Jordan, it seemed like you were really in a groove early, working fast. What was different about your game plan tonight as opposed to your last start? Really just went after him. Kind of trusted my pitches better, threw my cutter better. Executed a lot more fastballs and changeups late. And offense really stepped up and got a lot of runs for me to really get comfortable. What do you take away from this outing? Confidence, really just keep sticking to the game plan and trusting my stuff and letting the defense play behind me. You mentioned that offense. How much does it help you on the mound settle in when they put up early runs for you? Especially when they put up eight, you really can just attack the hitters, pitch to contact and try and get as deep in the game as you can. So I did my best and kind of just kept going after him. Aaron Boone had mentioned in that sixth inning that you were maybe hitting a little bit of a while. Did you feel like you started to get fatigued in that sixth? No, I was just kind of got out of my groove a little bit, got away from my game plan and kind of locked it back in and figured it out. But I left that change up up to Zuna and he made me pay for it. Overall, do you feel like this is a good step forward for you? Yeah, I'm starting to feel more comfortable out there and feeling a rhythm. So hopefully I can keep building off of this. Thanks, Jordan. Thank you. We can take more for Jordan. Andy Martino, please unmute. Jordan, when your offense does put up a lot of runs like that pretty early in the game, then you come out and you're really efficient in the middle innings. Does that change your mindset and your approach a lot when you say, OK, I got this lead now, whatever I do, I'm not going to walk anybody. You start pitching all differently? Well, I always try not to walk anybody. But definitely when you have that run support, the aggressiveness kind of goes even more so up. But they're still really good hitters, so it's not like you can just pile fastballs in there. So I tried to stick with mixing it up. But keep that aggressiveness and get some quick outs.


Welcome, welcome to Talk Talk Again. I'm Crystal here in Think Tech. So, you know, in terms of pushing boundaries, I'm always trying to think of like, what are ways we push boundaries just normally? And today I'd like to talk about identity and how cultural boundaries and gender boundaries kind of restrict us or inform us of who we think we are and what is that process in terms of our creative work? And I have a very creative person here, actually an old friend of mine, who was actually my music composer for my film, or in the color line, but today we're going to be talking about my month's work. And so let me introduce my month. I'm going to do the official thing first and then we'll do like the casual kind of like peeling layers off of what we know and don't know about you, okay? So, and again, this topic today is on being trans. We're going to talk about transgender, but also the transitions of what it means to become, the process of becoming something. You know, I always feel like performance is always a process of becoming. And when we're talking about music, how do we kind of go from the journey of where we think we are, what we want to create into that final product and why the process is so important. So today, really happy to have Manman. And I call you Manman, but I know your official name is Yiman Manman Mui. And Manman is a taiku drummer, artist, multidisciplinary artist, if you will, specifically. And Manman's done some really interesting things. And originally from Hong Kong, you lived in Hawaii for a little while and now you're based in California. Manman strives to build an equitable landscape through the music as an educator, fostering creativity through multisensory expression and the artistic approach challenges capitalistic and elitist social norms. And there's something of a term that I think you need to unpack for me later called neurodivergence. And I hope we can look into that. And what does that mean? And what is your relationship with music and body and just the process of becoming? So let's talk about that. Manman, welcome again to Think Tech. I know you've been here like quite a few years ago, but welcome again. Hi. Yes.  And no, well, at the time I knew you. Yeah, at the time I wasn't out. I wasn't, you know, fully out using like being identifying as trans and non-binary. Yeah. I, well, but I growing up, I know I never really fully identify as a girl or as women. Like I know it, I knew it since I was a really young child. So, but it's only until recently that I have the language that being able to fully identify and share openly, this is who I am. And yeah, so when we met, that's was not the, not what we talked about for sure. And I would mistakenly refer to you as a she and I'm sorry for that.  And then it's hard for me to transition and I totally respect the need to be aware of that. And so that's why I want to talk about transitions as kind of a theme for today. You know, what does it mean for me even on my side to transition my way of understanding? So can we talk a little bit about your background?  