File:Analysis of presentation situation, Movement Strategy Track, Wikimedia Conference 2017 in Berlin (shortened).webm

TRANSCRIPT:

ED BLAND: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ed Bland. So we're delighted to be here and to be speaking with you over the next 2 and 1/2 days about The Movement Strategy over the next 10 to 15 years.

So this is what we're going to be talking about. This may be the only formal presentation that you get. So you can sigh of relief and it's only 30 minutes. There are a bunch of slides but hopefully they'll be entertaining and informative.

We'll go through a little bit of introduction, then we'll think of some trends that are happening in the world for us to consider. Basically four big trends that will influence our movement. There will be many others, but these are some of the biggest.

Then we'll review a little bit about who we are today, the various stakeholders that are in our movement, a little bit more depth on those. For you longtime Wikimedians some of this will be repetitive, but there may be a new twist on information that you already know. For the newer folks we think it will be really helpful and insightful.

And then, who we want to become. We've done a little bit of analysis on other movements, social, political, empowerment movements-- areas where they get stuck, typically. And they're quite similar to where we may get stuck or have gotten stuck, and how they get unstuck in order to have higher impact in the world.

So that's what the flow is going to be, and then we'll do a Q&A at the end. So over to Guillaume for the first section.

GUILLAUME: Hi. Can you hear me OK? OK. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because most of you know this and sometimes better than I do. So just reviewing the past 16 years it's a bit impressive when you take stock of everything that has happened since then.

So for over 40 million articles in over 300 languages, I mean, that just to me is very humbling. Over 75,000 active editors across our Wikimedia projects. And as you will see, we have many more who may not be as active but who still contribute regularly. Over 25 million items on Wikidata, over 15 billion page views every month, I mean those numbers to me, in some ways they are meaningless, because they're just so big that I can't even understand them. But they're really humbling.

So as Catherine was mentioning this morning, we have a really bold vision. And we have had some success. We have had some challenges. And now is sort of the time where we are in a place where we can think about the future in a way that we are informed. So what we're trying to do today with this brief presentation is share the basic layer of what everyone, who is thinking about the future, should know.

The goals for the process, you've heard about this a little. The first one is to identify that cohesive direction across the movement. And that doesn't mean that we should all agree on doing one thing. It means that we should sort of decide where we want to go. And if possible that shouldn't be in two opposite directions.

And the second goal, to me, is at least as important. It's building relationships and building, or rebuilding trust. Because we can't go anywhere together if we don't trust each other.

Better to understand the people in these institutions it's through understanding each other that we build trust. Building a shared understanding of what it means to be a movement. And Ed will speak little more about movements and what they have in common, and how we can use those frameworks to better understand ourselves.

And the last point-- building relationships, this is within the movement, it's internally. But it's also building relationships outside the movement to people that maybe are our allies, maybe our threats, maybe a little bit of both, but that we can't really ignore.

The process-- I think we were supposed to have this on the poster somewhere, I don't know if that happened-- but what I want to show you is this. Yeah, OK. So we are at the top right here. So this is cycle one, and this is cycle one in mostly what we call track A, which is about organized groups.

So there are four tracks. And there are at least three cycles. And there are two phases. Right now we're in the top left corner. This is just the beginning. And we hope that you contribute to as much of the process as possible.

Just zooming in on the three cycles that are relevant to the people in this room-- cycle one is what we're doing right now. It's that sort of divergence of very open discussion. Cycle two will be trying to identify the big clusters. And then cycle three will be refining those, and coming to a conclusion.

And for the trends to consider I'm going to give the mic back to Ed.

ED BLAND: OK, so there are many trends, many trends. So we had to narrow it down and we picked four. This is sort of the takeaway slide. We will go into more depth in each of these four, but these were the four big ones that we really thought were worthwhile talking quite a bit about.

So the first is about population. And the big insight there is we'll get over the next 13 years-- to 2030-- another billion people. And they will come principally from Africa and Asia. Wow. That's a lot of more people on the planet. Already existing resources, no new resources, and what do we do about that? How does that affect us?

Second is about education, continued gaps in access to education, availability of high quality education. And those gaps really don't narrow dramatically by 2030. They are still quite huge. They may narrow in 100 years. And we'll show you a little bit about that. But by 2030 they haven't really narrowed that much.

