Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome
the chair of Wikimania 2012,
James Hare.
[applause]
Good morning everyone.
On behalf of Wikimedia District of Columbia
I would like to welcome all of you
to Wikimania 2012.
[applause]
I would like to thank our partners and collaborators:
the US Department of State Office of E-Diplomacy,
the Library of Congress,
the Wikimedia Foundation,
Wikimedia Deutschland,
the National Archives and Records Administration,
OpenHatch, the Broadcasting Board of Governors,
for working with us to make
this conference possible.
[applause]
I would also like to thank our sponsors:
Google, Ask.com, Zoomph, the Encyclopedia of Life,
the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, Wikia,
the Saylor Foundation and wikiHow
for their generous contributions.
[applause]
Finally, I would like to thank
our incredible conference organizing team
which has been working in one way or another
since January 22nd 2011 to make
this conference possible.
Nicholas Bashour, Katie Filbert, Tiffany Smith,
Orsolya Virág, Deror Lin, Sage Ross,
Chad Horohoe, and our legion of volunteers
all led by Danny B.
[cheers and applause]
I would also like to point out
that during this conference there will be
many side events taking place during the evening.
Tonight we have GLAM Night Out at the Newseum
and the official Wikimania Happy Hour
sponsored by Zoomph at Tonic.
Check out the information desk on the
third floor of the Marvin Center if you'd
like to learn more about our side events.
I'm glad you could join us this morning
with this excellent weather.
You see, I edited the Wikipedia article
on DC summers to say that
we don't have 100 degree heat waves
and apparently it worked!
[laughter and applause]
If you have attended a previous Wikimania
welcome back!
If this is your first Wikimania,
I'd like to introduce you to the
events of the next few days.
Wikimania is where you go to meet the people
who work on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
which is maintained by volunteers
and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation
That's Wikimedia with an "M".
The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization
that runs Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote,
Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiversity,
Wikispecies, the MediaWiki software project,
Wikimedia Commons, and I'd like to introduce
our latest project under development, WikiData.
[applause]
Volunteers for all these projects and more
will be here today, discussing their latest findings,
and pondering the future of the Wikimedia projects.
It is going to be an exciting four days.
But first I would like to introduce our first speaker
Dawn Nunziato.
Professor Nunziato is an internationally recognized
expert in the area of free speech and the Internet.
Her primary teaching and scholarship interests
are in the areas of Internet law, free speech and digital copyright.
She recently published her book
"Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age"
and has lectured and written extensively on
issues involving free speech and the Internet.
Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Dawn Nunziato.
[applause]
Good morning and thank you for that kind welcome.
On behalf of GW Law School
I'd like to welcome you all to our Lisner auditorium.
It's a great honor for GW Law School
to partner with the Department of State
on important and exciting events like this one.
And GW Law School, under our relatively new dean,
Paul Berman, is particularly committed to
bridging the gap between the ivory tower of academia
and the real world of law and policy and practice.
We're particularly committed to capitalizing
on our location in the nation's capital
and are very honored to sponsor and support
events like this.
As we said, at GW Law, professors like myself
are particularly focused on cyberlaw issues.
I teach in the area of Internet law, digital copyright
and free speech.
And toward that end with Microsoft's generous support
my colleague Artuno Carrillo and I created
a program and a speaker series
on global Internet freedom and human rights.
We're very excited to be sponsoring
a number of speakers in connection with
that speaker series:
Vint Cerf is going to come and speak to us
in a couple of months;
Ai Weiwei, Chinese human rights activist,
is hopefully going to be let out of China
to come speak to us on global Internet freedom issues;
we sponsored Rebecca MacKinnon,
the author of "Consent of the Networked",
an Internet free speech activist,
last year as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series,
so we're really excited about that.
GW Law was recently chosen to be the new home
of the Federal Communications Law Journal,
we look forward to working with the
Federal Communications Bar here in DC
on cutting-edge issues of communications law.
