File talk:Opening Speech Diversity Conference 2017.webm

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because they're wonderful images from Wikimedia Commons they often have pictures of you but today is I have no slides in the reason I have no slides that I spent most of my time preparing for this talk trying to prepare the words that I wanted to say instead instead of the images so I was asked to give a talk for 30 minutes we'll see if we get 2:30 if not we'll just take up that time to come back together I want to start by saying thank you all for being here and acknowledging those of us who are in the room there are 80 people here today from 43 countries with at least 20 languages represented I think the number was 23 but in this community it's hard to really know their as such a richness and diversity of of folks in the room I wasn't able to get a specific statistics on gender parity but looking around I think we're we're in a pretty good place I'm in rest and you all flu or walk to or took a tram or took a train today here from all these 43 different countries I am sure some of your little tired hands up if maybe you're feeling a little jet-lagged anyone I'm feeling a little down here in the future in the front Okay so 4 hours that's it these are long trips that you came on and I want to thank you for coming on these trips because I think that this is an incredibly important event for us it's the second diversity conference and I hope that it is I hope it is one of many yet to come but I also hope that at some point there is a time and a place when we look around all of our conferences and they feel like the people here in this room so why are we here at will because we are community that inherently believes in the value that every single person has to offer we are community that inherently believes that every single person on the planet has something that they can share with us and with the world and it's right there in our vision statement write a world in which every single person can freely share and the sum of all knowledge and this is something that I have always found incredibly inspirational over the years because it does imply Equity it implies diversity it implies that every single person has a role to play in our movement and when they play that role in our movement it is not something that is about consumption of knowledge it is not just being passive users of Wikimedia projects or Wikipedia it is about sharing back and having the presumption that their actions and their contributions are just as valuable as anybody else's and yet as this is our vision statement we also have to recognize that it does not currently our reality we know that we know that just by the Numbers we know that is we look around our Wikimedia projects that representation of gender is highly imbalanced we know that representation geographically is highly imbalanced I'm reminded of the and I thought I did but you're going to share some visuals and I'm going to go to that space and I reminded I'm from the researchers at the Oxford internet Institute in which they drew a map around Europe and they pointed out that the majority of the content on the Wikimedia projects all exist within that tiny Circle and the rest of the world has about as much representation as the density of Germany and that's that in and of itself underscores the problem I'm reminded of the fact that of the languages that we speak and then we can media project English Remains the dominance in terms of the size of Wikipedia with 5.4 million articles and the Arabic and I speak of Arabic cuz I was just as Wiki radio the other day which is the language of is 300 million speakers give or take 3:50 to 50 depending on who who's counting has five hundred thousand articles certainly not representative of the number of speakers on the planet and end Pacific only 20% of those Arabic speakers speak a second language to 80% of Arabic speakers have half a million articles on Wikipedia through which they experience the world and then the other secret is that a lot of those articles are still about Europe answer these are the issues of language in their issues of geography in their issues of gender and we haven't even begun to speak to the issues of socioeconomic representation where we know that the people in this room represent a certain amount of privilege no matter which Community you come from so we have challenges ahead but the good news is that all of you flew across the world or Walker took a tram or took a train to be here because you believed in the importance of addressing these challenges so why do we do what we do what's the Y what brings us all together I know you know we talked a lot about the fact that for some people it's about the other account but I suspect for all of us here in this room it's not just about the edit count when we survey we comedians about why it is that they participate time and again we get the same response because people believed in the mission because people believe in making free knowledge accessible to the world we believe that the world is a better place when people have access to more free knowledge you know it's hard I think to capture exactly how everyone comedian feels about this and I don't want to speak on any of your behalf but I can say personally that I believe is that the world is a better and more empowered place when more people have access to free knowledge and can participate in it you know I think that there is an implication there that we are stronger as communities that we are more open as societies that we have more empathy for each other when we understand where we come from and when we see ourselves fully represented and when we see ourselves family represented we feel as though we have more of a place at the table to have these conversations I believe also that it is about participation as I mentioned rather than consumption that we as individuals and as citizens of the