 Is anybody else speaking in the meeting who has not had a chance to do an audio check before we begin? I'm probably not speaking, but maybe speaking. Hey everybody, I'm Adoris Vitaak, communications fellow here at the Wikimedia Foundation and I'm really excited to welcome everyone to the Wikimedia Monthly Activities Meeting on this fine 28th of March 2019. So the agenda is pretty straightforward. We're going to have a movement update and then hear from presenters on Wikimedia 2019. EU Copyright Reform, movement strategy, the communications committee, and then we'll have time for questions and discussion and wiki love. If you have questions while folks are presenting, just a reminder to keep them until the end, the time allotted for questions and discussion, or send them on IRC. So movement update, we have some exciting news. Specifically, I'm going to stand here, so I'm not blocking one of these screens. Wikimedia Commons announces picture of the year 2018 winner. Nearly 3,500 people chose between 57 images in the final round and Jason Weingart's evolution, a composite time-lapse showing the development and expansion of a tornado, took the top prize. India's Wikimedia communities adapt the Wikipedia library to their own contexts. The Indian community has been adapting and are continuing to define the program on their own terms, including new partnerships, events, and programs. And a Berkeley event connects artists and academia to improve representation on Wikipedia. I actually went to this. The day-long event, organized by a committee of UC Berkeley librarians, archivists, and faculty, added more than 2,700 new words through 41 total edits. And for some attendees, it was their very first time editing Wikipedia. So let's take a look at that picture of the year 2018 winner. Drumroll in my head anyway. So this is the time-lapse tornado. This is really embarrassing, but the first time I saw it, I didn't realize it was a time-lapse. I was just like, whoa, that happens in nature. So it is a time-lapse for all those out there who might have made the same mistake as me. And coming up, here are some events. Wikimedia Summit is happening right now, more or less, in Berlin, 29th through 31st March. There's the Wiki Education Conference in April in Spain, and then there's the Hackathon happening in May in Prague. Now I'm going to turn it over to Eric to talk about plans for Wikimedia 2019. Hi, everyone. Nice to meet you, at least, virtually. I'm one of those who's actually in Berlin, so I can assure you that the conference will take place. And it's going good so far. You can switch to the next picture. Oh, the previous picture. So as some of you may have noticed, we have announced the theme and the first keynote for Wikimedia 2019, which, for those of you who don't know, will take place in Stockholm from 14th to 18th August this year. The theme, which we are very passionate about, will be strengthening each other Wikimedia free knowledge and the sustainable development goals. And we think that this theme is very interesting this year also with the strategy movement taking place at the same time, and those go very well, hand in hand. So our hope is to bring a lot of people to Stockholm. I hope to see a lot of you there, a lot of you there for really interesting discussions on how the Wikimedia movement and free knowledge can contribute to building a sustainable world. And the first keynote, which some of you may recognize, is Michael Peter Edson. He's been attending, I think, some Wikimedia conferences before, but he's the co-founder and associate director for the Museum of the United Nations, UNLIVE, which is going to physically be placed in Copenhagen when it's ready. It's previously been at the Smithsonian, and it's really great to have, like, I think, UN presence, or the UNLIVE Museum presence, at least, at the conference with this theme, because it's also very much about partnership. We can't build a sustainable world, obviously, ourselves. So I'm really excited about this theme, and I think that we will hopefully, after the Wikimedia movement in Stockholm, have a clear picture of the Wikimedia movement's role in fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals. If you don't know that the Sustainable Development Goals, that's a set of 17 goals that were developed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. In order to, I think they call it a call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and make sure that everyone leaves in peace and prosperity. I can go on to the next picture. Along with the theme, we're also trying to change how the Wikimedia conference in general will be working this year. We think that the theme in itself requires a more collaborative and future-looking format. The usual Wikimedia has been very focused on presentations, sometimes lectures, which, of course, is good and relevant in itself. We think that when we are trying to find strategies and tools to help building a sustainable world, we will have to be more collaborative in our setup. So one way we will be doing this is to focus, or the conference, around different spaces. The space will be a physical space at the conference, which concerns, or which is about a specific topic. The selection of spaces has not been done yet, but it's been an open process where people have the possibility to propose different spaces. So it's a way of giving more ownership to the community over what's actually going to take place at the conference. Our goal is that that will lead to a greater diversity of the content at the conference, and, again, an increased sense of ownership over the program of the conference to the community. We also think that this way of letting the community have a greater decision on the different spaces and what will actually be the program will increase the value of bringing all those people together to Stockholm. If there's any questions on the program design, I would first recommend you to go to the program design page at the Wookie Mania Wookie, which has a very good description and also a video explaining how it works, but I also want to stay here and answer any questions. Then you can go to the next slide. So the current status, we just closed the call for those spaces a couple of days ago, and we were a bit worried at first that we didn't