And in connection with that, FCC Chairman Genachowski
is going to come to speak to us
to launch that new journal in a few months.
So we're very active on these types of issues
and we're very exciting to be sponsoring
and supporting events like these.
I'm also very proud of the work of my colleagues
Dan Solove and Orin Kerr,
who you may be familiar with,
who are leaders in the areas of
Internet privacy and cybercrime.
So we've got a lot going on here
at GW Law, and in particular our new dean,
Paul Berman, is a world-reknowned expert in Internet law issues
and the author of a well-regarded casebook
on the subject.
So once again welcome to all of you
and on with the show!
[applause]
At Wikimania we have the great privilege
of working with the US Department of State
for our Tech@State track.
Our next speaker Richard Boly is a career US diplomat
and the current Director of the Office of eDiplomacy
an applied technology think tank for the US Department of State.
Previously he was a National Security Affairs Fellow
at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
where he launched a global entrepreneurship program.
Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Boly.
[applause]
Good morning Wikipedians and Wikimedians!
[applause]
My name's Richard Boly and
I am part of the Office of eDiplomacy
at the State Department, despite the suit,
we feel that we are kindred spirits with you!
Uh, actually I would like to ask
all the people from eDiplomacy here to stand up briefly
just stand up so you can search them out
and find out more about what we're doing.
[applause]
We're so excited about being able to partner
with you and with GW Law School
and we will have as part of our Tech@State track
some really interesting presentations
which dovetail perfectly with the conference.
Actually one of the two best known platforms
that we have or products that we offer
in eDiplomacy are Tech@State,
this quarterly conference on the convergence
of technology, foreign policy and development; and
the other is Diplopedia, built on MediaWiki.
And you'll get a chance tomorrow morning to hear
from Tiffany Smith and Chris Bronk
who will be talking about that as part of
the Tech@State track.
I also wanted to give a shout out to Tim Hayes
who has been curating these Tech@States,
and I think he's still over at the Marvin Center
checking people in.
Tim has been a huge driver in making
this collaboration possible.
But really, my goal here is to bring the words
of our Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
The Secretary of State would have loved to have been here
but unfortunately is travelling.
And she did pen a letter that she asked me
to share with you and we will scan the signed letter
and make it available obviously on the wiki website.
So here goes.
Dear friends,
On behalf of the US Department of State,
I am delighted to extend my heartfelt congratulations
on the opening of Wikimania 2012
and the Tech@State Wiki.gov.
I commend each of you for your dedication
to enhancing global understanding
through the many projects and initiatives
that the Wikimedia Foundation supports.
Wikimania 2012 highlights the intersection
of government and community goals.
It demonstrates how we are breaking down the barriers
between governments and the citizens they serve
by making readily available critical information
that is often difficult to find.
The US Department of State supports these
endeavours in technology, knowledge sharing,
and community building, as they are important
pillars of our 21st century state-craft agenda.
I am a staunch advocate of bringing technology
and knowledge to citizens around the world
and I believe it is vitally important that
our diplomats understand the huge potential
of using connection technologies
as a way to reach foreign audiences.
The world is more connected now
than ever before.
But there is still much work to be done
to fully capitalize on the potential of
this interconnection.
There are many people who are
disenfranchised because they lack access to information.
There are others whose contribution would
make our collective knowledge richer
but they face risks and difficulties in doing so.
Your work in the Wikimedia Foundation
contributes greatly to achieving our shared goal
of making information more open and accessible.
Thank you for your efforts
and please know you have my best wishes
for a productive and enjoyable Wikimania 2012.
With appreciation and best regards,
I am, sincerely yours, signed,
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Thank you.
[applause]
Now I would like to introduce
our keynote speaker for Wikimania 2012,
Mary Gardiner.
She is an open source developer,
computer science graduate student,
and women in open source advocate
with over 10 years of experience.
Mary's research is in lexical semantics
and concentrates on how changes in word choice
can affect meaning and tone.
Before entering graduate school she worked
as a senior software engineer for a year
and contributed code to the Python-based
Twisted project.