The third is on technology. There's a lot here. We'll be referencing a few things. I want to point out Toby is here. Where is Toby? Right here? Many of you may know Toby. Feel free to ask him questions, as well, about technology. And Victoria-- is she here? Right in front of me. Yes, she's here, too. So we have our two technology experts here.

For the first time nearly everyone in the world will have a smartphone. In our lifetime everyone in the world will have a smartphone. Wow. Wow. That's pretty big.

The last one is on the politics of knowledge, which is a broad trend. Also including the economics of knowledge, but knowledge is still equal to power in many respects. And so it can get usurped by powerful interests to serve their purposes.

And also that much of the digital knowledge that exists is contributed by a small portion of the population as we know. So these are the four big trends. This is the population one, as you can see. This is actually the next 83 years. But by 2030 is that line there. And you can see that half a billion people coming online, the top one is Asia, and the blue one is Africa. Still very steep. And the rest is sort of-- still a little bit of growth, but more or less straight line-- big.

So a lot more people, and still unequal access to resources, and not a lot of new resources. This was the statistic-- it'll take 83 years for low income countries to move their average school level from elementary to high school graduation. So it's just going to take a long, long time.

There are some very positive signs-- about literacy, for example, going up, and access to primary education going up. But still the gaps remain. And actually there is an urgency to our quest. Referencing the Wikipedia-- no deadline. We actually believe that there is a deadline. It's a deadline for us as a species and a planet, and to help solve some of our biggest problems on the planet. And we are a part of that solution.

OK, on education-- here's some trends in education-- there are also the education team and experts here as well that we can refer to on this trend-- more tech in the classroom, especially mobile. Established frameworks to advance digital literacy, information literacy, and 21st century skills around data and facts. Teachers creating and using open education resources, and actually education more and more to advance employability throughout the world.

To technology-- over half of the population of the planet will be online by 2030. It's now 47%. So it will just keep growing. This is an internet penetration by country. So you can see-- well developed global north and Africa still being-- not nearly as much access as some, and the bigger population centers, but still very, very uneven.

Mobile means that everyone gets a pocket supercomputer. Not quite yet, but it's coming. The trend for video and photos is extreme. This is a chart showing the number of daily photos shared on various platforms, Snapchat, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp. You can see it's nearly exponential in the last three years.

Structured data is also really significant, both for us and everyone else. This is how it relates to us, linking our projects and standardizing across languages, improving search, helping to answer complex queries, and enabling micro contributions.

We're still pretty early on the machine learning. And it's already starting to have big benefits to us and others in the world. This was a great statistic of a 90% reduction in hours spent reviewing recent changes for vandalism after the [INAUDIBLE] system was enabled-- machine learning prediction service for our own movement on Wikipedia.

Onto the politics of knowledge-- this chart just shows that most of the world, 67% of the world is still living in areas that don't have free access, maybe, somewhat free, partly free, or maybe quite censored, or not free at all. Only the green areas would be considered truly free.

And actually under-represented topics-- this basically makes the point that groups are under-represented, not just passively, not just because there's a content gap there on groups that are under-represented. But when people are actively putting content on, about under-represented groups. It's getting actively deleted and eliminated by our system. So it's not just passive but active. And those are things that we can change if we want to encourage more diversity in the movement.

OK. Lastly, on the politics of knowledge-- these are the policy areas that the foundation is established, that we believe in, and will support-- access, censorship, copyright, your media liability and privacy. And as you can imagine all of those are under threat in various parts of the world. Some more so than others, but they're all under threat.

So those are the top trends. If you're interested in more detail, we'll give you the follow up information on that. And we've got experts here to answer more questions. I'll pass it back to Guillaume to review who we are today.

GUILLAUME: Thank you. So Ed gave you an overview of what the future looks like and outside of the movement. And because strategy is about imagining who we want to become, it's useful to try and look at who we are today in order to see the road ahead.

So some of this will be familiar to many of you. And I'm probably going to go a bit fast because I don't want to bore you with things that you already know. Feel free to stop me if I'm going too fast.

So when we think about the movement the first group of people that usually comes to mind is individual contributors. And those can be people who actively edit, but also people who are local organizers, people who organize trainings, people who work on partnerships. But they are all still individual contributors.

And when we look at who is editing, and how much they're editing, the numbers that we usually give are the active, and very active editors, which are 62,000 and 13,000. And usually we talk about those 75,000 editors who contribute actively.