get any proposed spaces. But in the end it turned out to be 31 proposed spaces, which is amazing given the fact that it's a completely new format. It's never been tried before in the Wookie Media movement, and it really puts a lot of pressure on those submitting or proposing a space to be creative and think in a new way. And we're very glad that so many actually took the possibility. The thing that will happen next is that me and the chair of the program committee, Liam Wyatt, will sit down and try to make a good selection of the spaces so that we have the diversity of the end, but that also relates well to the theme of Wookie Mania 2019. And those leading these spaces are those that in the end will form the program committee. So so far the program committee consists of one person, which is Liam Wyatt. We're also very happy to use this theme as a way of getting more partners to the movement, perhaps getting new partners, partners in different networks that we haven't perhaps been engaged so much in before. So we are in the finalization mode or whatever you call it with several cool partners on how to bring them into the Wookie Media movement and Wookie Mania 2019. That's, I think, what I had to say about the Wookie Mania preparations so far. I really hope to see a lot of you in Stockholm in August and then perhaps it's time for me to hand over to the next person. Awesome. Thank you so much, Eric. So that's a really exciting overview of Wookie Mania and hopefully has given all of you a lot to think about as you head into it. Now, looking at you copyright reform and we're getting an update from Stephen Laporte. Hi, everyone. I'm Stephen Laporte with the Wookie Media legal team. And as many of you have probably seen, the European Parliament voted on Tuesday to adopt a new copyright directive. This included two norms that are very problematic for the free and open Internet, Article 11 and Article 13. They'll become part of European copyright law shortly. Article 11 requires news aggregators and websites that use new snippets to get licenses from press publishers. This is bad because it will make high quality news more difficult to find and share online. Article 13 makes platforms liable for copyright violations of their users in a new way. The goal is to make websites like YouTube get licenses from rights holders. However, the requirement will drive websites to deploy filtering technology that blocks uploads that are clearly allowed. This is problematic because companies are risk averse and will inevitably overblock content that's legal. It's important to note that Wikipedia as an online non-profit encyclopedia is exempt from the requirements in Article 13. And I'll talk about what that means in just a second. These two rules have been part of the proposal since the beginning. And they went through various iterations over the past few years. In the end, the Parliament voted not to allow further amendments to the text that have been negotiated between the EU member states. The EU copyright directive is not entirely bad. There is some good news in this new piece of law. There's a protection for the public domain that ensures that faithful reproductions upon the public domain cannot be granted new copyrights. And there's a limited exception for text and data mining, which is good for Wikimedia's work to collect data in projects like Wikidata. The vote about allowing amendments to the copyright directive was ultimately very tight. It moved forward by about five votes and ultimately the Parliament did approve the directive. This is a disappointing outcome for the supporters of the free and diverse internet. However, the positive new exceptions I think are something to be proud of and something that Wikimedia did very good work advocating for. So there is improvements in the law that will span across Europe thanks to the work of many Wikimedians. And that's something to celebrate on even though ultimately I think the outcome is pretty disappointing. So what did Wikimedia do around EU copyright? Wikimedia has been engaged in the debate since 2016 and even before that. We've continuously written about problems with the requirements of upload filters and the press publishers' rights. And that includes not just the foundation, but many Wikimedia chapters and individual Wikimedians who have been on this work for many years. Over the last year, you may remember that some Wikimedia projects ran campaigns and protested around two crucial votes. These were the ultimate sort of turning point in the EU copyright directive's development. And in this run-up to the final vote, we focused our outreach directly on the European Parliament. Catherine and some members of the public policy staff went to Brussels and met with lawmakers and journalists. We published a video that explained some of the problems with Article 13. The community on a few Wikimedia projects voted to black out and ran in protest of the law. And over 17 Wikimedia organizations did some work related to EU copyright. They took action including calling or writing their members of parliament, writing blog posts and talking to the press and supporting local campaigns inside their country. So what's next? The directive will now get a final approval from the government and member states, but this is purely a procedural step. Afterwards, the directive will be published in an official journal. And at that point, there will be a two-year period during which member states, the countries in the EU, will need to adopt national copyright law that complies with the directive. So this means that there will be an opportunity to do work in the national implementation of the copyright directive over the next two years to try and improve the way copyright law works. So along with our allies, Wikimedia will be focusing on the effects of mitigating the effects of Article 13 under the guidance of the directive. And there will be other opportunities for us to push for positive changes in national copyright law. So for example, including more exceptions for user-generated content, remixes and the sort of knowledge sharing that Wikimedia thrives on. And we're very committed to supporting the affiliates and our communities and our allies who are working on copyright in the EU. Although I see this most recent directive as sort of a