In 2011, she co-founded the Ada Initiative,
supporting women in open technology and culture.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mary Gardiner.
[applause]
Good morning Wikimanians,
good morning Tech@State attendees.
[laughter]
So as interesting as computational lexical semantics
and computational sentiment analysis are
I am not going to talk about my PhD work today
I am talking about my new project,
work with my new project, the Ada Initiative,
which is a US-based non-profit
supporting women in open technology and culture,
which very much includes wiki projects
and other open knowledge projects,
also open source, remix culture, open government,
open data projects and similar.
And what I'm going to talk about specifically
is fostering diversity in these kinds of projects.
Broadly, uh, not only gender diversity
but diversity across different economic backgrounds,
different geographic origins, different ethnic origins,
and so on.
Ah, so I subtitled my talk maybe
in a slightly inflammatory way,
I wrote "not a boring chore, a criticial opportunity"
because there can this temptation
hopefully not succumbed to too much within this room
to view diversity as essentially a PR exercise
that a more diverse project looks better.
It is however of course crucial in a project
with a mission like that of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
to encompass some, in the case of Wikipedia
an encyclopedia covering the um, the sum of human knowledge
ultimately, obviously to incorporate the sum of human knowledge
you need to incorporate the sum of humans in some crucial way.
So it should be fairly obvious that therefore
diversity is one of the key goals of Wikimania projects.
OK, so first of all I just want to talk a little bit about
wiki projects as social change.
Uh, it's not what everyone involved in wiki projects
is aiming for, uh, I mean there are different
reasons you want to build the sum of human knowledge
and creating social change is only one of them.
But it is something that happens as we build these projects
and make them freely available, that things change
both because of the project and ah,
with the momentum of the projects.
So just ah as a very narrow example,
this is from Joseph Reagle's keynote last year,
he mentioned the Aardwolf article
back in 2001 on Wikipedia,
back when each Wikipedia title had to
contain at least two captial letters,
which is why it's AardwolF with a captial F.
And South AfricA, yes, so it has a terminal A and so forth.
Anyway so apparently the article read in total
"Aardwolf, small animal from South Africa,
related to the hyena, lives in the ground,
nocturnal hunter."
And now you have the typical Wikipedia zoological article
with zoological classifications, behavior characteristics,
geographic distribution and so on.
So, OK, so that's not social change,
that's Wikipedia changing.
Stepping out to one particular individual.
That, that's me when I was fourteen years old.
The reason this is not the most flattering
photo of me at fourteen years old is that
I mean I was pretty sort of awkward and gawky and so on
but it's not the most flattering photo
and the reason is that I asked my father to scan these
and this was the most flattering photo
of the ones he sent.
[laughter]
So the Wikipedia related point here is that
I was a pretty nerdy teenager, um, I would have been
about fourteen.
For my fourteenth birthday I got
a reference work for my birthday.
It was "The Penguin Book of Curious Interesting Numbers".
It goes from minus one up to Graham's number
skipping some numbers in between.
Ah, and I read it in numerical order.
And this is a person who really needed Wikipedia,
but it didn't exist.
OK, so now that person, when I wrote these slides
these were the last fifteen or so Wikipedia pages
that showed up in my browser history
skipping all articles I read on individual
members of the Beatles, because
that wouldn't be very interesting.
[laughter]
So, you know, OK, that's not social —
I mean that's social change in that it affected me
but it's important to note that like,
I am in my early thirties
I've been taken from this thing of you know
having my one book, my one precious book
of numbers that you know
I read to death, through to be able to
read about colorectal cancer and T-Mobile USA
in the same two day period.
OK. Uh, again social change that Wikipedians
are very familiar with.
In 1990 Encyclopedia Britannica sold, had their
highest sales volume before or since of
120 000 printed copies of the encyclopedia.
I never had one, I spent most of my—
maybe not when I was fourteen
but I spent most of my pre-teen years wishing that I did.