world are better off when we are active and empowered to shape the way that we want to visit you that world have access to information about The Sciences and they cards poetry and religion in geography we live richer live our lives in which we understand each other better or better positioned to create more on our Collective behalf that's why I'm here seems to be the that's why many of our way comedians are here too and whichever way they choose to articulate that in the Strategic Direction and then we are going to talk a little bit more about that and I'm going to try to stay late on the Strategic direction today cuz I have a lot of hours for it later the way that we captured this was talking about advancing Humanity because the world in which every single human can freely sharing the some all of all knowledge is just a description of a state it doesn't describe what it is that we're trying to achieve but for me at least it's about achieving a place in which we are advancing Humanity and I want to start start cuz I've already started I want to acknowledge my own position being here in front of you all today I want to acknowledge the diversity or lack of diversity that I bring to my position I am standing here in front of you is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation which is the position of extreme privilege within this movement I am standing here as a as a woman yes I will knowledge that but I'm also a neurotypical individual I am a white individual individual from North America I'm in individual who grew up speaking English language and despite otherwise have failed completely to learn any others I am able bodied I was able to access tremendously good education as a young person I never wanted for anything my parents took care of me all of these are pieces of positions that I bring to this position and it means that I do not represent the diversity of the world which we serve for the most part other than that like 50% gender thing and so I say this because I want to put this out in front of you because I want to be reminded of it myself and I want to be reminded of it in these conversations that I cannot do anything other than to listen the vast majority of the time when we are having conversations about the challenges that are communities face and hopefully listen and be able to reflect back what I hear from you as how we may interpret this challenges into opportunities that we build going forward I say it because if I don't acknowledge it it was in the room and I want all of us to be able to freely acknowledged the different places that we come from and what that means how I understand that but I also want to talk a little bit about almost 4 years ago one of the things that I found incredibly different about this particular movement in our communities we all know that sometimes we have been better at it and sometimes we have not been so good but now that it is owned by the communities who create it and it is owned by the world itself and I spent a lot of time working in other organizations that were all about reaching out to communities and serving communities in trying to build Target populations of communities beneficiaries of the program that we sought to build a nonprofit organization of that is right there in the language when you're talking about Target populations it makes it sounds like you're going on a hunt right there's something inherently problematic in the idea that anyone design for any other person with a solution to their Community challenges might be and what we can media promised instead and as I said it has been an imperfect promise that we have plenty of opportunity to continue to live up to and our future is that instead of having Target populations that we were all in it together he is a community determined who we wanted to be how we wanted to evolve where our projects were going to go and what the needs were is that we had and how we were going to address them how we were going to bring our resources together and how to allocate more resources and that is something I have truly never seen at a global scale I know that that happens in communities I know that that happens within countries but to see that a global scale is such an aspirational promise and it feels like a promise that I think we're all here today honor in this room start I said are we are We There Yet right arguably no we're not I mean I think as I said at the beginning it's really clear that we're not there yet in terms of the way that are content in the way that our knowledge reflects the world are We There Yet in terms of the promise of shared power of our communities I think the answer is also no we're not quite there yet have we changed the world yes I think we have some examples of why I would rather go to you the one who just said yes how we change the world done with Wikipedia raise the bar on Watts knowledge look like because you say that just free at 9 and 3000 articles is a few Wikipedia digital media literacy and I'm really excited to see the background of the member I mean there are young people really young people become the administrator of Wikipedia in Chinese Wikipedia so well and so come the to defeat all the bully and older the Internet troll and that's the empowerment spirit that I'm most beautiful out and I can talk to her people from the men in China which we are still in the Civil War state Carmen is it good answer I completely agree I think that we can media has changed the world I think there's a lot more world-changing that we can do but it's certainly in the sense of the whole model of what a collaborative Community could look like the whole idea that information could be free at all the fact that the data and the knowledge base Wikipedia is used not just to inform people but to draw insights about the world around us and to build a new technologies Wikipedia is data and it's the Corpus is something that is used throughout technical