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