OK, well, a couple of years ago as you know
they sold around 8500 copies and they closed
their printed edition down
but they did report that they had
450 million visits to their website.
That does include the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Way back in 2006, practically pre-history,
18% of the world's population was using the Internet
only 3% of the, of the two continents listed here
are the two smallest percentages reported on
that Wikipedia page that I'm using as a reference.
And I'm told you're not meant to do that,
I'm not sure if that's true in this crowd.
[laughter]
3% of the African population using the Internet
and 11% of the Asia-Pacific population
using the Internet.
OK, again using Wikipedia as a reference
35% of the world's population using the Internet,
13% of the African population, a four times increase.
27% of the Asia-Pacific population, more than doubled
using the Internet.
So here we have real social change.
And Encyclopedia Britannica has gone away
and 35% of the world's population is using the Internet.
So this is the kind of story that as you know
Wikimedia projects are part of.
The mooted at least death of print,
open access, e-books, ultimately the Internet.
OK, so we get to the topic of diversity
and how that relates.
So, the good news with Wikipedia is that
as Internet projects go it's definitely a very diverse project
along many dimensions.
At the end of May there were 285 Wikipedias,
four of them had over a million articles,
forty including that four — English, German, French, Dutch —
I think are the four,
have a hundred thousand articles,
112 have at least ten thousand articles.
So that's 112 different languages
you can read ten thousand articles
about human knowledge in.
That's extremely diverse.
There are of course somewhere between
it depends on what you define as a language
somewhere between 3000 and 8000 languages spoken worldwide
of which the vast majority have no written form
but maybe that ultimately that won't stop Wikimedia projects.
But I'm not here today to argue that
there's a linguistic diversity problem at least with,
as compared with your competitors.
OK, again. some figures from the Wikipedia survey of 2010
of editors and contributors.
The pie chart shows every country
that constituted more than 1% of respondants.
A great number of diverse countries represented here.
Poland, the Czech Republic, China, the USA, Russia, and so on,
India is in there, although as a share of
its world population it's vastly underrepresented.
OK, so less good news again as many people here will know
is that about a third of Wikipedia readers
who responded to this survey
reported being women.
And even less good news is that
slightly less than a tenth of the editors
reported being women despite
women comprising 51% of the world's population.
Ah, which, one is inclined to suspect that there is a link.
That if women are not using Wikipedia,
if they are not finding it useful
in the same numbers that men do,
they find it even less interesting to contribute to.
So in addition to other factors
the usefulness and representativeness
of the knowledge contained within Wikimedia projects
will affect the willingness of diverse people
to contribute to them.
Okay. So having made this argument that
Wikimedia projects are part of social change
whether or not Wikimedia projects are always
intending to drive social change, they are in some way part of social change
and sometimes they are intending to be part of
driving social change, giving people like my
fourteen-year-old self more information about
colo-rectal cancer.
I want to talk a little bit about the general
principles of diversity. So if we wish to increase diversity
in the project, well, why do you want to do that?
And then I'll say a little something about 'how'.
Okay. So the term used a little bit in some of
the literature about instrumental diversity
in particular: so, instrumental diversity is essentially
the question of how diverse participation make
Wikimedia projects better.
So, the argument would be: we have people
with different perspectives and different knowledges
coming in - their knowledge might make Wikipedia
more comprehensive, more representative
Okay, that's instrumental
because you are primarily arguing for diversity
in order to help Wikipedia rather than the other way around
You can argue the other way around:
that a more representative Wikimedia project
with knowledge to more people will benefit those people
At the extreme end, the instrumental argument
is sort of the PR argument - that is one of the instrumental arguments.
It makes us look better to have diversity
so that helps us. It also makes the actual product better.
So you have to balance these arguments.
You can't think entirely in terms of instrumental diversity
because it's not fair to the people you are asking
to give to you.
It has to be an exchange where
in order to ask people to make the Wikimedia
projects better, there has to be some
way the Wikimedia projects plan to serve those people.
