the communication strategist here at the Wikimedia Foundation. I normally am out of our San Francisco office, but I'm actually working remote this week. So you were seeing my sister's den behind me. So I'm working for my sister's house this week. So greetings from Michigan. So let's jump into things. So next slide. So this month's agenda, obviously this welcome introduction, we've got a lot of movement updates and highlights we're gonna share. And then we're gonna get an update on the movement strategy process. We've got a really exciting report on Wikipedia's roles, excuse me, Wikipedia's role in the lives of teenagers. And then we're gonna get a presentation talking about the new Wikimedia space project. And then we will wrap up by talking about the conclusion of this meeting and the future of these types of activities. So moving on, let's talk about movement update. So our first big update is, I can move on to the next slide, is we had Wikimedia this year. It was a huge success in Stockholm for more than 800 people from nearly 80 countries who gathered in Stockholm for our 15th annual Wikimedia. Quite a few of these other items relate to Wikimedia and it's partly why we have so many this month. It was a very busy Wikimedia. At Wikimedia, they announced the Equal Edit, which is making Swedish history and Wikipedia more gender equal. This was a collaboration between the Foundation and Wikimedia Sweden to launch at Wikimedia and has already produced some really cool content. Also at Wikimedia, we announced a new partnership between the Foundation Movement and the UN Human Rights Commission, or I'm sorry, Human Rights Office. We're gonna be partnering on the creation of human rights related content on Wikimedia sites. So that's super exciting new partnership as well. Next slide. And keeping announcements from Wikimania going. We also announced Emna, who is our Wikimedian of the year, this year in recognition of her inspiring leadership within the movement, especially within the Arab and African communities and for tireless work raising awareness of Tunisia's extensive history and culture and also her work on AFCOM and a bunch of other activities around the movement. And we also announced to a new staff member, Ryan Merkley, who's joining as chief of staff and announced Shani, who is joining as a trustee and also covered the reelection of Maria is our board chair and Natalia is our vice chair for this upcoming year. So some exciting new additions to staff and board happening at Wikimania as well. And next slide. And then two things that didn't come up at Wikimania but I should wanna talk about. One is there's some new illustrations that are appearing on Giffy. We'll show an example in the next slide. We partnered with Adele who we worked with on some of the art around the We Miss Turkey campaign and they put together some really cool graphics which have already been used extensively on Giffy and you can find on Giffy or use and a bunch of different messaging platforms that are out there. And we also had a really interesting discussion about the EU copyright reform and its effects that you can read about on the blog as a part of our summer legal fellow panel. It was the EU copyright and you talked about the recent reform that passed, how that reform came to be and what comes next. So if you wanna recap on that, you can go to the blog. And I also put on here moving forward after this meeting all of these types of updates and highlights are available on the Wikimedia Foundation website. And in fact, since we launched the new website that's where we've been borrowing all of these highlights from. So all of the highlights from the last year or so in this meeting have come directly from that site so you can go there wikimediafoundation.org slash news. Next slide. And then this is just the fun visual of some of the Giffy gifts that were put together. Our personal favorite, my personal favorite and kind of a staff favorite in comms has been Brainy which is the one that appears sort of in the bottom right. It's actually now in a few places on the screen but he's the one reading the text and all that fun stuff. So that's gloomy. So this was some gifts you can play around with the really cool. Next slide. So with Wikimania behind us, our next couple of big events is Wikiconvention facrophone which is going to be in Belgium and then Wikicon Deutsch which is going to be in Germany. And also all of these events for the last few months we've also been pulling from Wikimedia space. So it's space.wmflabs.org. There's a calendar where you can see all of the events happening across the movement happening over the upcoming year or years. So that's a great place to get this slide information moving forward. So with that next slide, I wanna hand it over to the fantastic movement strategy team for this month's movement strategy update. That's us. Thanks, Greg. Hi everyone. My name is Mirdard and I'm the information and knowledge manager from the core team of movement strategy. And today I'm joined at this call by the French language community liaison, Diane Rangville, who's joining us from Grenoble who will speak with us a little later. Hello everyone. Very good. Okay. We're actually a little bit sad to hear that this is the last monthly activities meeting. We've really appreciated having designated time during these events to share updates from movement strategy. But we're also excited to get on Wikimedia space and for the audience you can learn about and engage with what's happening and follow us on all matters strategy via our portal at 2030.wikimedia.org as well as on social media and through affiliates and community strategy liaison. So plenty of ways to get involved and it's great to be here with you today. Take it away, Emerald. So it's been a whirlwind of a month for all of us working on movement strategy and so much has happened. First and foremost, we have the first draft recommendations from the movement strategy working groups. Over a year ago, working groups were established around nine thematic areas that were deemed important for movements, future discussions and strategic direction. These thematic areas, they have come from many prior discussions and a lot of research and the working groups which comprise about a hundred people from across our diverse movement and all in a volunteer capacity have come around this. This process has brought together editors, admins, affiliates and committee members, volunteers, foundation staff, board members, executive directors, community members from established regions, emerging ones, women and men, young and old, across geographies and time zones. These individuals have worked together to define what their thematic areas mean to them and to our movement and what it could look like in 2030 to become the support system of the whole free knowledge movement. These working groups have contemplated and deliberated on what steps we should take to get there, whose company we've missed out on and have to make a concerted effort to include what external structures have excluded those people from being a part of our