lost vote, there's very important work ahead. And I think it's important to just think very generally why we put so much work into projects like European copyrights. Why is this something that volunteers and chapters and the foundation have been working on for many years? This is a good reminder for me that copyright is an area of the law that has a big impact on how we share knowledge, especially in a digital environment. So projects like Wikimedia are affected very much by copyright. And our vision for an open web requires a copyright that allows people to create and learn copyright rules that allow creation and learning research and all of the things that are important for Wikimedia. And as lawmakers look to make significant changes to rules like copyright, they're unfortunately designing rules thinking of major companies and forgetting about the real diversity of projects that exist on the internet that don't always fit the same mold as major companies. I think lawmakers started to recognize that problem part way through the process with the European copyright directive, which is why Article 13 has this exception for online encyclopedias and other services. They realized the framework wasn't good for the entire internet, so they started writing in exceptions for us. And I think that this is an important reminder for us that as we look ahead towards our movement strategy and work that we all do as organizations inside of Wikimedia, that we need to advocate for a vision for the open web and for a policy that allows us to do the work that we want to do because there are changes that happen in the environment around us and those changes can potentially affect our work. And I'm just really proud of the proactive effort that many Wikimedians put in for many years to get those positive additions and the exceptions that were added in but ultimately to try and explain a vision for copyright law that's good for the internet. And even if that wasn't adopted by the European Parliament this week, I'm optimistic there will be other opportunities to express that vision to lawmakers in the future. There have been a lot of people who have worked on EU copyright, both at the foundation and in the Wikimedia movement at large, so I won't try and list off all our names, but it's been a very big joint effort and I want to say thank you to everyone who contributed. Great, thank you so much Steven. Absolutely when thinking about an issue like copyright it's so important to remember that this is about more than what you can and cannot upload. It's about all of our rights to go out in the world and live lives that are less circumscribed and being able to express and make and think freely. So thanks to everybody who has done amazing work in the movement and in the foundation if you'd like to see any of the public statements you can also check out. Shameless plug for the wikimediafoundation.org slash news. You can find public statements written by some folks at Legal. Now it's time to hand over to Tambir for a movement strategy update. Hi, thank you so much. We're coming live from Berlin where all the action is happening. We are just about to begin the Wikimedia Summit 2019. I am very happy to introduce two members of the working groups. So the idea today is to talk about the work that the working group members have carried out and what has been their reaction, how have they been thinking about the next steps, what has been their learning and how do we go ahead from this point are going to be the conversations that we would like to have today. Next slide, please. So these are some of the questions that I'm going to request the working group members who have joined us today to speak about. I'm not going to read the questions because they are going to reflect upon this, but can we go to the next slide, please? So I'm joined today by Jackie Koerner who's from the Community Health Working Group. She has been an active member of the Community Health Working Group and she has also done an amazing job of analyzing all the scoping documents produced by the other working groups. And for reference, she is also part of the Project Grand Committee. And I'm also joined by next slide, please, Gayane, who is part of the Revenue Streams Working Group and is also the Executive Director of Wikimedia Armenia. Can I please request to move back to slides and I'm going to hand it over to Jackie for her reflections. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. So reflecting back on the movement strategy process thus far, the biggest thing that I think I've learned is how similar and how dissimilar the problems are. There's so many different similarities that we all deal with in our different communities and then there are issues that we hadn't even thought of before. So this is why it's so amazing to engage with the community and I am so pleased to say that so many of the different working groups had listed during the process and in their scoping documents saying that we need ongoing research evaluation and this work should not end after the strategy process. So I am so excited by that. And just coming from a social science perspective, we're all really looking forward to engage and learn further what's needed because this learning should not stop with this process and I have learned so much through this process already. Even just engaging in smaller conversations, you never know what to learn. So we're really looking forward to working with the community members and I understand that some of this content is very personal and experiences are very personal. So we are working on ways that community members can engage with us that aren't public so that we can protect you all and respect your experience as an individual and I'm very excited to do that because that's something that I just really enjoy doing. My dream for the movement strategy process is to work on some of these barriers that are really getting on our way. I feel like some of the barriers that exist are ones that we're keeping built and we really need to dismantle those. So I'm really excited to encourage everyone to get involved with the process so we can dismantle some of these barriers and eliminate some of, for example, bad behavior. Bad behavior takes a lot of capacity that could be otherwise used for good. So for example, the