How does that all inform you of your, your, you know, kind of identity? Well, yeah, I bought a race in Hong Kong. I immigrated to the US when I was 27. So like fully, like fully immersed as like growing up in, it's interesting when you say traditional because when I think about Hong Kong being a, you know, British being, was a British colony. And myself now these days, I started using this terms that I grew up as a British subjects. The colonies. Oh gosh. Yeah. Like actually this past 10 years living in the US helped me put in perspective and unpack a lot of what colonization has done to me. So to talk about growing up in a traditional Chinese culture. And yes, I, you know, I grew up with families. We do rituals and things and, you know, like bison meaning like we would, I would see my aunties and grandmothers doing full on like Chinese traditional practice of like religions and like culture. But at the same time, my parents are, my dad especially, it's very open-minded. So like I feel like for me, I have the luxury of growing up. Like, yes, I'm exposed to very traditional gender norms. Very like, like that's the societal, like how in, and post on like what a girl's supposed to be a boy is supposed to be that kind of thing. But at the same time, my dad, like it's encouraging me to be who I am. So your dad knew that you kind of questioned your identity early on? No, I don't think any of us have the language. Like I think when I was really young, I did express to my parents a lot of times that I want to be a boy. Like I'm happy always being mistaken that I was a boy like because of my, you know, the way I dress and appearance and I'm always more drawn to boys' clothings. And of course, you know, as a little girl, people would also put me in dress and like, right? So, but then with the culture of like where my, my immediate family, my parents, like they never really put those expectation on me. Which I appreciate, but at the same time, we didn't have the language to fully understand.   Like there's no in between. And I felt like, am I a lesbian? But I also am attracted to like my, like, yeah, I know like this exploring sexual desire as a teenager is really, oh my gosh, what's going on? That's a thing about sexual desire as a youth is that we tend to explore, right? And it doesn't mean we're one thing or another, but that's part of the process. And I need to also clarify, well, gender identity and sexual desire are two different things. And but then at the time, I did not have that. I did not have that available to me to understand gender identity and sexual desire are two different things. Okay, so when were you attracted to more girls than boys at the time? I'm attracted to both. I was, I am and I was. Yeah. Which was confusing because at the time that, oh, I'm friends with people who are identified as lesbian, but I don't fully feel that I fit in with them. I dated boys, but then I also don't necessarily fit into that mode of, you know, people dating and then how like as a girl needs to show up in relationship in a certain way. The rules, women play. Yeah, I never identify, I never resonate with and looking back and also going through puberty, it was really hard. I experienced a lot of body dysphoria, meaning that I was really uncomfortable with how my body was changing. Now it makes sense because like it also makes a lot of, with like phobia too, like I couldn't understand like I was really, really discovered, had a lot of scum for my hips during the show.  It's unhealthy. That's why you're thinking this way. But now I'm understanding like, okay, it's also a mixture of like body dysphoria that I was experiencing. And now looking back, having the language to understand it makes so much sense. What gave you the language? Is it being in the States? Is it being in a certain community of friends who gave you that confidence and freedom to be able to trust these ways of, you know, I think with moving, integrating to US, living in the US, being in the, I play Tycho drums, which is my main artistic expression and yeah, practice. And with that community, I'm able to connect to a larger like queer community, meeting friends who are also identified as trans and non-binary. And through that, that's how I start to like learn more. Oh, non-binary. I like this. Okay. In between space, this kind of, right? Yeah. Yeah, I'm not a man. I'm not a woman. I like, what am I? Okay, but can, do you mind if I share that? You know, I went to your wedding, right? Yes. Yes. How long ago was that? 2017. Okay.  Did you feel like at that time that you were going to get against what, how you wanted to be presented or you hadn't changed your mind? That's a, that's an interesting, interesting time when you're asking me this because recently I look at photos. So yeah, from the wedding. Yeah. Like, you know, now, like when I look back, first of all, clothing has no gender and like anybody can wear any clothes because clothes itself doesn't have gender. Like it's, it's a society. Regender it. Right, right. Like, yeah, like girls supposed to wear this, men supposed to wear this. Right, right. And, and now with the understanding that and also after socially transition being out as trans, I mean, I, I'm also allowing myself to explore different clothings like the haircut and, but at the same time, I do like wearing dresses. Yeah. Right. It's comfortable.  But then like when I look at the wedding photos, I, this is also inspired by friends that I, like, I know it's like looking at myself like, oh, if you like think of it this way, if you see a like a drag queen, right? Like, or if you see a person doing drag or, or think of me being a non-binary or more masculine, like I wrote more like, I'm leaning more towards a trans masculine and the trans masculine person wearing the dress. It could still be pretty, right? Right, absolutely. Yeah, so when I like, cause I genuinely love the dress that I paint. Yeah, no, I remember it. I love it. The hair and the makeup. I mean, I wouldn't be wearing makeup every day, but I genuinely, that was a nice experience.  