But there is a category of-- what is called in this slide-- light editors, who make only a few edits a month. And we don't usually talk much about them, but if you compare the two numbers, we have a lot more people who contribute maybe less, but who are just as valuable. And that number is just amazing to me.

In terms of where the edits are coming from-- so this is a chart that shows you for each continent the percentage of the global population, the percentage of total internet users, and the third bar in each is where the monthly edits are coming from.

If I can direct your attention to Asia and Europe. You see that Asia has 60% of the world population, but only contributes 19% of monthly edits. Compare this to Europe, for example, with only 11% of the total population, and more than half of all monthly edits to Wikimedia projects.

So when we see this, and where the edits are coming from, we could say, well, maybe that doesn't really matter if we are actually covering topics about the whole planet. But as we see that's not the case. This is a map of items on Wikidata that can be associated with a specific location on Earth. So those could be monuments, they could be cities, any item that has an associated location.

And you see that this is very European. And if we assume that there should be articles about the whole world, you see that we still have a long way to go.

And also we still have a gender gap in editors. I don't think this is news to any of you. But I still wanted to have those numbers in here.

I think I saw Aaron. Yeah. So for this slide I'm going to say very little, and if you want to learn more, you can talk to Aaron.

So we have a lot of projects. And some are more mature than others. And they have different growth rates and different dynamics. The one that is interesting in terms of trends is the most major one, the English Wikipedia.

And you're probably familiar with this chart, from what we call the rise and decline of Wikipedia, whether the number of total active editors peaked around 2007, and then decreased, and maybe leveling off.

And also, this chart of the percentage of surviving newcomers, meaning people who come to this site and who actually stay, and you see that that decreased by a lot of percentage points, and has leveled off around 6%, maybe. Something like that. But this is to say a lot of people who come to the site just don't stay, and we lose those people.

So, these were all about the numbers. And now, if we look at why do people contribute, they contribute for a lot of different reasons, and sometimes the reasons that they gave are not the actual reasons.

So you probably remember the editor's survey in 2012. And some of the results are here. And you see that what is really striking to me in this slide is that the first reason given by people for why they contribute is because they are driven by the mission. So before I saw this slide, to me, when I imagine why people contribute, I mostly think of people who contribute for their own personal benefit. Like, oh I like trains. I'm going to contribute on trains, because I just want to entertain my own hobby. And that happens to an extent, but it's also a lot of people being driven by the mission who care about sharing knowledge. And then adding content and personal fulfillment come next, but to me this is the most important point, to me, in this slide.

So moving on to organized groups-- a lot of people in this room are from organized groups, so I'm going to go quite fast on this. As most of you know we have affiliates, and organized groups, and the foundation. And so these other groups that do the work on the local scale.

There are different models for organized groups and allied organizations. The chapters, which is the oldest model, with the legal structure and they support a specific geography, one thematic organization, user groups with a more lightweight structure, and that is the model that has seen a lot of success in the past few years. Two allied organizations and the Wikimedia Foundation, itself.

Moving on to donors. I'm going to give the mic to [INAUDIBLE] for the next few sections.

PRESENTER: Hello. My name is [INAUDIBLE]. This is about funds raised by the Wikimedia foundation. So 77.2 million USD from 5.4 million donors. You can see that most are coming from North America and Europe.

So we have not a lot of donations still in Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and Australia. And we see a little bump there in Latin America-- in Brazil-- as the fund-raising team has figured out a new payment processing in that country, and that's why the bump. But this is pretty new. And we don't know how that's going to evolve, if it's going to maintain or not. But that's the scene-- that's the lay of the land today.

And then, why do donors give? So the Wikimedia foundation, the fund-raising team, ran around 50 focus groups to understand why people are donating to us. And they mainly do that, they mainly donate because they use Wikipedia. And they like what they see as a source of information.

So that is 31.8% that are donating to us because they see the value on what they are reading. And I want to call out, as well, that 23.6% also thinks that Wikipedia depends on its readers in order to survive. So some of them know that their donation is really important to our survival.

And in another one, the 10% there, it's really interesting as well. Because they know that they need to protect our independence. And we all know and value that, right? No ads. Let's keep our independence protected.

And the 15.2%-- they also know Wikipedia is a nonprofit, which is also really important data. And those are the countries where the fund-raising team that does the research-- so Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and the US.