emotional labor one uses to deal with the risk of incurring some sort of harassment or just witnessing that. Removing that will open up our capacity for doing so much more and really hitting some of those goals that our mission isn't really in line with. And what do I want to say to the larger Wikimedia movement as a working group member? Just get involved. I know it's very challenging to ask more of you all as you all are deeply engaged and as volunteers and wearing all different sorts of hats and responsibilities. But I really encourage you all to get involved because this is something... the learning that we're taking forward from these working groups is something that will not... it's going to be used very strongly. So I really encourage you, even though it might be challenging to get involved. And I hope that you find that to be a fulfilling experience and I hope that you're really proud of the work that we're doing. So, thank you. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'll share a bit of perspective of our group with the revenue streams, the smallest group, I guess, in the whole working group thing. And we were the most difficult to come together and to gain some results. But I was really happy to join the group members last month in Berlin for the face-to-face meeting, which was really a huge step forward for us because we did a big progress and personally for me it was a huge learning process. I got a sense of finance flow in the movement and I felt more comfortable in working with this group because I was quite reluctant to join because of not having that much experience in the movement overall especially in the revenue streams. But now I feel more confident and I'm really thankful to the peers who were sharing a lot and were really open to help to work together. Where I mentioned here, the biggest learning for me was when working in just Armenia, you see only your level and while joining these discussions I realized that this movement is really huge. So many different layers, so many different actors, so many different problems and so many different opportunities. And now I see this working group thing as a huge opportunity to bring all these things together and to use this opportunity as a great chance to learn from all these things and to come up with really working recommendations. What is my dream for the movement strategy? We are putting lots of efforts. This is very intense process. We are really tired I think, though inspired a lot with what we are doing but I really hope we will come up with something that the movement really needs or the movement will see the benefit, the value of our recommendations and will use those in future. This is really my dream. And I would second what Jackie said. I would really ask everyone to come and talk, to feel really responsible for this process because it is not the responsibility of, I don't know, around 100 people who are working groups, this is the responsibility of all of us because if we are a part of this then we are more keen to implement the responsibilities on the ground. And as I learned nobody should be afraid of expressing themselves, speaking up. So I would encourage everyone just to come and speak, to share what they learned and not to be afraid of saying something stupid because very often the thing that we consider as something very simple or stupid contains really bright elements. So this is what I wanted to say. Thank you. Yeah, so I'm Karol, also from the strategy team. You can, yes, move one side forward. We don't have Shani today. Unfortunately, she's working on the programme of the summit. No next one, what to expect? Yeah, with the strategy team we are trying to challenge everyone to take part of things and now we are challenging the tech team at the foundation with our quite difficult slides at this time. Actually what I wanted to talk about is what to expect next. And looking at what has happened so far we have been really concentrating on the working group model getting them up to speed trying to figure out how to support them rather than confusing them and also they have been really working hard on getting the scoping documents out so they have worked on defining the scope of their respective thematic areas and what we have learned from previous processes like this is that we don't want to over consult or fake consult the communities so we have really tried to put in the work to get some framing out there so you don't have to fully rate to something abstract but have something more concrete on table to react to, to really prompt your ideas to get going in quite difficult and challenging strategy conversations this is not what we usually do I do that every day, but this is not what we as Wikimedians do every day it's really hard to get into that conversation so during the past 6 months working groups really have tried to build the access doors for you the questions which allow you to enter into these discussions and bring your perspectives, ideas and this is I think really important for the general process because this is not the strategy of some stakeholders in a movement this is not a working group strategy this is Wikimedia movement strategy and they are doing this for the ambitious future that we have this is to become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of a whole free knowledge and this is a really ambitious goal and we need all your perspectives all your thoughts, all the context and the reason it has been kind of maybe back towards or behind the curtain so the communities have not really seen what has been going on, but now it's live the first thing is that scoping documents from each and every working group is on meta, yes it's on meta you can go there, you can discuss it there we also have kicked off the community conversations so we have already strategy liaisons organized groups, we are also looking for in a future engagement from the more engagement from the project communities but now the questions are there you can already relate to the topics that have been brought out and our hope is that you will be engaged in these conversations to bring your thoughts and bring your dreams for a future of Wikimedia and also point out the places where your energy is currently stuck and where we can actually change some things significantly