movement and what internal barriers have stood in their way. Next slide, please. So it's a huge task to discuss topics as complex and as cross-cutting as generation and allocation of resources, the health of our vibrant communities, governance, roles and responsibilities, advocacy, forging partnerships, building capacity and the working groups have only had a few hours a week and with such far and wide implications to come up with drafts, it's no easy task. But they've done it with so much effort, especially over the past few months and even more so in the lead up to Wikimania. We have concrete ideas and aspirations in front of us to work with, build on and dive deep into. The draft recommendations, they really give us an opportunity to discuss how we can build the future we want, get conversations going, sometimes around sensitive topics and that's okay. The idea is for the movement to provide feedback to the working groups on these draft recommendations and to help the working groups further and find them into concrete recommendations that we can unify. We can unify around and create the diverse and inclusive future that we envision. The working groups were under a lot of pressure to share these draft recommendations as we were very much wanting to have an opportunity to interact with the wider public at Wikimania. And did we ever? Next slide please. So yeah, Wikimania, each working group or thematic area had an allocated 90 minute session. So you do the math. That means other than the opening and closing ceremonies, the core team and other strategy enthusiasts, we hardly left the Wikimedia 2030 space at Stockholm University. Working groups made presentations and activities to engage with participants from across our movement. We had 30 to 80 participants per session with an average of 40, which is amazing. And this includes the Sunday morning session. So that's pretty awesome. And discussions happened in big groups, in small subgroups, around specific topics and recommendations, people from all across our movement and beyond came to learn more about strategy. Next slide. So this is inside our space. Our session, as I mentioned, our sessions were very well attended and really a testament to the hard work of the working groups, their draft recommendations and growing interest in strategy. Next slide. Yeah, and I believe that's a picture of our lovely advocacy working group making a presentation and our strategy space. Next slide. And of course, strategy just didn't stay in the formal sessions. We socialized it and the draft recommendations and talked to people whenever, wherever we could. This is a picture from the closing party and the strategy glasses and the frame for the future went with us. Working group members, strategy liaisons and the core team, everybody was on hand to answer questions, gauge ideas. We see feedback on the draft recommendations and on the strategy process. It takes time to incorporate all of this, but all the input is being reviewed. It's all being collected. Some to be used now. Others better suited to help contextualization and programmatic adaptations of strategy implementation. But yeah, everyone's been on hand and speaking of strategy liaisons, it's my pleasure to welcome Diane on this call to share her experience from Wikimedia and more so to talk about her experience as a strategy liaison. Next slide, please. No. One is skipped. Yes. Okay. Hey, everyone. I'm happy to be here with you with this last monthly activity. I am Diane Aronville. I am community strategy liaison for the French language. And in this picture, you can see me at the bottom right corner of the picture. And this is the Wikilabs meetup at Wikimedia. That's why we are doing a little hearts with our hands and on the opposite side of the picture, you can actually see another strategy liaison, Rupika with the pink dress who works with the Hindi language. And together, we are seven strategy liaisons for various languages. And our work is to help communities engage with the strategy process in all ways possible. Next slide, please. So, for example, about the last few months, we have helped organize a lot of strategy salons, around 40 salons already took place all around the world. In my case, I was mainly helping salons happening across French-speaking Africa in, I think, five different countries. On this picture, you can see the strategy salon happening in Wikimedia Chad. Next slide. We have also led online conversations with community members. So on Wiki, on social media, for video calls through a survey that was designed by the working groups. So people really have reached out to share how they feel as Wikimedians about all the thematic areas of this strategy. And personally, I learned a lot about the movement all along the way, about how diverse and amazing it is, and also about how we can make it better. And everything I learned, my work is to pass on faithfully to the working groups so that it helps them build or refine their recommendations, which are now available. And all this work was online, but we got it through in real life. With the next slide, please. Because we then arrived at Wikimedia and for us strategy liaisons, I think for all of us, it was an amazing opportunity to finally have conversations with people. Sometimes new people that we didn't have a chance to reach out to. And also, of course, with people that we had talked to online and that we were happy to meet. For example, here on this picture, you can see me with Mahetan, who is a Wikimedian from Benin, but who lives in Paris. And he participated a lot in Twitter conversations. So we had met online and I was really happy to finally meet him in person because he's an amazing Wikimedian and he has a lot of interesting insights about strategy issues. So that's just one example, but there were a lot of them. Next slide, please. As Muradad explained, we have nine 90-minute sessions at Wikimedia. And the one thing I wanted to share about this session as a strategy liaison is something Muradad noted actually in one of his latest emails that he noted that during the sessions, strategy liaison were actually apparently more interested in participating to the discussions than taking minutes, which was supposed to be our job. So thankfully Muradad was there to take the notes. But apart from the fact that we were not very serious, I think we felt this urge to participate in the conversation because having heard so much from the community over the last few months, we somehow felt, yes, an urge to be ambassadors for all the ideas and perspective that we have received. And I actually think that this position will continue to be our main focus for the week to come as we are now gathering as much feedback about the recommendations as we can. We are translating the last silent reports and we are sharing all of this with the working groups so that the process can move on to its next stage. And I'll hand it over to Muradad, who will actually explain what the next steps of the process will be. Next slide. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Diane. It's been really awesome having you on the team. Here's a graphic representation of where strategy has come along in the process and where we are now. Really a collective and inclusive process like this has never been done before in our movement. And I can safely say that Wikimania was a success for us and the working group members. And of course, efforts haven't just been limited to Wikimania. In the lead-up to it, we posted full and abbreviated versions of the draft recommendation on the designated page, on meta, on the strategy portal and posted translations on a rolling basis. There are ongoing discussions happening on talk pages and we encourage everyone to join and to voice their opinion and help the working groups in progressing the draft recommendations and shaping their ideas for our future. The working group members, all of whom work remotely in the world will actually have an opportunity to come together in Tunisia at the end of September for a harmonization sprint, where they will try to integrate their draft recommendations together, harmonize them into a cohesive set to yet again present to communities for input and insight. And in between now and harmonization, working groups are really working hard, refining and working on the next iteration of draft recommendation, thanks to the input received online and offline. As well as external research and their own expertise and knowledge from the movement, of course. Next slide, please. And yeah, and that's it from us. Thank you so much, everyone. It's really been a pleasure to speak with you and thank you to the foundation for continuing to give strategy time and space. And thanks for all the effort and see everyone on Wikimedia space. Follow us, talk to us, like us, think us, share, speak, join the conversation. Yeah, thank you, Emerald. Thanks. Thank you both so much. That was great. And as you see the URL up there right now, 2030.wikimedia.org is a great place to go to get this information in the future as a replacement for this meeting. And as mentioned also on Wikimedia space where we look forward to following more about this great conversation about our strategy. So exciting work there. So let's jump onto a topic I'm really excited to hear about. We've got Bryce and Lucas who are gonna talk about Wikimedia's role in teenagers' lives, which I think is gonna be a really interesting topic. Let's get into it. So I'm Lucas. I'm here with Bryce. We are both 17 from the Bay Area. And so our project is kind of just surrounding the role that Wikimedia plays in Team Flags, basically. So next slide here. So basically we had a few informational objectives for this project. The first was finding what role Wikimedia serves in teenagers' lives regarding like is it more for research versus personal interest? Do teams use just the summary page or the cited sources? So things like that. Next slide. So our second objective was to find out if Wikipedia serves the same role universally. So we have a good idea of how we interact with Wikimedia here in the Silicon Valley like being teenagers, but we were also interested in the perspective of like teams in other countries as well. Next slide. And so lastly, this one was just sort of out of curiosity, but we were interested in to the extent that teams actually value Wikipedia and whether this is a resource that is taken for granted or if this is something that, I mean, that's really valuable in teenagers' lives. So next slide. So our final deliverable is basically just a short list of product enhancement recommendations as well as I think we had some pretty unique insights that we got through this project. Next slide. So we laid out a few hypotheses. Again, being teams, we had a pretty good idea of what we thought Wikipedia's role would be. So there's definitely like a stigma around Wikipedia being unreliable just in school. And so because of this, we didn't think it would be used very much for in-depth research. That led us to this hypothesis. Just there's teachers in school are often kind of like criticizing Wikipedia. And so we thought a lot of students might be, might think of Wikipedia as sort of this unreliable source. So that was our first hypothesis. Next slide. So secondly, we thought teams might value Wikipedia differently based on region because people in other countries might not be as educated on how to do research. Basically, we just thought Wikipedia would have a different role in based on region and education level and things like that. Next slide. And lastly, I kind of went over this, but we thought that teenagers kind of frequently take the idea for granted. Next slide. So the final version of our script was kind of structured to get insight into each interviewee's interactions with Wikipedia as well as understand their perspective on free knowledge and their background. And this was difficult because we didn't have like a whole lot of connections basically for people in other countries. And so we kind of ended up having to sacrifice some of like the diversity of our sample in order to get more overall interviews, quantity-wise. Next slide. So yeah, we settled on phone interviews. We prioritized unique inputs over efficiency. So that's why we went on phone interviews rather than like an online poll because we thought that the insights we got from the phone interviews and in-person interviews were a lot more interesting. Next slide. Yeah, again, just the phone interviews, the advantage of that in our process. Next slide. And so we made a slide for each question because we just kind of wanted to outline what we're doing. But essentially we wanted to get an understanding of the interviewee's unique background. And our final goal after we collected the data was to see if there were any trends. And so one trend that we were looking for is whether there are any differences in teams' responses based on their background. And so that's where this question came from. Next slide. This one was asked in order to understand how interviewees primarily access Wikipedia services. Oh, sorry, that's not this one. This one was pretty abstract. So this was pretty like stumping for a lot of people because they were like, it's a very abstract question. But we asked this first because we didn't want the interviewees to know that we were talking about Wikipedia. We kind of wanted them to think about free knowledge in the most general sense. So next slide. This one was the question that was asked in order to understand how interviewees primarily access Wikipedia services. So like physically. Next slide. Similar to the previous question, this was more about context, school, versus personal use. And next slide. This question, so being teams, most people are like in school obviously. And so we kind of wanted to know, get a little bit of insight on how teachers might influence how teams view Wikipedia and therefore how they use it. So next slide. This was kind of just to understand whether interviewees use the collection of credible sources. Next slide. This question was a way of getting at like how much. So here we kind of start to transition into something new. We did, we asked about