We have here one of the more difficult things
to accept about diversity:
this slogan, "nothing about us without us"
comes out of the disability activist community
which in turn adopted it from the foreign affairs community
What this is is essentially you cannot dictate
to people with a particular interest:
you cannot tell women, you cannot tell people
with different ethnic backgrounds and so on
"this is how we are making things better for you"
"This is good, we have done this"
If you choose not to accept this, you are
being ungrateful and diversity is no longer our problem
it is yours.
This is difficult, right, because you have a vicious
cycle. Well, you don't have any people from
a certain background participating
but then there's nobody to ask to participate
so you end up spinning your wheels.
So the question then is outreach.
You simply have to identify your failings
and reach out to people.
Essentially, keep the project, keep the discussions
open to criticism which says
this would make it easier for you to participate,
this would make it beneficial for me to participate.
Constantly asking, constantly listening to their
responses and believing them.
Talking just quickly about the rationale for diversity:
in the Western liberal philosophical tradition,
the traditional argument is it promotes oneness
and harmony, essentially.
That as people talk more, we will converge
on one point of view, converge on one culture
and one way of thinking.
As I expect you know, that's not a very popular
view at present.
A more contemporary argument is that it
enables all people to change and grow.
To integrate contact between diverse peoples
allows them to borrow from each other while
continuing to maintain some of their differences
both in points of view and cultural traditions
and so on.
So, very quickly, an example of this discussed
by Peter Emberley in a 2011 book chapter
is two Indian art cultures that are both affiliated
with religious practice.
The Docra(?) of India are sculptors traditionally
sculpting the divine forms.
And Emberley argues that as they have had more
contact with Western culture in particular,
that their art forms, especially in the younger artists,
while continuing to maintain artist-driven,
culture-driven integrity to themselves
are moving away from divine forms to secular forms
and moving into 2D rather than 3D representations,
but at the same time, not moving to actually
produce Western art.
Likewise, the Baul people who are Bengali musicians,
Emberley argues in the music produced by the
younger people now, they are starting to move
again towards some representation of less
eternal, more ephemeral aspects of human nature
and they are utilising things like musical notation,
musical recording, anthropological recordings of their own culture
in order to maintain it. But at the same time,
viewing themselves as continuing in their own
traditions, integrating the aspects of Western
modernity that they can use but without moving
their music towards a more mainstream Indian
or Anglo style of music, but allowing them to
access the audience through modern means.
So in terms of Wikimedia projects, you may have
the same effect, part of the contribution of
Wikimedia projects in documenting the sum of
human knowledge is allowing people to preserve
their own traditions and ways of thinking
for themselves rather than necessarily only
benefiting me as a person who wants to learn
more about Indian art.
Okay, I wanted to talk about, well, this has been
very abstract. What do we do
if we want to recruit diverse peoples?
And I just wanted to talk about some
general principles there.
The first is, so Sue Gardner has mentioned this
in conversations about various things, is the
power of invitation is one way of talking about this.
So there's a story about this that I know fairly well.
In 2006, the GNOME free desktop project,
they ran Google Summer of Code.
It's a programming project - Google
Summer of Code invites university students
working on the project with a stipend.
They got 200 applications and there were zero from women.
You know, zero with an '0'.
Two GNOME developers - Chris Ball and Hannah Wallach - created what
they called the GNOME Women's Outreach Project,
which was almost - they were paid slightly less money
- almost identical to the Google Summer of Code
except it was the GNOME Women's Outreach Project.
They received 186 applications, I believe,
all of them from women.
There was some question: why didn't they apply
for the other one, which was the same except
paying slightly more money and slightly more
prestigious in that you were selected from
a wider field.
The answer seems to be somewhere between
two things:
you have a picture of a woman computing student
and you read a thing saying "spend your summer
working on a coding project", you have a picture
in your head of someone who's not necessarily
you working on a summer coding project.
It's usually that guy, you know, "that guy".