to support you and help you in your everyday work and make you thrive and why your input is really important is that we are really moving into analysis phase, we need the different perspectives to see where the recommendations from this process need to direct towards what are the things that are relevant across the continents, across the across the global Wikimedia movement so we need to understand this better working groups need this information to to make informed decisions and to understand better your context because it really has been mind-opening for many of these members too to learn from different stories across the world, this was the design of a working group model to have diversity in the group so we can already kind of prepare for this wide range of perspectives and I hope that we are now even much better with the community conversations in this place to bring these thoughts in so we are really looking forward to your input and we are really looking forward to launch into the analysis phase and really see what can be changed structurally in the movement that we support each and every one of us better that we really truly become the global community that we want to be and global unified community and achieve the goal of supporting the whole ecosystem for free knowledge and get a little step closer to our big vision that we all agree with so that's the idea and this is what is to expect next that we hope that you will participate and we hope that working groups will based on your participation your perspectives make informed decisions when we come to recommendations and we change your movement for the better next slide what I also want to say is that feedback is helpful so I've heard many things about the process that could be done better it has come from the working group members it has come from the members of wider community and they really try to be adaptive with the process and take in the valuable feedback also what I ask you in this feedback is to propose solutions what you see could be better how this could be better done so instead of just saying this is not working tell me what is not working what exactly is not working for you how we can improve that bring your dreams and aspirations if you say that for example that this money that we are pouring into this process could be used for something much better tell me both the better thing is so it can be also integrated in the process that we can use this as a platform that we have built to actually do the thing you are dreaming about this is about realizing your dreams so feedback is highly helpful and I'm getting it from different places and there is a process architect I'm committed to improving the process to the needs and meeting the needs of the communities of the working group members and in general for the whole movement so this is I'm committed to and I'm really glad that people have brought their criticism and ideas on board and we try to integrate them as good as we can that's it for now from our side next slide, thank you there is also context for Tanbir to me please reach out to us if you have anything to add and also we'll hear if there are any questions this time thank you so much, back to the hosts thank you so much all bring your dreams and aspirations what an inspirational line and I hope that everybody takes that to heart it's time to hear from Greg on the new communications committee and movement communications group hello, so my name is Gregory Varnum I'm the communications strategist here at the foundation in the communications department and I want to share some exciting updates with all of you about our new communications committee and movement communications group so let's go on to the next slide I think I have the clicker I can grab the clicker, haha power of presenting in person so the communications committee has been around for quite a while so let's take a look back at how we got here the committee was actually created by the board of trustees for the foundation in January of 2006 it's actually one of our oldest committee and dates back to when we created the language committee and a number of other community committees at that time in 2006 there really was no communication staff of any kind within the foundation so the committee literally was the foundation's communications team they did all the press release writing they did all of the press fitting all of that stuff was handled by that relatively small committee and then in 2009 when the foundation began to staff up and a communications team was created they decided that it would be better to create it turn it into a staff committee and basically because there wasn't going to be production work for them anymore but there was going to be a department rather at that time that was going to be around to support so it began to change from about a 15 person to a mailing list kind of advisory group with about 200 plus people on it which when we began to meet with the group at wikimedia conference in 2016 we met several times I shouldn't say began meeting when we had a meeting with them in 2016 we acknowledged that a 200 person group wasn't really a committee anymore we also acknowledged this was right after wikipedia 15 that we had had really great success with this 200 person group and doing a movement wide activity the wikipedia 15 birthday a lot of the communications coordinating was done through that staff committee mailing list but we recognize that we could do more that kind of inspire the communications department to really want to think through how can we engage this group even further that was also around the time when the department became a department and we began going from you know 2.5 people to a dozen people so the possibility of engaging with the community and doing it more meaningful actually became a reality and a possibility for the department so from wikimedia to 2016 till now we've been experimenting and having discussions with the committee specifically about what this should look like and these are some of the steps we took to get here we met at all those different events we did a survey with the committee in November 2016 we got a lot of feedback on what kind of experiments to do we did a bunch of different ideas like a newsletter to that group we modified how we do the media report