So people don't question it. But when you talk about drag, it's obvious that it's like, you know, a masculine body and a feminine dress and it becomes kind of a contradiction or people kind of have this discomfort or trying to like label. So you kind of slip in this kind of this secret space, a passing for whichever way. Right, and to clarify though, like now I'm able to see myself through that lens because being able to come out like having a community do see who I am and recognize who I am, that I am able to look in the past and looking at myself being really feminine and be healing and feeling it's okay. But it took a long time because, you know, like for a very long time growing up, I never ever wearing anything pink. I never wear any, like I don't like wearing dresses. I remember a conversation I had with my cousin when I was really young, like I don't like to wear a dress. It's really uncomfortable. But then I'm asking her, why do you like to wear a dress like that? And I, and yeah, like as in, you know, like because of also realizing that it's, I don't want to be identified. I don't want people to see me as a woman. I don't want people to see me as a girl.  But like I'm like, no, I'm not.  You know, she says, I don't even know, can I say she? You know, I, you know, they say, the idea is that we're always performing a gender, right? That it's not natural, is that sometimes it's dictated by these social norms that dictate how we think we should be presenting ourselves in order to tell people what we are, right? So do you feel like you have any of those kinds of consciousness when you dress every day or is it continuing to morph? Like as you continue to transition to kind of like just be in this fluid space of where you feel you want to be, how much does that dictate? I think it's transient. It's continuing to evolve. I certainly have a hard time partying with some of the clothing. Like this dress is so soft. Like, here's my dream. Here's my dream is that I have this really pretty pink dress that I pay a lot of money for. Okay. I still cannot feel comfortable to wear it. Not even how to get a Barbie movie or something? Oh, maybe I don't know. But here's my dream is that I want to perform in that dress. I want to perform taiko in that dress. That's something that I've been manifesting like a piece or something that... All right, I'm going to hear you say that now and I look forward to that performance because that'll be really... But I'm glad you were talking about performance stuff because I want to kind of talk about your work and your music and how your being trends kind of affects or can we use it as the metaphor, as you said earlier into the process of creating your work and how much does that affect the way your processing works? Does trends become a method of looking at fluid spaces that kind of connect body and sound and different types forms of music? Yeah, I think it's interesting. I've never really used it this way, like being trans and how that... I mean, I am trans and I am non-binary and I am neurodiverse, which you earlier asked me to unpack here. Yeah, yeah. So now that I'm able to be more authentically with my own work as an artist, I am seeing that more coming forth. Like in both my teaching, in both my composition, in both my artistic creation, it does show being more and more coming to the forefront. First off, I wanted to say that's kind of how I first got really into Taiko in the first place, Taiko Jeremy, and it has evolved too. So how I first got really into Taiko Jeremy, I started Taiko in Hong Kong and Taiko, I think, to most people, the immediate image of Taiko is very masculine. And through playing, I started Taiko maybe 12 years ago, and that's when I'm having that release. And also as someone grew up, I am autistic. I grew up with selective mutism, meaning that when I was a child, I couldn't speak. I couldn't speak at school, I only speak at home with my parents and my mama, my grandma that used to take care of me, but I couldn't speak at all in school. And so being neurodiverse, meaning how my brain is wired in a different way than how I relate to the world and not being able to speak is one way. And sometimes it's not necessary not being able to speak, it's like speaking is not my most comfortable, intuitive communication. It's a non-verbal communication. Right, and Taiko and dance and music, it's definitely like so much more in tune in line with how I like to express and connect with other people. Interesting. And Taiko being so loud, it fits so many needs for me, like redefining that gender, expectation, gender norm.  And like playing Taiko. That's what I wanna say about your performance of Taiko. I love it.  It's a beautiful thing. It's graceful and yet powerful, it's dynamic. Can we actually, is it a good time to share the video of you doing your Taiko? We have a small part. Yeah, so to lead into that, that it's come to the part where it has evolved. Like for me, like this particular piece that I included a video to share is with a really, really big drum. And the big drum we call Odaiko, which like, of course, a lot of people think of Odaiko or think of like the hypermasculine image or people would think of like Koto performance with the Fundoshi, which is like the smaller, like with almost naked, like you see like a very masculine body playing the drum. And I created this piece is actually where I, it's a space for me to explore what femininity is and what masculinity, or maybe what does that even mean? It's a place where I reconnected with femininity because growing up, I pushed femininity like, no, that's not me. But then at the same time, now embracing my own gender identity, like we all both, we all have feminine quality and masculine quality. Like, but then the society kind of forced us to, you know, like compartmentalize. But yeah, yeah, we have to choose. We have to check a box. Yeah, well, this is an excerpt. Like we can take a look then. Well, let's take a look at it first and see, and then we can talk