communities all over the world it's such a good chance that something you touched when are you going to use something like that you know Google translate has been trained in some way on Wikipedia data you know our impact on the world at this point is so profound that if we were if we could pedia where not to exist I actually don't know how any of us would function I don't mean to make light of this in any way but I travel I was just sitting in Turkey the other day on a layover and as we know you can't access Wikipedia is anyone here from Turkey Stormy Monday you're not in turkey and to not be able to access Wikipedia for telling him 15 minutes of sitting down reminds you of what it feels like when you've lost a part of your brain and so you need to add to my way of thinking it certainly is something we have changed the world and yet as I said we haven't changed it enough right how is it possible that today among amidst are well-known challenges with gender I receive somebody sending me a link the other day to an RFA from a woman who the responses were I don't know if I can trust you as an admin because you care so much about this gender thing I don't know if you can be fair you don't how is it possible that we're still talking about a gender gap when gender is something that is far more fluid than two sides of the discussions and how is it possible that are $70,000 so active contributors on a monthly basis 50% of those contribute to English Wikipedia which means that only 50% of the 70,000 contribute to all the other projects in the world how is it possible that we have only one chapter in Africa how is it possible that I'm standing here speaking to you in English and we do not have simultaneous translation when I say some of these things I know it's possible because at the foundation and position of power and privilege we have not taken the necessary steps to address some of these issues but I also know that it's possible because he is a community and as a movement are not as fully and truly diverse and inclusive as we wish to be because they underscore the challenges and they make it clear to us how much work that we have to do because these issues as a form of accountability if we put these issues out in front of us and you have been putting these issues out for years I don't mean to say that I know these issues because they are the issues that you raise but these are issues by raising these issues at the form of accountability to ourselves but I should take pains to clarify it is also not a burden for those of us in the room to take on alone I was reminded of the expression or the saying that you know it is not for the marginalized to remedy the problem because they did not build it and I found that particular I knew that there was an expression that affect and I want to just acknowledge that that particular freezing comes from a woman named Ava Duvernay who is a black American female filmmaker and artist on just all-around awesome human so it is not for those of us in the room if it is not for the marginalized to remedy the problem because they did not build it what is it that we can do well first we can build community among ourselves and money each other we can find places of power in that Community we can find places to have this open conversation in these communities we can through the power of community have a stronger voice in the broader community but we can also think about what are the Frameworks through which we raise these issues to the community as a whole and how did the way does the work that we do integrate into the work of the broader movement to earlier this week I went to a conference in Chicago it was hosted by the Obama foundation and the focus of the conference was really around organizing and community building and I went to a specific session led by another incredible powerful black American woman named Brittany packnett was an organizer at an organization called Teach for America and the United States that I'm specifically telling you this because I want to recognize the other people do and I want to put names to the work that other people do because it is important that other people do this work to raise awareness around the challenges that we face that we name and acknowledge them for the work that they do this woman Britney she's a leader in this educational nonprofit in the United States of America and she let us session on equity and inclusion and I want to share I found her words so powerful and I found the ideas with me coming into the room today that I'm just borrowing them with attribution and sharing them with you the first thing is of our conference today which is right is the people in the room diversity is what we represent collectively but diversity is not the end state that were looking for inclusion is not even the end the end state is a form of equity the end state is a form of equity in which all of us equal in front of each other with access to the resources we need to be able to experience equity and I'm going to ask the same question of you who in this room has ever experienced state of equity raise your hands if you have okay who among you in this room has ever been in a place or a time or a community in which you fully felt that all aspects of yourself were included were represented that you had voice an agency and Power okay so one hand a couple more hands great so is that but still a very few number of hands and the reason I raise this is because what we are asking ourselves to get to a place where all of us feel included that every aspect of ourselves is represented that we have voice and agency and Power in decision-making and in our communities this is not a place where many of us have ever felt that we have been before and the reason why this matters is because if we do not know what it feels like to be there it is very hard for us to map the journey to get us there as a community we're asking ourselves to take on work around