we made a lot of kind of changes some ideas work some ideas didn't work but we took all of those learnings and then the wikimedia conference in 2017 began to propose this idea of replacing the communications committee with something different a little smaller kind of going back to its roots if you will going back to its origin story if you are a video game or comic book fan so we drafted a proposal and presented it with wikimedia 2017 we got a lot of really great feedback and frankly wanted to begin rolling it out shortly after that but one of the pieces of feedback we got consistently was that if the department was going to engage in this work we really had to commit to it it wasn't a project we could launch and then because of priority changes or staffing changes or things like that kind of put on the back burner that once it begins it's really going to get going and people really want to get behind it we really want to move it forward quickly and as some of you may remember there were some things going on in the movement around 2017 we were working on this whole strategy thing our department had a number of staffing changes and we also decided we should probably work on the foundation website a lot of things took place that made us realize as a department this might not be the time for us to make this commitment we were very nervous that we would kind of full start it we would launch it and then realize we didn't have the resources to really see the idea through so we unfortunately kind of put it on hold for a lot of 2018 tweaked it a lot though it went through a lot of revision work so I'm actually kind of happy we delayed it because we learned a lot in talking with the committee further and talking with community members and we learned a lot from the movement strategy process so the plan that we actually proposed in 2017 has similarities with what we introduced earlier this month but it's actually a radically improved plan so where are we taking things there's going to be a new committee the new committee will be about 10 to 15 members we're asking them to serve three year terms so these are definitely a commitment from the volunteers or the staff of affiliates excuse me it is open to all of the people in the movement it's not just affiliates we want anyone in the movement who is working on movement communications be it through a wiki project or through a user group or through an extension that they're working on whatever it is but they consider participating in this committee they're going to work very closely with the department and a lot of the kind of projects like annual report website development a lot of the things that we do on a kind of a day to day basis we're going to be working on some ways to integrate them more into that process so that we have their input directly and we're hoping for example like you know there's kind of the question of like well you're an international department like what are you missing out now there's been a lot of issues with wikipedia 15 some of them are obviously are relatively clear to those of us who've worked in the community that obviously having community input helps the foundation offset things that might upset the community but something that's really interesting we've learned in communications is we also really need this international input to make sure that what we're saying actually works across a global language so for example one of the lessons with wikipedia 15 is we talked about having an events on every continent except Antarctica on six continents when we presented this to the audience in South America they laughed at us because in South America there are only six continents there aren't seven continents so this international press release talking about events in six continents in their minds was a press release saying we had an event on Antarctica and they were wildly confused so there's those little things that that wasn't something that upset the community it was just something that didn't quite land and it turned out that didn't land in 60% of the of the world as it turns out we found out continents is a really interesting issue so those are just like small examples of how we've learned we really want this global perspective and this multilingual perspective on our communications we really believe not only in addition to making it more accessible to the community it will make the foundation and the movements communications more accessible to the world and hopefully therefore help deliver us on some of our movement strategy goals it's kind of specifically guidance on the movement communications you've been hearing the department communications department through the website and some internal meetings has been talking a lot about things like talking beyond English really doing more multilingual communication really hoping this group can help us with some of that work they're also going to work with us on implementation of movement-wide activities so Wikipedia 15 with the old communications committee was a great success surprise surprise we're probably going to be doing something for Wikipedia I don't know if anyone's world with this shocking announcement but there will be a 20th birthday for Wikipedia and we're hoping this group will help us with that and something that will be new for this group is as the affiliates have grown and as our community has grown so is the desire to build their communications capacity and there are multitude of teams across the foundation who work with them and supporting that but we also recognize there's a lot of things that can happen between the affiliates and between the team and provide them training and some of the access that the staff enjoy such as you know media training with our outside consultants things like that we really want to help them develop their skills in part so that they can take those skills and take to other people in the community and other projects so it's not just dependent on our department and other departments in the foundation to do some of that capacity building or the handful of affiliates who have taken it upon themselves to help with that so that's the old group that was this two hundred person mailing list it was actually working really well for us we had a great experience with Wikipedia 15 we don't want to lose that