about it afterwards. Mama, that was a little, Cliff, if people just joining us later of your kind of, you said it was an exploration of gender through your taiko music. Can you expand on that a little bit more and how that kind of came to be? Yeah, so like I mentioned before, we watched a video that like a lot of times we associate with odaiko or taiko as hypermasculine. And this piece was a space where we, well, at first it was a solo piece, but then later on I'm like, no, it needs to be more than, I need to play with other people. I needed that interaction and connection, non-verbal communication. And it's an improvisation piece because it's a structural improvisation because it's important to me that each time this piece is being played and being performed, it's authentic, it's in the moment. It's derived from the real-time connection that happens. And for me, like why that is like an exploration because for me to be playing in a very graceful way, it took me a lot. Like now I play this piece with, at ease, like I feel really, now when I play this I feel a lot of joy, but when I first started doing this sort of like more graceful way of playing and moving, it was really difficult for me. Plus, it's almost like it's in my body that I've learned to reject any sort of femininity. And people see me, like you said, right? And Asian, fatigued women, that's how people see me. And these people are just associating me as such and such. But for years of trying to fight that off of me, it's almost in my system, in my body. Like, no, that's not me. But having a space to like, you know, I can't move this way. And it's actually natural for me to move this way. And it's actually nourishing for me to move this way. And also to move with other people that way. And in the same video, you saw my friend Kristi Akioshiro and David Wells. And I love that in that particular performance, the three of us have sort of like represented different stereotypical Like, in the case of like, how people expect, oh, here's a black man, like very masculine. And here is a more androgynous person. And me, who seemed a little bit more like, a little bit, here's I'm like, who seems maybe a little more feminine. I'm just even struggling to categorize myself in that way. You're resisting it. Yeah. But then for us to be doing this together. Yeah. Yeah. I think the key word is multi. Like, even in the beginning, you were struggling to say, OK, well, how do I, which words? I have so many titles under my belt. Which ones inform me? And what am I refusing to leave out? And I think the idea of multiple being a multi-sensorial way of knowing through Tycho. Because I'm thinking about your three bodies working with each other, next to each other. And you're also in tune with listening to each other because you have to be sensitive enough to work with each other's dynamics. And if you have those, if you will, masculine and feminine senses, if you will. I don't know. I don't want to compartmentalize as well. But at the same time, you are dealing with different dynamics. And I think that that's part of your process, too, is how do you embrace these different ways of being? And how does that become a, how does the performance itself become a process, like you say? It's really quite interesting. So how does music help transform people to understanding their bodies a little bit more? Is that because that's something you do in your workshops, right? Yes, very much so.  This is actually someone described my workshop recently. I just taught in Finland. The very first thing that I did is breathe. That we all breathe together. We all, like because Taiko, I think that's why it's really healing for me that I can be in my body. I can be with my body and also feeling the resonance of vibration. But even before I hit the drum, I need to be here, grounding, standing on this ground, feeling my feet, feeling my chest, feeling every part of me.  And but then at the same time, I do want to emphasize that Taiko is not perfect. I still experience a lot of people who look at me and expect a certain thing. But then at the same time, I'm kind of running out of words. Because we only have a short minute left, but I want you to leave our listeners thinking about how do we push boundaries? Because there are structural things that kind of keep us in a place just for the convenience of the way the system works. And many oftentimes, we are meant to be in multiple places. So how do we do that? For you as a Taiko artist and an educator, what are some suggestions to leave people with trying to find ways to push boundaries and to be in these multiple spaces? Like it's important to connect with the history. It's important to connect with your ancestry, with where you come from. But at the same time, keep asking, is this am I showing up as who I am, or am I trying to fit in? I'm trying to fit into what people expect of me. And sometimes it's never no one way to answer that. It's always keep changing and evolving. But the process of asking, the more of you and me will come through, I think. Like don't be afraid to explore and to express, right? I mean, it's hard, easier said than done, but I feel like there's a lot to that. Again, unfortunately, we are time's up. I don't know how it went so fast. But if people are interested in your work, your website, can you just leave us with the website? Yes, I think it was shown earlier. OK, so we had it. It's by full name, Yiman, Y-M-Y-E-M-A-N-M-U-I, YimanWay.com. And I'm all over social media, check out my work. Continue to push boundaries. Thank you so much for being on Think Tech and good luck with your new projects, your multi-sensorial, multidisciplinary projects. Love it. Thank you. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.