donations. And then as you'll see on the next couple of slides, we asked about, so no one, no, we got zero people, one person, sorry, one person who said they donated. And then we got into after this slide, you'll see we asked about advertising. And so this was a to understand the, like what monetary value teams put on Wikipedia. Obviously that was very low. The expectation was not that teenagers don't donate. But we really wanted to get some insights into how they would like, we kind of wanted to say, look, this is not something that just exists for free. So next slide. So do you think advertisements would compromise any aspect of Wikipedia? And obviously this is something that is like far outside the scope of our projects here. And this is, we are sure like a much larger conversation that Wikipedia is having. And so, but basically what the insights we got out of this were do teenagers value Wikipedia for its information or do they value it simply because it is free? And so we got mixed results here. And we also got some other interesting kind of non quantitative results. So next slide. And then this question was just in order to understand whether respondents understood the, or just basically how much they trust Wikipedia. This is difficult because we realized like halfway through we don't actually have a baseline for it would be great to compare this to like other sources like new sources or other online sources because the next slide, because these numbers don't mean much without like context I guess. So if you go to the next slide that's just on a scale of kind of zero to 100 that's pretty new why without a baseline like I would personally say that this is pretty good and that like this, Wikipedia is a pretty reputable source but you know, this question was not as helpful as we would have liked because we just didn't set up a baseline here. So now I'm gonna hand it over to Bryce here. So next slide. Yeah, so this question was really to see if Wikipedia was truly sort of a bedrock for information for teenagers and overwhelmingly 100% of respondents said it is absolutely the first place they check for information. So that was just insight into how it really is impactful in teenagers lives. So our next slide. And then this question was just kind of to see whether teenagers viewed Wikipedia more as an archive or as like an active, like evolving place for information. So what we got as you can see is about a third of the respondents says they will use it occasionally and most respondents said they never use it as a new source. So what we got from that is that teenagers are much more likely to go look for concrete information for Wikipedia versus like evolving stories. Next slide. So we asked the same exact question what does free knowledge mean to you? At the end of the interviews just to see if anyone through this interview process changed their opinion or thought about something new. And as you can see there were a few pretty interesting changes like this interview from California who said that free knowledge means the freedom to think collectively online without government censorship. And I think this is because the interview we sort of recognize that Wikipedia, like free knowledge isn't available in every country, right? And I think especially in the United States we tend not to think about that, but I think in the interview process a lot of our interviewees came to realize how valuable free knowledge is. And then another interviewee also from California said, yeah, that free knowledge is the idea that every human is the right to educational information which we found pretty interesting. And he was sort of framing in the context that everyone has the right to educate themselves about a topic. Again, without government censorship found that pretty interesting. Next slide. Sorry, yeah, this is just our conclusions. Next slide. So revisiting our first research question. What role does Wikipedia serve in changes lives and how can Wikipedia improve on that role? Next slide. Oh, okay. Sorry, going back to that first one. Sorry. I think we were, yeah, yeah. Wikipedia is absolutely a source of service level information that is easy to access, it's frequently used and is used in both the context of school research and out of personal interest. But for something new we did not expect teenagers to frequently use Wikipedia out of personal curiosity but that proved to be very common. Next slide. So this question, we were actually proved wrong. We interviewed people across a fairly diverse set of backgrounds, again, not as much as we initially would have liked, but like we interviewed a teenager who lived in Shanghai, China and a teenager who lived in Prague and Iran and a couple other interviewees that had previously lived in foreign countries. And Wikipedia pretty much serves the same role. It served the same role across these countries, pretty much irregardless of background. Next slide. So this question was kind of a mixed bag. I'd say some or almost the majority of the interviews did prove us wrong that the teenagers do genuinely value and understand how important Wikipedia is to free knowledge in the world. Again, but some teenagers did confirm this hypothesis who didn't totally seem to understand how unique Wikipedia was and what it does. Overall, we would say though, that teenagers did tend to appreciate the sacrifices that Wikipedia was making by making it open source and thoroughly vetting the information while simultaneously not providing advertisements. We are also sure, next slide. Yeah, so we just want to highlight a couple of insights that stood out. Again, the girl from Shanghai, China that we interviewed noted that discrepancies in information between English and Mandarin are very widespread. However, we are aware that Wikipedia is actively working on AI and machine learning to solve this issue. So I think that issue is already well on its way to being resolved. Yeah, so just to touch base on this one, this was pretty interesting actually. Two different interviewees brought this up for historical articles or articles where the information is pretty much guaranteed to not evolve. They thought that it might be a good idea to lock certain articles and then provide a seal of approval so that they could be cited in academic research and while we found these ideas to be pretty interesting, we of course know that this would kind of contradict Wikipedia's goal of crowdsource information but we did find that interesting that teenagers were, they did want to use Wikipedia as an academic source but they were unavailable. Next slide. So this is what teenagers appreciate throughout this whole process. They really appreciate Wikipedia's clutter-free interface. They really appreciate no advertisements. Even one interviewee said, I think, they go to Wikipedia sometimes just because the data from the advertisements from other news sources makes their phone bill a lot higher. So they really appreciate that and they love that it's direct, digestible information. Next slide. So this is what we got that teenagers would still like from Wikipedia. I know of course this is an continuous conversation. Again, reliability. So two of our interviewees, the one from Shanghai and someone who spoke fluent Japanese and who moved here from Japan, said that the language discrepancies were still very apparent but again, we know that's being fixed as we speak. And also the seal of verification idea which was pretty interesting and building a connection with the authors or maybe like highlighting certain credible authors that have edited the sources. Just things like that is what teenagers would appreciate from Wikipedia in the future. Yeah. Next slide. So what we got from all of this is that what teenagers would want is a combination of more reliability. While there is of course no simple solution to this, other small aspects of Wikipedia could be improved so that Wikipedia could better fill its role that it's currently providing which is service level information to teenagers out of personal interest or for school research. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's basically, I think a lot of where Wikipedia's sort of perception as an unreliable source comes from is these teachers saying that it's unsightable and unsightable does not mean unreliable but when you're told from like second grade not to use Wikipedia, it can be kind of hard to get over that hump of saying like, this is a source that I can trust. So yeah, I mean, that's just something to keep in mind but yeah, I mean, we thought we got some really great insights. We have a research write up on Wikimeta. So yeah, that's about it. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much, Lukas and Bryce. That's really great information. Super helpful, very insightful and I think helps get us a better understanding of where teenagers are at in terms of Wikipedia. So that's super helpful. Thank you. So with that, we're going to move on to Wikimedia Space which is a project I suspect some folks have heard about but perhaps don't know everything about or have some misconceptions about. So we've got Elena here who's going to give us the rundown. So take it away. All right. Thank you. Hi everybody. I'm Elena Lappin. I'm with the community relations team here at the foundation and with my colleague, Chris Kerner, we're going to be shedding some light on what this mysterious project is that keeps coming up in this meeting. So we're going to be talking about Wikimedia Space, what it is, how it works, what problems it's designed to solve and talk a little bit about how it's been brought up as a possible place to host the conversations that are normally hosted in this meeting but in a way that is a little bit more constant than what's normally afforded by the single hour per month that this meeting has historically given us. So with that, what is Wikimedia Space? Wikimedia Space is a single platform for collaboration. It has two different sections. It has a blog section where community members can go and publish stories, updates, announcements related to what's going on in their communities. And it has a discuss section where anyone can go and ask a question of the community, open a conversation. And the discuss section is organized by category and organized by tags. So all of the conversations are really easy to find. They're easy to search for and they're easy to follow. Wikimedia Space is a prototype. So it's very much in development right now and it's being developed through community use and feedback. We've got a lot of users on space that are involved in developing new features and talking about what they'd like to see. And there is a discussion category on space devoted to just that where users can come and say, hey, how does this work? Can we improve this? Can we fix this? So the development is very much underway now. It is in development, however, it already is multilingual in many capacities. So users can go and publish blog content in any language already and users can open discussions or ask questions in any language already. And then finally, Wikimedia Space is safe. It's governed by a code of conduct and it has active moderation to make sure that it is welcoming and open for everybody. So what was the inspiration behind this, right? What problems is this designed to solve? If you have been part of the Wikimedia movement for any amount of time, you've probably asked yourself one, if not more than one of these questions. How can I learn about what's working for other communities, right? If I wanna know what's going on in other parts of the world so that I can take that and adapt that to my circumstance. And then the other side of that, how can I tell other communities about what we are doing? We're doing something great. We've got a great initiative going. It's working really well for us. We wanna offer this up to other communities to see if they're interested in taking it and adapting it for themselves. Next, where can I publicize my events across the movement? Until now there hasn't really been a single place to do that and Wikimedia Space offers that and I will get into that. Next, where can I confidently direct newcomers and other community members for support? If you're an experienced Wikimedian, you likely support newcomers and that's wonderful and that's super valuable for the movement but you can't be their only resource. And so it's important that there's a place that's safe and open and will warmly welcome newcomers and connect them with the resources that they need when their mentors can't. And then finally, how can I consolidate my project's communication channels? There's a lot of fragmentation going on across our movement, communication channels on Wiki, off Wiki, on social media and chat and Wikimedia Space offers the opportunity to consolidate different channels into one place so we'll talk a little bit about that as well. This is the Wikimedia Space homepage. You'll see on the left-hand side it talks a little bit about the blog and on the right-hand side it talks a little bit about the discussion board. And this homepage kind of brings both sides together, talks a little bit about the project and allows for easy navigation between the two sides of Wikimedia Space. So I will turn it over to Chris to talk a little bit about the blog specifically. Yeah, thank you. Hi everyone, my name's Chris and I wanna talk a little bit about the blog side of Wikimedia Space. So the blog is, well, a blog. It's a place where news can be published about the Wikimedia movement, attendant for the Wikimedia movement and by the Wikimedia movement. This means you. Anyone is open to login and submit a draft, anything from a simple proposal like, hey, you should follow up on this to a complete draft ready to review and be published. The editorial process is documented and reviews open to anyone interested. So if you wanna help write or if you wanna help review, that's great. Those editorial guidelines are also a prototype and are on meta as well. Next slide please. So what does it look like? It looks like a blog. On the one side you have the main most recent posts and on the right you see information about top posts, discussions