OK. Moving on to readers now. So this is also going to be really looking at English Wikipedia. And I'm going to call out the three first factors-- why readers are coming to Wikipedia. And it's pretty much when a topic is referenced in the media, that's number one. And that could be pretty much like politics. Like who is the president of the US right now?

Or it could be like someone mentioned a celebrity and I wanted to read more about that person.

The second one is, people are really interested in learning. And that's really high there. And then the third one is the bar bet. Wikipedia, or a topic, came out in a conversation, and we need to know who is right. Who is going to pay the beer? So that's the third one. And that was about 5,000 responses that gave us this data.

And then we know that we needed to also learn more about readers that are not in North America, or Europe for that matter. And I'm really proud of this work as being part of that. So this is actually the initiative of five teams within the Wikimedia Foundation, that includes communications, the global reach, and partnerships, reading-- that is part of product-- community engagement, and research.

So the five teams-- they came together to understand more about countries and in places where we actually don't have a lot of readers and editors. And we started with Mexico, Nigeria, and India. We have done phone surveys in those three countries. And why phone surveys, you might be asking. It's because in those countries a lot of people are coming online for the first time using their mobile phones.

So if you would be using the internet and Wikipedia to run a survey, which usually is the way that we have done that in the past, we would be talking to the existing audience. We would not be talking to the people that are not here yet. And that's the importance of actually calling them in their cell phones. And having that be a free call that they can reply to, and talk to us about awareness. Have they heard about Wikipedia before? Do they know things about Wikipedia? Do they use it? And what's the value on it for them?

And also technology use-- do they have a smartphone? Can they afford data? --and all those questions that really help us understand more about Mexico, Nigeria, and India.

And we're still learning from that data. We are going to do more of that work through phone surveys. And also going to these countries, we are partnering with a design research firm. And we're going to go there and talk to people at length in their environment and ask them more about how they're relating to knowledge-- how they're finding, or not finding the information they need and want. And especially-- are they finding that in their local language? Is there relevant content there?

And the two countries that are going to do that is Brazil and Indonesia. And right now we already know that offline is a big thing. And I think we have been flirting with offline on and off. But now we have the data to confirm that people are-- especially the ones that have intermittent accessibility to the internet-- they want to go online, find the information they need, and then consume that information offline.

So we know that offline is a big thing, and especially for education. So we are looking into that-- how we can make offline better and widely available.

The other thing that we-- and maybe one of the main things, if not the main thing, in my opinion-- is that we learn that awareness, or the lack of awareness of Wikipedia, is high in those geographies.

And every country we do-- we actually did a new survey in Iraq. And that's before the call that we gave to almost like 2000 people in Iraq-- we asked them, have you heard about Wikipedia before this call? And only 15% said yes. And we were covering Arabic, Kurdish-- all the local languages. So it's a pretty low number.

And every time we were doing these surveys we were coming back with this number. The awareness of Wikipedia is low.

And then in a lot of countries-- cost, especially in Nigeria and India-- cost is still a barrier to use. So when we are talking about access here that is affordability. Affordability is a barrier. And we need to find ways to tackle that.

We are already tackling it. And I'm going to talk about that in the next slide. But those are the three main findings that we are highlighting today. There is more. And all this data is available on Meta. You can go there, and you can find everything. And we are more than happy to discuss and talk more about this.

So partners-- and it's funny that I'm here also representing partnerships for the Wikimedia Foundation. And I'm going to talk about the partnerships that we already are doing. So we do partnerships to expand our impact.

We know we cannot do that alone. We know we cannot achieve our vision alone. We need partners that are going to help us to get there. And we are doing that on education, through the Wikipedia education program. We're doing that with Glen partnerships. And we are doing that, as well, with distribution. So we can talk about-- I just mentioned affordability. We have a program that is called Wikipedia zero that is designed to distribute Wikipedia and reach people that cannot afford data charges.

And we are trying to find like-minded organizations to work with them as well, and have our goals, and mission expanded. So these are the partnerships-- the existing partnerships that we do. And we should do more. We should do better. Yes. And we will. But that's what we are doing right now.

The last one-- and I just mentioned that, we cannot do things alone. And we are not alone. Actually, we are in an ecosystem. And you can see this is probably the first draft illustration of this idea that we are not alone. We are inserted in an ecosystem and we need to consider that.