Okay. Thank you all. It's a very long and stimulating day, so thank you all for being here on behalf of Francis and myself and welcome. And I'm afraid I'm still a bit shook by this presentation. Very courageous and really thought-provoking. Francis and I were thinking of the phrase the personal is political when we were preparing our own session and I was thinking of the converse of that, the political is personal for you and very powerful. And maybe we need a theme of that for all conferences in the future because I think these conversations are really important. So Francis and I engaged in a series of reflection and discussion over the last few months. And as Sheila mentioned, we blogged a little bit about that. And in coming up to ALT's 25th anniversary conference, we thought about what's happened over the course of the last 24 conferences and could we look at the themes and what kinds of things emerged and how those were concurrent and perhaps coincident with our own personal histories as we say learning in brackets and technology. So we have woven in not just our experiences as learners, as teachers, as researchers, but also as mothers, as feminists, as community activists, all kinds of things because we feel it's a really important piece of who we are in learning technology and in education. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. We also are going to give you an opportunity to do a little bit of reflection and speaking with each other. So that's why we invited people to come down a little more close to the front. And welcome to all the people, the people who are participating virtually as well. We will make sure that we include you in those activities. All of the links that we'll be referring to over the course of the presentation are in a Google Doc, which is bit.ly. So our presentation is there. The abstract to this session is there. Our blog posts and blog posts by other people who will mention later in the session. So that's how you can follow along, whether you're here in the room or following virtually. Thanks to Trezi because the title for this slide in our presentation was Context. And that is because we live in serious times. We can't ignore the wider context of this conference, of higher education, of our work and of our lives and the lives of all who work in higher education students and staff and others. So what we chose to do and what's impossible not to do is when we looked at the history of the alt conference themes and what had arisen, we've done that through the lens of who we are and our identities and our experience. And that's very much a feminist approach. So not ignoring context. So in the abstract for the conference, we kind of talked about the green and the purple circle. So we said we're going to look at alt conference themes through the lens of our own histories and standpoints. But we also wanted to give you an opportunity to reflect and have that kind of conversation also. So to start out really briefly, a more deeper reflection will come later in the session. We'll just ask you to take one minute just now, if you would, and maybe share with someone, ideally not someone that you walked in the room with, but maybe just say something about yourself, who you are, whether it's your work, your job, your location, and maybe your first experience of ed tech or learning technology. So just for a minute. And if you're online and doing this, please use the alt C hashtag. Okay. I want that a little closer. People are talking. That's good. Okay. I might ask for your attention back again. There'll be more opportunities for speaking. As I said, we're not asking you to share that. We simply want to invite your reflection as a foundation for what's going to be happening over the next 25 minutes or so. So I'll hand over to Francis now. Very good at talking to each other. That's a good sign for later. So this is what we promised in our abstract, in our session description and what we've worked on for the past few months. And it's mainly been detective work to generate the resources. It's definitely work in progress. And it's an ongoing analysis of the themes and trends of the first 24 years of alt C. And as Catherine pointed out, our reflexivity is important. And we want it to leave space for the reflection and perspectives of others. So we hope we achieve that. We've reflected on our own histories. And we're recognizing that our personal histories are integral part, as Catherine already said. So we're going to share a short summary of that work, some of which we've blogged about already. But our main task today is to invite you to this discussion. So our documentary resources, as you'll see if you look later at the document, are incomplete and organic. But at any conference like this conference, even delegates get only a partial view of a conference. And over the last 25 years of alt, not surprisingly given that long period, we've had lost websites and limited access. And it's made for some very partial views of some years. And we're still finding new sources in our work in progress. And if you've got any little conference proceedings tucked away at home or CD-ROMs or whatever, please get in contact with us. But what we've found is that even glimpse from afar, some things look different and some things can actually become clearer. So there are clearly connections and overlaps between these themes, but they are identifiable as distinct threads of conversations and work over the last 25 years. And they're themes that are important to us. So if you'd done the work, you might choose different themes. And we've explored two of these themes so far, and that's what we'll be presenting this afternoon. So the theme that I'm looking at is active learning. And I'm going to give you a brief reflection on my working-like link to active learning. And there's more in the blog post that I've already written if you want to look at it later. And then I'll look at active learning in alt's history. So working as a program analyst in the 1970s sparked my interesting learning by doing. It seemed sort of more relevant than some of the stuff I'd done at university. And it raised my awareness of workplace sexism, especially in IT. And I understood this better when reading Marie Hicks' book this year. And I can really recommend it as a read because, you know, it's an American researcher who did archival historic research to look at why Britain's discarded women technologists in the post-war period. It's absolutely fascinating. But unfortunately, sexism and racism are still prevalent in tech industries and elsewhere, but it's interesting that they are prevalent in tech industries. So in primary schools, active learning can be achieved through play, garden clubs, and other authentic activities. And when I was teaching in schools and further education, it raised my awareness of gendered experience that contrasted with my single-sex secondary school in ways that I hadn't experienced. So I learned something from being a teacher that hadn't learned from being a student at school. And as a mother, I certainly learned that learning starts at home in families through play and through learning life skills like eating.  