diversity and inclusion and Equity when we as a society and as a world has very little experience being in that place and since we have little experience being in that place it is hard for us to know how exactly we get from where we are today to that place of inclusion and representation does that make more sense just checking thank you Victoria for asking the question I use the language of equity and I'm going to speak a little bit more about this because it's something this afternoon because it's in the language of the Strategic Direction and explicitly want to Define this not because I assume you don't know what this is but because I have been asked the question of what does equity mean and how is it different than equality for example and I recognize that in doing this again taking advantage of the fact that isn't quite a lot to me and I think it's important to be able to have Clarity around what these different words were using them specifically quality right that we are all equals in front of each other in this room that we bring into the equal value and importance anybody else but we all have different challenges in our work the challenge of a community working with a limited electricity is a very different challenge than a community working under political pressure these are different challenges that we have in our work and all of these challenges are equal invalid challenges but they are different challenges and if I gave you equals solutions to address these challenges even if they were totally equal person-to-person we wouldn't all get to the same and because different challenges require different solutions to a quality itself is not enough what instead we need is access to the resources and capacity to reach equal Solutions but recognizing that those resources and capacities might be different we need access to different tools to achieve equal outcomes is the concept of equity position of being equals in front of each other and that we are trying to reach a position in which we remain equal each other and which we are in front of each other but they differ in terms of what we will need to achieve and go on that Journey our differences of equity equality and it's got three different answer three things that it's the same size and like The Tool Guy can see the football game and the total account I'm with Equity distribution blocks each other thank you how do we change the the structural challenges I wanted to talk a little bit about this concept of equity because I think it requires that we all have access to different pads and resources to achieve equal ends and that I think is the core of what the work is ahead of us particularly as we go into the afternoons conversation around the Strategic Direction when we talk about knowledge Equity is one of the goals of the Strategic direction for the movement what we were talking about is not that everything is equal for all of us but that we are going to each required different ways of doing the work in order to achieve our goals and the reason I think this is important in this conversation is that diversity and the conversation we're having diversity conference is recognizing that diversity is actually only the first step to equity that we need to start with diversity in terms of having a diverse group of people represented in the room who represent communities of people with different needs and different challenges and different lived experiences but that it is not old enough alone to bring everyone into the room that we then need to also be able to achieve a form of inclusion where people feel as though they're not just in the room but have a seat at the table it doesn't matter if we have a diverse group of people is half of that room is in the back and only those people who feel empowered to speak are able to speak everyone needs to feel welcome everyone needs to feel empowered everyone needs to have a sense that their voices and have understanding of how the voices are being hurt and how they their perspectives and their experiences are being used to make decisions and then if we're successful in that we may get to a place of being able to have a conversation and Equity so what is this it says that as a social movement we will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege we will welcome people from every backgrounds to build strong and diverse communities and we will break down the social political and Technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge is everyone read that alright that's okay by the time we leave the back of your head that's the goal right to be able to really think about how do we include those who have not been included had we break down these barriers perhaps how do we remove the fence as you just heard how do we ensure that those challenges that you have are represented how do we ensure that our communities themselves as the week in media movement are more representative of the communities that we seek to serve and as we go into today's session I use some, I want to introduce some Concepts that I think might be useful and I will put these up on Wiki apologies cuz I know that sharing information without visual information can be challenging and I do apologize for that the concepts of shared power decentralisation of dominant culture cultivating identity accessible language and centering the marginalized and these are five steps in the process or the journey from diversity to inclusion to equity that I think are very powerful tools that we should be using throughout this conference to ask ourselves are we getting what we need out of this conference or others getting what they need out of this conference does this conference become the basis for further conversation and further work throughout the movement and so what are those Concepts themselves mean so shared power is something we talked a lot about in the Wikimedia movement but just a reminder that shared power is this idea