and more happening around the content. It's a public blog. Anybody can read it. It has its own RSSC. So if you wanna subscribe to it through your RSS reader and you're probably asking what sort of news goes into this blog? Well, the scope is things like news produced by committees and affiliates like the ones that have been posted historically on Wikimedia L. Interesting links to Wikimedia stories and discussions published in other channels. News about Wikimedia partners. The ecosystem of free knowledge that surrounds us and other current events that are connected with the movement. And our target to Wikimedia contributors, that's our audience. So things like announcements, requests for feedback, reports, newsletters, all the stuff that the Wikimedia Foundation builds and does can also be published here on Wikimedia space. To give you a few examples, we've had an updated, we had an affiliate group sharing a job posting, WMF designer sharing insights and design principles for editing on mobile. News about a strategy salon from Guinea Conquery and a researcher sharing their findings on how women persist in the movement. Next slide, please. Submitting your story is pretty straightforward. There's a big giant button that says submit news. Once you log in, you can write your post and once you're ready to have it reviewed, you submit it through a light editorial process. Again, documented for open discussion where experienced editors will read it and contact you with any questions before scheduling it to be published. And you can submit your story in any language, space is multilingual and submissions can also be translated into multiple languages too. We also are open to republishing. So if you have something from your group or community that you wanna share with the wider movement, space is the place. One last point I wanna make about the blog is that it's actually integrated into the discuss space. So comments and likes will show up on the blog underneath an article. All blog posts automatically open a new topic thread on discuss and then on discuss, you can comment, like, link, or otherwise interact with the content from the blog which I think is a really cool thing to have of that back and forth between the author and the movement. So I'm gonna hand it back over to Lena to talk about the discuss side. Okay, so for the discussion side, this is the main page of the discussion board. You'll see that on the left-hand side, there is a list of categories. And the categories are kind of the organizational building blocks of discuss. Anything that is posted, any topic that is opened or blog posts that is posted will go into one of these categories. And right now we have about 10 categories and eight subcategories, but we're building every day. Users are coming and saying, hey, like yesterday, for example, somebody suggested I'd really like to have a gender gap category. This functions like a little sub-discussion board where you go in and talk about initiatives related to closing the gender gap and Wikimedia projects. So those categories are really important for organizational purposes and they're growing based on community needs and community feedback. So we have that on the left-hand side. And then on the right-hand side, we have just a list of latest topics that have been opened that are being discussed. And so it's a really nice mix of, okay, we've got some organizational structure on the left-hand side where you can easily find the content that you're interested in. If you're interested in a certain category, you can easily find the topics that are posted in that category. And then also about the balances between, you know, all of the different topics and things that are being discussed in different corners of the movement. So it's a nice mix of, you know, practicality and customizability and then visibility into all types of conversations that are happening. So like I mentioned, this is still being developed and new features are being discussed all the time. But users have already given us a little bit of insight into what features currently exist that are their favorites now. Some favorite features include the central calendar of Wikimedia events. I know Greg brought this up earlier. If you go into that events, okay, if you go into that events category and you post your event in that category and you add a date and time to that post, it will automatically pull to this central calendar. People from all corners of the Wikimedia movement have come and added events to that calendar already. Perhaps even cooler than the central calendar is the interactive map of Wikimedia events around the world. Yeah, right. So you can go check out your area, see what's going on in your area at any time. If you're gonna be visiting a different part of the world, you can see what's going on in that part of the world while you're there and maybe stop by. Another feature that people have been really enjoying so far is closed groups, right? Sometimes collaboration is just safer in a closed environment. For groups that work on sensitive subject matter on the projects or whose members haven't felt entirely comfortable or welcome, collaborating in a more public space, these closed groups offer a really good option and they work kind of like their own little private discussion board, discussion category, where you can just come on and discuss what you're working on amongst your trusted peers. Groups have tended to gravitate towards Facebook or Telegram or WhatsApp for that reason, right? We see that there's a void in what we're currently offering and groups have tended to go other places to be able to find that closed collaborative environment. And so we think that this is a really important answer to that to bring people back where other Wikimedians are, where people are talking, but still be able to provide them with an environment that feels a little bit safer and a little bit more comfortable. Okay, and back to Chris to talk about how to join Wikimedia Space. Yeah, so I hope everyone's excited and you're probably wondering, okay, how do I get there? Maybe half of you have already Googled it, trying to find it. But I will tell you, to join space, go to space.wmflabs.org, that's right, it's a prototype. Click on the join button on the homepage and you can sign in using your Wikimedia account through Fabricator. That's a temporary jump around, but for now that works. Once you log in, you're able to create new drafts, view the editorial calendar and edit the editorial calendar and participate in discussions. Next slide, please. So again, space is designed to be a platform for community news and conversations across regions and languages that we wanna build with you based on your needs. So please create an account, take a look around and tell us what you want. We have a category in space itself called about Wikimedia Space and feedback is welcome there. Thank you. Thank you. All right, thank you both very, very much. I just wanna personally say, I know 12 years ago when it's shortly after I joined the movement, there were discussions about ways to improve Wikimedia L