So in further and higher education, there are obvious examples of active learning on vocational courses, but I do believe it can be achieved in many learning activities. So not just there. And active learning even happens at Old Sea. I think this was 2008 at Leeds, but I'm not absolutely certain. And I'm sure you'll recognize a few faces there. I also learned from doing research, which I think demands persistence, accountability and criticality. And it leads to learning by writing and blogging about your research, conversations that follow. And social media has offered great opportunities for networked learning in research settings, but we do have to think about the platforms that are in flux. For example, what we learned about Facebook and other revelations this year. So trawling through these archives, just say a little bit about my own connection with Alts. I had little or no contact with Alts in the 1990s. My subject discipline was information systems. So I was reading science and technology studies. I was critiquing technological determinism and learning how to research. I was also studying to improve my pedagogy. I was really interested in that. So look at books like Shones, Reflective Practitioner, Diana Lawlard's book, The Active Learning Journal that I think Helen Beatham might have worked on. And getting the IT forum mailing list. There's a US mailing list. I fell into what we were then calling e-learning when I shared my teaching materials online by accident, but that's another story. I attended most Alts conferences in the 2000s, and this is a third Altsy I've attended in this decade, but we found some interesting sources to help plug the gaps in our attendance and recollections. So the first Altsy in 1994 was entitled Enabling Active Learning. And honestly, I didn't really know that when I decided to look at Active Learning. I was already interested in that. But we don't really know any details of the discussion there. We've managed to find summaries of titles and authors for the first three conferences. What we found the strongest voice in the mid-1990s came from the editor of Alt J, who was one of the founders of Alt. In his early editorials, he acknowledged that what he called traditional education in higher education needed to change, and that applying to education technology was a change in itself, but the challenge was in understanding the relationship between those two changes. Sounds a bit familiar, really, doesn't it? He also argued for more than stories of practice at Alt. And this long article was from a constructivist perspective, and it doesn't read badly for an article that's 23 years old, so you can find it in the excellent Alt J Research and Learning Technology archives. And it was held by the Alt J editors and an inspiration to authors and presenters. It's had more impact more widely. It's our journal's most cited article with about a thousand citations, but as far as we can see, only three of those are within our journal, so it's had quite a wide impact, but maybe not as much impact within our community. When we trawled through the Journal and Conference archives, we found there was very little that you could call formally active learning that was labelled as active learning, but there were many examples of learning that was active. So maybe, looking down this right-hand side, how to get real, how to get a rich environment for active learning, maybe our members were getting real in their own ways. So this, the next article was entitled Enabling Active Learning, but we don't know the details of the discussion there. And there again, he was complaining, or not complaining, but commenting after the conference that what he'd wanted was not for just people to look at the two changes, but to look at the relationship between them. He seems to suggest he didn't find that was happening. Okay. This is very, very speedy, but we just wanted to give you an idea of some of the highlights of what we found in our research, and there are more detail in the documents we linked to. In terms of open learning, anyone who's done research in the area of open learning or open education will know that the very definitions of those terms have changed considerably, particularly over the last 40 to 50 years. So research in the late 1970s and early 1980s would have defined open learning as flexibility of space, student choice, integrated curriculum, changing the relationships between learners and teachers, fostering student agency and ownership for learning, those kinds of things. So, and this is also evident in the research in ALT, in ALT-C, which I'll talk about in just one moment. But in terms of my own lens for looking at that, I blabbed about this, but really briefly, I have what is kind of called, I think, a portfolio career. Maybe a lot of people in the room have this as well. Not a straight trajectory. And so in the 80s, I qualified as an engineer and practiced engineering in IT. In the early 90s, I went back to study for an MA in women's studies and really learned a sociological approach to study and knowledge, and also got to learn and experience critical and feminist pedagogy. And I did my dissertation in the area of gender and technology. And later in the 90s, I deepened my understanding of qualitative research in a three-year study of gender and technology. And it wasn't until the 2000s that I really started getting involved in e-learning as it was then and laterally in open education. And that was initially as a practitioner and then in the last few years as a researcher. So that's the lens that I bring to the troll that I did in the area of open learning. So here's a nice example of open learning from my history. So this was literally cut and paste. Anyone who was doing education in those years will know that's how we did those things. And this was one of several community education courses that I developed for women because through all those different career choices that I made, one of the threads that's been extant in my life since growing up in Bronx to living in Ireland and Scotland and the States is community activity and community activism. So much of that work has been working with women and kind of financially and socially disadvantaged areas. And a lot of that was bringing IT and working in the areas