User:Deryck Chan/2019/Live notes

Friday

• Keynote:
  • How do you get millions (billions) of people to work together on a common goal?
  • If you initially focus on quantity, you get better quality (pottery class experiment)
  • Engage people: laughter and self-introduction wakes people's brains up for a task
  • Self-organization is effective; use local know-how (cancelled business executive conference in 2010 Snowpocalypse turned into a self-organised unconference that was "better" than the original planned conference)
  • Climate change / fascism back 70 years ago - there's a narrow window to act now. If we "win slowly" it's the same as losing
  • Participatory, play.
  • We don't conceive "museum", "library", "conference" etc in the abstract, but rather link them to our own experience (some US kids go to the library all the time without knowing it's the library. And then when the museum creator gets them to describe a nice family day out or a nice place to learn, they get baffled if they weren't told the purpose, but "die a bit on the inside" if they're told it's a museum they're planning)
  • Sadly, sometimes the more one knows, the less one feels compelled to take action
  • Greta Thunberg: I don't want you to hope. I want you to panic like I panic, and then take action.
• Growth / newbies session:
  • Onboarding dashboard developed with Korean (Revi) and Czech (Martin) communities
  • Guide to help newbies get in. Mentor available to answer questions through dashboard. Automated stats to encourage newbies.
  • Very similar idea to what Cantonese Wikipedia is proposing.
• Strategy: Diversity
  • What is diversity? Wikimedia is defining a few important characteristics to focus on.
  • People keep having long arguments about the style of English, but actually we should focus on what challenges we want to address and what suggestions we want to propose to address them.
  • Testing on diverse user profiles:
    • Accessibility, not "literacy" (we're thinking 10+ years ahead, so give them the access and literacy will come with practice)
    • Documentation always falls behind technology because technology is mostly built by staff and documentation and policy are all volunteer-generated
    • Maybe WMF should step in to help small projects clean up their policies and gadgets, while leaving large projects alone in their community development.
  • Language survival kit: We should be thinking about what is in the survival kit
    • What we want is the tools to take any language from spoken-only or sparse artistic literature only, to invigorate them to a level at which you can write a Wikipedia edition in it.
    • We need to stop hiding behind SIL / ISO-639. We're essentially wanting to do SIL / ISO-639's work for them because we've entered that field of work.