The one you think of as spending all his time
in front of a computer.
So by saying "for women", the picture automatically
changes: "well, I'm the woman in my classes
who spends all her time in front of a computer."
The other thing is that other women were really
keen: other computer science professors in this case
were really keen to do outreach for them
once they had explicitly said that this is for
women, it welcomed women, it was in order
to promote women.
Women computer scientists were forwarding it
to each other, some were encouraging 10 or 15
of their students to apply, so you had this
double effect of encouraging people, tapping
into networks of people who specifically want to
mentor women.
Saying "oh, this is for us, I've set up a network
waiting to give women opportunities, here's
a woman opportunity coming along".
So you have this double invitation.
The second one is simply reaching out to groups.
What that means is you find more than one:
to use women as an example, if you invite one
woman into your editathon or hackfest, and
suddenly she is THE woman.
There's some statistical figure, it is around 20% or 30%
where women stop feeling like "the woman".
They stop feeling like everything they do will
be read as "well she only says that because
she's a woman", or "she only does that because
she's a woman" or "we'll ask her opinion about
women".
If you can bring in more than person at a time
by identifying existing groups of diverse people
that reduces that effect.
The final thing is: once you've recruited diverse
people, there's a tendency to say...
Say I identify as a woman Wikipedia editor
(actually, I do, I do edit Wikipedia)
there's a tendency to believe the two identities are
in conflict: the more I identify as a woman
Wikipedia editor, it becomes more like:
WOMAN (Wikipedia editor).
And that the only way to get me to identify
as a Wikipedia editor is to discourage my
woman identification.
Now that's not actually true. Identity is
not a zero-sum game like that.
It turns out the more you encourage people to
retain parts of their identity that are important
to them: in my case, being a woman is important
to me in that way.
To retain and enhance my ability to continue
as a woman, that also increases my identification
as a Wikipedia editor.
So you get this false problem sometimes,
people will argue that having the groups for
women or the groups for diverse participants
discourages them, an isolationist kind of thing.
It actually encourages both identities.
That's a very important principle of diversity
too, that you allow people to acknowledge
that they are part of a minority within a larger culture
and to embrace being part of a minority within a larger culture.
To conclude my talk, I want to give a couple of
specific examples of possible outreach avenues
for diversity.
I have had the pleasure of meeting people over
the last week who work with Wikimedia on diversity
and outreach, and outreach to different groups
and educational projects, so not to say that
none of this has occurred to people in the room
so a couple examples of how outreach might happen:
first, let's use an example of primarily technological
outreach which I didn't really expect.
I talked a little bit to Andy Gunn at the Open Technology Institute
which is in turn part of the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition here in the United States
working with people in Detroit in particular.
Non-white people who are young, building up
communication and access to media and technology.
Their overall mission statement is that people and
organisations in Detroit who believe that communication
is a fundamental human right.
This is an excerpt: they have the principles of digital justice on their website.
The webpage is quite long, there are 20 principles;
I recommend having a look at the web page
for all of them.
You'll notice, I have an excerpt here: equal access
to media and technology as producers as well as consumers.
Prioritising participation of people who have traditionally been excluded.
Advancing our ability to tell our own stories:
again referring to people who have traditionally been excluded.
The creation of tools and technologies that are freely shared.
Now, points 1 and 4 are very compatible with
the broader open movement, open access,
open knowledge, wiki culture and so on.
Points 2 and 3 relate more to diversity concerns.
So I emailed them and Andy, what immediately
leapt to mind, was technological outreach.
He sees the problem with getting his community
to participate in Wikimedia projects is technological.
They are very focussed on mesh networking,
community, neighbourhood mesh networking
setting up ad-hoc wifi networks that have a
flaky, not-always-on uplink to the Internet
so you primarily exchange information within
your mesh network.
So what he said was "well, in order for
Wikipedia to be useful, we would have to
cater for those uses", which is of course
possible under the license but it wasn't
in fact immediately obvious to him
that there was something now that could be