of IT. So even in those days we were trying to make sure that Ada Lovelace was in the introduction to computing curriculum and the Jackard Loom which some of us have been talking about on Twitter recently. But looking through the alt archives for those years with my personal lens was really interesting. So this is alt C now and not alt J. So this is a timeline from 1994 to 2017. In those early years, in any search for open, open was not described, defined as open education or open learning as today. It was that older definition. So things that came up were things like open and active learning, open collaboration, open questions and even the values underlying openness, openness and trust was talked about quite a bit. And then if you look at the blue stripe there, the first explicit mention of openness was our wonderful friend reusable learning objects. And laterally OER, open content, MOOCs, the octel course. I see little smiles in the room. A lot of you were probably involved in many of these presentations, open data. And although those were the topics in open education, the green structures that a lot of the tools and spaces that people were using for open educational practices were talked about quite throughout those conferences as well. Blogs, Wikis, social media and social networks. 2009 was a significant year. It seems that was the famous or infamous Velia's Jedge seminar. Who's, James Craig? Yes, he is here. And a keynote by Terry Anderson, really about Web 2.0 and defining open scholarship and so on. But really from 2012, a couple of interesting trends. One is 2012, which as Lorna Campbell reminded me this morning was the end of the UK OER program. It was the first time there was explicitly a theme of open at this conference. But also really evidence of critical approaches. So now we're talking about that quite explicitly, but it's been evident in the program for the last few years. So as Frances said, we have different perspectives from looking back. So what we'd like to do is do a really quick think, pair, share. So you may have had some thoughts listening to what we're talking about about your own experiences inside and outside education. Perhaps bringing in the strand of the political as well.  Perhaps as educators, perhaps as learning technologists or more broadly. And write down three anywhere, I accuse people that you have, that you feel are most important to bring to your current work in facing the challenges that we face currently in learning and technology. So what are three aspects of yourself that you think are most important to bring to your work right now given the challenges that we face? Okay, I'm just going to say 90 seconds for that, just alone. Just a thoughtful exercise alone. And then we'll take 90 seconds to share with each other. For those who are participating virtually, you can do this alone or if you wish to share, you can do that on Twitter or elsewhere using the tag alt C or personal alt C. Okay. Now for the pair part of this activity.  And just to read your list, you don't have to explain, just read your list to one another and listen to one another's list. And then see if together you can decide on one thing that you'd like to share in our Google Doc. I'll put the link up in a minute. So again, 90 seconds just to share your three things with one another. Thank you. Perfect. We're very low maintenance. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, I'm really sorry about that. I mean, it would be great if we had an hour to do this session. But it's possible that you may have found something really striking that one or other of you mentioned during that. And you might want to share that. It's possible that you may intersect in one of those, that you both said one of the things that may be roughly the same. So we're just going to ask you, as a pair, to access this document. It's a Google Doc. And add one thing to the doc based on your discussion. And we'll bring it up on the screen and we'll have a look at it. And then we'll just pull the threads together and try and finish on time. And you can include your name or not include your name as you wish. Yeah. So you can be anonymous on that list, yes, or add your name, whatever you wish. OK. We tried to break Google last week with Martin. Martin Hoxie was helping us. It is open for sharing. Yes, it's just case sensitive, yeah. OK.  Pull the screen out for that one. My goodness. Yes, indeed. That's bit.ly. And then case sensitive, Hoxie-bell-cronin. Thanks. Shall I be on the bus? Two minutes, one minute. OK. So for those who possibly don't have access on their device, there's an awful lot of collaboration, communication, community and sharing. And then other values appearing, empathy, equity, fairness, coming from a marginalized background, ethical awareness, compassion, inclusivity. OK. OK. I would like to keep this going but I know that we're in the last session. We are free to continue to add here any further comments as well. Also, if there was something you feel really strongly about and you're sharing that wasn't the one thing you chose, you can go ahead and add that now as well. We just didn't want to have too many contributions crashing the document. We just invite you to think about the fact that one thing that we certainly found was the surface aspects of being a learning technologist are necessary but not sufficient to do the work that we do today and that we felt that the thing that was most important in looking back, that looking back view that Francis talked about with the lens was bringing our whole selves into the work that we do. And we think that's increasingly important for all of us. So a kind of a values-based approach, as Melissa mentioned several times, which is difficult, it's challenging, but possibly more spaces in this conference to be able to talk about the challenges of doing work in that way. And we invite you to engage in those discussions with us here at the conference and also online beyond. In our abstract, we just go back to our, we used a quote by Audrey Waters and we just wanted to call her to mind again today. We felt this framed so much of our perspective as we looked at this and that is all visions of the future of education, teaching, work, learning are ideological and they are also political and to the extent that we deny that we're not doing the best work that we can do. So I don't know if Francis wants to add anything but we would really love to hear more from you and thank you very much. Well we just want to thank you and everyone else who's contributed and we put a list of what we know about the blog contributions in the document and if anybody does make a post or finds one, please just add it to the document yourself. Thank you so much.