and I've been watching those discussions for the last 12 years. I'm really excited to see us actually move into trying something. I think a lot of us very much feel that there are a lot of great tools out there, but clearly they're not serving all of our needs as we have learned over the last 15 years and rather than trying to beat our heads up against the wall with existing tools, I'm excited to see us experimenting with something new that really seems to address all of these and also includes things like discourse that the community has been talking about for at least a decade. So it's really, really exciting to see that. So with that, next slide. I wanna talk a little bit about how that things like space, the new website, a whole conflicts of changes over the last 10 years have impacted this meeting. So first, next slide. I wanna start with just a really quick look back. So a long time ago when this meeting first began, it was the staff metrics meeting. It was an internal way for us to go over as a staff some of the data that we were getting around editor retention and some of the real basic, basic metrics. Soon after it was realized that of course, staff are not the only ones who have interest in this information. And so it evolved into a public metrics meeting. Soon after that, we realized that these metrics were in fact so popular and in fact so important to how decision-making was being done across the movement that they got their own setup. They got the dashboard as it was sometimes called or WikiStats as we refer to it today. We have a whole system of analytics that have been built up around the entire movement with the help of volunteers, with the help of staff who provide the information we used to get in the metrics meeting on a monthly basis to where you can get it instantaneously updated basically to that day. So as a result of that, there was a shift towards the meeting being more about Wikimedia foundation activities and sort of thinking about the metrics of how the foundation reports are worked. But that too has also changed as our staff has grown and as our other communications channels have grown, we realized that we really are now more in-depth and more effectively talking about that to much, much wider audiences in places like the website, social media, meta-wiki, those places when we talk about the foundation's activities, we get a much, much wider audience so we get a lot more bang for our buck, so to speak. As a result of that, we decided we wanted to kind of move it open, open it up to all movement activities and kind of get a sense of what the interest was there. And that's what we've been experimenting with the last year or so. And I think basically what we learned in that experiment was that the tools that are being built to address the sign of wider level is kind of an ongoing need, right? Other than just this unique monthly need we're frankly better solutions and better long-term and we're already getting wider audiences. Space as an example, even as a new project already has a larger, more engaged audience than this meeting has frankly ever attracted. So we kind of got a sense that shifting to that in other areas might be really helpful. I will certainly acknowledge, I think like many of us, it's a little sadness to see a meeting go. We've had this meeting for a very, very long time. Of course, it's always a bit of a bummer to see something we've all gotten very used to, see its time come and go. But I think to be realistic, we've acknowledged that that's where we're at right now and we can get a lot more done with other efforts. But first, before we get to talk to that, I did want to give a quick moment for everyone to just give a real quick round of applause to everyone over the many, many years we've had this meeting who have helped run it, who have facilitated, who have given presentations, who have run a V for it. So whatever role they may have had, let's just take a quick second and acknowledge all of those folks with a quick round of applause, which since the mic's not on there, I'm going to do extra loud here. There we go. There we go. There we go. There we go. That's awesome, that's awesome, that's awesome. All right, great. That's sort of what the history that has brought us to today. So next slide. So as I mentioned, today we have more options than we've ever had before. In terms of getting this information out to people, we have a great system of Wikimedia statistics and analytics that the analytics team has been building up and really making improvements. If you haven't checked out Wiki stats version two, I don't know why you haven't, you should go check it out, it's great. So that's at wikimedia.org. Of course, Meadowiki and as the foundation grows, we're continuing to look at ways that we can integrate with Meadowiki and communicate with community leaders there. And then we're seeing the new blog on the Wikimedia foundation website. We're really proud of some of the ways that that's elevated and we're also really looking at ways that we can make that more multilingual and reach many, many wider audiences. But even a small blog post gets to a pretty wide audience in comparison to larger activities like this. So we're kind of interested in that goes. And then as was just presented on, of course, we now have Wikimedia space to really provide a great structured and safe space to have these discussions as an entire movement and featuring some of the activities that we were thinking about a year ago. Really now the community blog we're realizing is a much better showcase and seems to have already much more interest from the community. So where does that go moving forward? Next slide. I'm always hesitant to say that this is the absolute final meeting because of course in our world, things reemerge and experiments happen. So it's the final meeting for now but there will of course be some experimenting. I think particularly I can speak to communications that is the department who's been running this meeting for the last couple of years. We're interested in using this time that we have on this meeting, all the hours that go into running any of the monthly meetings as well as the meeting itself and trying out some different experiments. I honestly don't know what those experiments are going to look like yet. I'm sure some will be video, some will be tech, some will be audio but we've already seen that even beyond these experiments things are happening in a really exciting way. We talked just a little bit ago and we were talking in the IRC channel about how so much of Wikipedia was recorded this year which is a pretty exciting development. So the notion of how we communicate our activities to people and the way that we get information out is kind of a moving target for us and we feel the exciting things that people are doing frankly provide a much better outlet and a much better method than this particular meeting. So that is essentially why moving forward we're hoping all of these other channels will provide a much better conduit. We also, I wanted to mention that in terms of foundation updates there's