that those who for whom a solution is being created are involved in the process of creating it to borrow another expression nothing about us without us so if there is something that affects us we are in the room to discuss it that we all have that seat at the table and our voices are involved and incorporated into decision making the other one the next one is the safety of decentralizing dominant culture another way of thinking is there a single model of what success looks like or what value looks like in the question how much does your how much value you bring to the movement contribute to the movement they contribute in other ways they contribute in organizing they contribute in advocacy they contribute in doing emotional labor of keeping people collaborative and working together they contribute in bringing Partners into the movement they contribute in explaining what it is that we do they contribute in many different ways that are not just the edit account but at the end of the day in many discussions the edit count Remains the only thing that matters that is dominant culture and that dominant culture is something that if you are sitting there with a laptop in front of you that you own with electricity that never fails and cheap internet and access to all of the resources that you need through your libraries or your other institutions it is a lot easier to rack up the really large at it count then if what you are doing is bringing people together to talk about the importance of free knowledge or what you are doing is sitting down with an administrator in a university and explaining why Wikipedia is something they should be using dominant culture is something above all others but it also inherently means that we are saying that this thing that people can do because they had access to all these other resources is more important than the work that people who do not have access to these other resources and are doing this work anyway it's more important than their work and when we think about decentralizing dominant culture but I think we really are thinking about is how do we find ways to celebrate this is another one that we struggle with a little bit way to be Wicked median might be the way of being a North American Way comedian or it might be the way of being a European white comedian and not fully recognizing that there are other ways to be Wicked medians and that your identity and culture is as valued and it not only as value but brings value in and of itself into the room and so if you are an African way comedian or Latin American Way comedian that use that culture and identity is celebrated in a way that the community says this in and of itself has value that we want to cultivate diversity of people in our rooms and in our spaces and that it's not just about sort of saying it's great that all these people speak these different languages but saying we bring value in that people too the last two and then we'll wrap up are accessible language I've failed at this already in this presentation speaking in ways that are communities understand speaking in language that you and I have a clear understanding about what it is that we're talking about so that we can have the basis of a good conversation regardless of what language we speak all we can mediums love language we like to be precise we like to be very specific about what we mean unfortunately it doesn't always mean that we are accessible and so how do we as we go into these parents these conversations remain accessible to one another and finally this ideacentre centralizing the marginalized which means that how do we ensure that when we bring people together into the room that were not doing so in a way that tokenize as their participation or another way of saying that how do we do so in a way that says your challenges those of you who've been left out structurally throughout societies not just in the media movement that we will listen to you first and we will listen to the needs of those who have always had a lot of power in the Wikipedia movement after we listen to those who have not had power in the comedian those five things around shared power decentralizing the dominant culture cultivating identities speaking easily understood using language and centralizing I think if we can think of those conversations to the rest of our communities that's a really strong place for us to come from you are radical because you were here in this room right you are radicals because you are representing communities that are under-represented in this movement to get from the beginning but you are also radical because this movement is a radical movement this movement is a group of radical people because free knowledge in and of itself and you've heard me say this before but three knowledge is he and I know it doesn't always feel like that when we sit there and we're adding are citations and perhaps work just fighting over what does this one word mean in this one sentence but three knowledge of a fundamentally radical thing for us to do right because for centuries knowledge has been a tool of power for centuries it has been used to build Empires to build empires of religion empires of political power empires of capital when you say that knowledge should exist and that everyone should be able to participate in it and everyone should be able to access it that is going against centuries is not Millennia of human instincts of aggregate power of the exclusion and so what you were doing in this room today what we are doing in this room we do every single day is radical and I just want to take the pressure off for a moment let's sit here in the community of radicals knowledge the challenges that we have again again around the idea of justice and that Justice is hard and struggle and the conversations over the next 24 hours conversation is difficult and it is a process and what we are doing is very much for all of your work every single day thank you