but we also heard a lot of feedback that the way it operates today wasn't working for everyone because it had about a nine year kind of craft if you will had 200 people but no one really knew who else was on it it was like oh Jimmy's on the list well that's amazing I had no idea like people were just every week kind of finding a new mailing list so we're going to dump the old list invite everyone as well as anyone not on the list to join a new mailing list which we're referring to as the movement communications group we feel this sort of better embodies that you know committees generally aren't 200 people usually committees have kind of work this is a bit more of an advisory sort of interpersonal and inter affiliate discussion group so that's where hoping will happen and we're going to be launching this in the next week and we'll be doing a new one that's been worked out and once that launches again similar to the new communications committee we're inviting people from all across the movement who happen to do any type of movement communications work to join and to participate and just for privacy and security if there isn't a concern about like a person's name being listed we are working on that but that'll be handled on a case by case basis. We're going to be taking applications for over the next month there's information up on meta wiki and you can follow the com com link or check your inboxes as we've sent this out to wikimedia l and a few other places but go to the com com page on meta wiki we have information on there and how you can apply essentially all we're asking for is just verifying you know it's a three-year term telling us what some of your ideas for the committee are and telling us a little bit about the information process we're not looking for a whole lot so just some basic information to help us figure out the department because it's a staff committee and there are no existing members will be working on selecting the inaugural members in the future for future terms and possibly adding people at this time next year we'll work with the committee on that and then the communications group movement communications group as I said will be launching in a few weeks the sign up form is going to be a little bit mailing list we're still figuring out those final details but a draft of the page talking about that and where you'll be able to find the form to sign up is also on meta wiki at move com so we've got com com and move com I didn't see we're clever with those alright so that's it thank you so much we really appreciate and particularly thanks everyone for their patience I know especially the committee members and affiliates have been hearing us talk about this for a year or two but we're super excited that we can now really commit to rolling it out in a meaningful way with some long term support for these committee members so thank you all very much and now it's time for questions and discussion so if there are any questions you have feel free to step up to that mic over there if you're in the room or if you have questions on IRC take those as well hi I have a question Danny horn for Eric about the wikimania spaces you said you've got 31 proposals so far give us how many are you going to choose like how many you can end up with it's not actually entirely settled yet because it depends on how it depends on a lot of different factors it depends on the latabilities of rooms of rooms of right sizes of how many sessions we end up deciding to have like how long key knows we will have and everything so it's very hard to say a specific number it's probably not going to be 31 and we counted out also if we accepted everyone and the time that they had asked for it would be like a conference of 21 to 25 days which it won't be so I can say that everyone is obviously not going to get everything that they want but I can't give any exact exact number yet so we will get back about that to everyone who's applied for spaces in probably next or the upcoming weeks okay thanks and are there any other questions for folks anything on IRC okay cool anybody have questions in the room speak now or forever hold your peace has anyone ever objected at a wedding then that's a terrible segue to wiki love but it looks like it is time for wiki love so if you have some love to share please come up to the microphone or shout out on IRC okay I'll do a quick one in the absence of other folks I want to just say a huge shout out to colleagues over in TNC for all of the activities of the past month like Pi Day International Women's Day that's really it's been awesome and fun and I give some wiki love to our colleagues in Europe who worked really hard on the EU copyright reform we didn't necessarily get the exact outcome we wanted but we got a lot of things done along the way we've got a lot of inroads into the next steps and I think a lot of that is due to the amazing work of community members on the ground and the staff who supported that who are some here some all around the world but great job on that public policy work is super hard and it takes a lot of commitment and I think we did a great job. Some wiki love to our developer volunteers specifically because those three are crossing my areas in the last couple of months Jay Prakash Omher Iranda and Formafix they're relentless in giving us good insights and improving our code. Thank you. Some wiki love for Santosh, Pow, Runa and everyone else who was involved in launching the external guidance feature which is a really great thing and came to us kind of suddenly and they're here today which is really cool they're usually remote so thank you guys. I just want to give some generic wiki love to our stewards for people who don't know the stewards are a small group of users who have rights to do things like block users all the projects and they've been really helpful working with us the trust and safety recently and all the time so a generic thank you to all of them for their ongoing sort of work with us. Awesome. Thank you all for sharing the wiki love and remember to keep in mind as you go into the next month folks just you know notice things with gratitude. I think that's a great way to live life. Thank you all for sharing and for coming to the monthly activities meeting hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.