going to be some changes happening to the quarterly check-ins for people who've followed quarterly check-ins over the years. We haven't done the public posting we haven't done those in the last year because we've been reframing them that process is coming to a conclusion soon and there'll be some new quarterly check-in metrics for people to be able to see. So there's a lot of other places in the meeting is kind of become redundant and we don't want anything that is redundant unnecessarily. So I wanted to kind of offer that context give a little bit of a sneak peek to where we see in communications things going and what you can hopefully expect to see in the months and years ahead but really again want to appreciate and give a big recognition to folks like Chris and Elena who have been working on other tools and really trying to find creative solutions to problems that we've been struggling with for 10 or sometimes 15 years. So that's the part that I wanted to talk about in concluding this meeting with that I just want to move into questions and discussions keeping in mind that we have time for about two of them but I think we only have one or two questions. Hey, so I'm going to jump in right now and ask questions really quickly. So I'm going to batch them all together. So around Wikimedia space there were questions around how are we going to cope with people wanting this not to be seen as something run by the foundation but run by the community and how are we going to make sure that our ownership is felt? There was other questions saying, hey, this is great. What are we looking at in terms of indications around how we're going to evaluate how successful it is? And there was another thing saying, well, hey, communities already have places where they talk to each other on Wiki and why would they choose to be part of Wikimedia space instead? Okay, I can try to, I don't know how I'm going to answer all of those at the same time but what I don't get to, we can actually have a conversation about on space or we can publish more details on space. In terms of, so the first question was about that being a community-led initiative and community involvement with Wikimedia space, I just want to say that community involvement in space and community direction of space is paramount for the success of this project and that's why we released it as a very kind of out-of-the-box prototype experience because the idea is that we are building this together. We invite people who are interested to come and tell us what features they want, how they want things configured. That is really the vision for how space is going to go and then I think governance is also a really important aspect of that, of community involvement and ownership and space is set up so that it has a user trust level system so that the more that users participate productively in space, the more they move up in trust levels and the more abilities they have on the platform and the idea is that people will move up organically to the level where they can become moderators on space and what we really want to do and this actually ties into the second question about success criteria is that we need to have a range of community moderators on space that speak different languages that represent different perspectives that are really involved in making sure that the environment is safe and welcoming for everybody and helping us kind of perfect what moderation, what community moderation really looks like in this context. So yes, community involvement and direction is extremely important here. Then in terms of the success criteria, we actually have a very extensive list of what we envision success to look like that has a number of quantitative criteria as well as qualitative criteria. We really need the single Wikimedia login, for example, so that people don't have to use fabricator to login to Wikimedia space and that's already very much underway and it's currently being tested so we expect it to be deployed on Wikimedia space very soon. So there are things like that creating a very seamless multilingual experience on space is another success criteria. Integration with media Wiki notifications is another success criteria. So what I can do is actually go on space and if you're interested in what we think success looks like we'll outline what that success criteria is that is still very much in the works and get some feedback on that as well. And then remind me of what the last question was. It was around ownership in terms of why would communities choose to have conversations on space and not on Wiki. Right, okay, so yeah, this question has come up a lot and it often comes in the form of, well, what's gonna happen with meta Wiki? If people are already talking on meta Wiki, isn't this the same purpose that meta Wiki is designed to solve? People who are happy on meta? Sure, you can stay on meta, there's no problem with that. We're not gonna shut down meta, we're not trying to replace meta, but it's become increasingly clear to us that meta doesn't work for everybody and communicating on Wiki doesn't always work for everybody and we know this because people are going to other platforms, they're going to social media, they're going to chat and they don't always wanna be there. They want a different alternative to have these kind of more dynamic organized in the moment type conversations where you can get on and ask a question and share multimedia and really find the answers to your question because everything is so organized with categories and tags. So yes, communicating on Wiki is working for many communities and we know from experience that communicating on Wiki is not working for a lot of people, so if you identify with that we really encourage you to create an account, get on there, test, tell us exactly what you need to make this the most effective platform that it can be for your needs. Is that it? All right, thank you. All right, were there any other questions? Otherwise, I think we're gonna jump onto Wiki Love and for the sake of time, unless there's a line of people in the office which I apologize, I can't see, is there? There is not. Okay, I guessed safely that there was not. We're gonna do one encompassing Wiki Love for everyone who has watched or participated or in any way been a part of these meetings over what is now nearly 10 years of meetings. So it's not long that we do something for 10 years in the movement, so a little bit of Wiki Love to all of the hundreds of folks who not just help participate but also attended and have watched these over the years. That's a big round of applause in Wiki Love to everyone, which should be all of you. And then I will borrow a request from my dog, Lincoln which is before the end of the week, find at least two people to give some Wiki Love to, someone perhaps you generally work with and somebody you perhaps have never talked to or had much interaction with before. So that's your Wiki Love challenge, just go out and find a couple of folks. And with that, thank you all very much for attending this month and the very last Wikimedia Monthly Activities Meeting.