Some of the "partners" quote unquote, are going to be our frenemies, or are going to be really friends, and like it or not, they are going to be there. And we need to relate to them, talk to them, and consider them and the ecosystem in how we are going to work with this broader ecosystem that is around us, surrounding us. And I think now I'm done. Yeah, I am.

ED BLAND: OK, we're in the final stretch. Five or six more slides and then we're done. Who we want to become--

So this is a brief look at other movements. Movements are powerful and purposeful ecosystems. These are movements you probably will recognize and know. It can be political movements, social movements, lots, lots.

The one I'm particularly fond of is the micro-finance movement. I've been involved with that for almost 10 years. Would love to talk with anyone about that movement if you're interested.

And as we looked into this, and put information on meta, we got a lot of response. Well, we're not a move-- we're not a political movement. Wait a minute. We're not really a social movement. And so in many ways, this is a movement. We call ourselves a movement. And it is very much a movement. There are many ways that we are a movement on the left.

We take collective action. We have organizing structures and coordination. We have common values and principles that we operate by. We have an overall belief in the value of free knowledge. And we have similar enough motivations. They're not entirely the same, but they don't need to be, they're similar enough. And there is a general reaction against the commercialization of the internet.

Now, there are probably more commonalities that we have within the movement that make us a viable movement. And we're big. And we're relatively global. And moving, more or less, in the same direction. Not always, but more or less.

And there are elements that are a little bit different. So unlike some very emotional, social movements, they're reacting against systemic injustice. Some of the examples we put were land rights movements, ethnic discrimination, or environmental exploitation movements, that are really saying, no. This can't stand anymore. This is exploitation that we just can't tolerate.

Others are more political. They have a real political agenda, and they want to basically convince the powers that be that the laws are not right. And they need to be changed for more civil rights, let's say, or universal suffrage, or labor rights. I'm sure you can imagine many of those that are very, very political.

And we have some of those but not as much as some others. And others are also very time bound. Enough is enough. This needs to change within the near term.

So we can learn a lot, regardless of the similarities and differences, we can learn a lot from other movements, and for ourselves, to understand how they operate. And so we've put a bunch of these together. There's one particular framework we want to expose you to.

It's from a group called The Movement Strategy Center. They've been working for 15 years on various movements of many sorts. Mostly they're grassroots, community-led movements. And in their view-- and they've published a bunch of white papers-- what often happens in movements that they have some pretty typical challenges that get them stuck? And these are the top five.

So the first is they get stuck being isolated, and they have a sort of narrow focus among the constituents. They get defensive and reactive. The folks-- there are many folks that are marginalized within the movement, even people they're trying to promote as those that shouldn't be marginalized can be marginalized.

They can be very competitive within themselves based on their interests. And then lastly, they can be very control oriented. And the hope is to move from this area to the other column. And they have many examples of groups that have not been able to do that, and groups that have.

So they move from isolation to interdependence, from a defensive stance to a much more proactive stance-- from marginalized groups are actually put in the center, to have distributed power, and moving from competition to more strategic direction for a more collective impact. And then control can move much more toward creativity. In the control area it tends to be risk averse with an intolerance for much change or perfectionistic orientation. And there isn't as much innovation. And that can move toward more creativity.

So does any of this ring true to anyone? It seemed to ring true to some. Some, not so much. But some seemed to ring true. And so we gathered your feedback and information, and from other groups, and it does seem that there are some areas within this movement that might relate.

Just take a look at these for a moment. Limited engagement outsides, stuck may be defending against conflict, tough environment for new communities, a lot of self-interest and maybe some power struggles, and resistance to change. So these were some of the top ones.

And so what to do about this? And so there is a solution. It has to do with these five areas. You'll see some of this over the course of the next 2 and 1/2 days, to help us think about things in a slightly different way, that might break up some of these obstacles. Inviting a broad awareness is what we've started today, to a larger movement with lots of different constituent parts. Leading with a bold vision and purpose that everyone can understand. Listening to people and communities, and they may sound trite now, and hopefully they'll be more meaningful as we go. Aligning and moving collectively and trusting more, and innovating more.

So we wanted to leave you with this final ecosystem slide. And we actually have this slide deck in the white packet there, if you'd like to look at it. And we're going to have a little exercise to discuss this among groups, and then we're going to do a Q&A. So thank you very much for your attention. I'll turn it back over to Bob.