Sinor is a material sciences company that makes porous membranes, hollow fiber membranes for water filtration applications. We get the contacts with the market leaders. We get our chance to vocalize our story in papers and in the activities throughout the conference. We have the exhibition where we can show off our products. We find that the combination is very good for marketing for project basis, finding projects and at working projects, but also for market knowledge and also for people to learn who Sinor is and get the word out.


I'm a teacher, and that's what I am. I saw the advertisement on the Royal Society of Chemistry website, and thought that this was something that I'd really like to do. Now I'm retired, keep my mind occupied, and perhaps contribute something to the exercise. It's quite a responsibility. You've dealt with students in 30s and 40s, maybe 50s in Nigeria, but to reach hundreds of thousands of millions is a responsibility. So we've got to get this thing right. I think science is difficult because some of the scientific concepts are counterintuitive. They're not just common sense. So a lot of misconceptions build up when you are trying to learn science. So I think one of the things that I find very important is to try to overcome those misconceptions. And I think possibly one of the reasons why those misconceptions arise is that the science that is taught is not always taught in context, in a real global useful context. So I think my motto for science teaching is to set the science in a real everyday global context and to try to address the misconceptions that have been perpetuated possibly through science teachers as much as the media. There are a lot of children in this world of ours who have no access to education, and I think a few school enables them to gain some education. I think we've achieved a main objective. Most people in the Western world have got schools and plenty of resources, but if this can reach the parts that other education can't reach, I think we've achieved something really great. I think there's a certain amount of scientific understanding that's necessary to know how this world of ours works, how it functions, how ecosystems interact with the environment, a little bit about the chemistry of climate change and so on, which a lot of people, particularly politicians and people who are leaders of industry, do not understand. And without that understanding, they can't really understand the solutions that need to be made. So a scientific understanding, I think, is a human right and it's a human need so that the industrialists and the politicians can put the right policies in place. Chemistry is the science of matter and we have taken materials from the Earth, we've spread them around the planet, we've polluted the planet and we need desperately to understand what these materials are, how they behave, in order to make sure that we can develop a way of operating, if in a sense like natural ecosystems, they recycle materials and mankind has got to do the same, we can't keep digging things up, using them and throwing them away. And without a chemical understanding, a lot of people will not understand how that can be done or why it should be done. Biology is life on this planet and life on this planet, it works quite happily without mankind being around but as soon as mankind started to develop their industrial methods and so on, ecosystems began to be threatened and with the knowledge of biology, not only can we keep our own health and progress going in an ecologically friendly way but we can also hopefully protect what's left of the world's wonderful ecosystems. It's been a very, very worthwhile experience for me, I've sort of come to the end of my career and feel I've still got something I can provide and give and so on and it's been really great to have met you all and to be able to participate in this enterprise. Entertaining, enterprising and I've started to think of a word that's summed up the sort of humanitarianness of it the sort of the ideals, the idealistic maybe perhaps, maybe idealistic.


Good morning, San Francisco. Good afternoon, New York. Good evening Berlin and good evening Tokyo This is the Wikimedia monthly activities meeting for the month of May I am James Hare the associate product manager on the technical engagement and scoring platform teams. Let's get started In today's meeting we will be sharing a movement update including updates on structured data on commons including the first GLAM pilot projects as well as some updates on the wiki data info box on commons the wikimedia 2030 status update questions and discussions and wiki love But first our movement update Some big headlines right now we have we've petitioned the European Court of Human Rights to lift the block on Wikipedia and Turkey which I understand is not something we do every day So this is particularly big news so big round of applause to our cross departmental team that made this happen and with Wikipedia in the classroom a former student has become the teacher This is very exciting it shows that when we invest in our leaders they in turn become leaders to other people and so I think that is worth celebrating as well And just with and just as with our petition in Turkey we've also requested the government of China to unblock us I am seeing a pattern here but again thank you to the foundation for their work in making sure that billions of people around the world can actually read our website And in case you didn't know media wiki is the software that underpins Wikipedia there was recently a conference about it in California about dedicated to Basically all the people throughout the world who use the media wiki software and is very inspiring The Wikimedia Foundation published its 10th transparency report and Wikimedia Argentina and the National University of La Plata partner to promote free knowledge A round of applause for all these wonderful efforts And coming up we have the Wikimedia polling conference and that will be just coming up in a week or so I think We have Wikimedia 2019 in Stockholm and we also have the wiki convention Franco phone in Brussels And now I will bring and now let's take this over to Sandra who will be talking about structured data on comments Yes hello everyone can everyone hear me well Yes I assume you do okay so I'm going to give a very quick update to be very clear this is a work in progress update We don't really have a very finished product to show yet, but we want to update everyone listening to this to this broadcast about the current status Of things emphasis will be on pilot projects that are running full force at this moment glam pilot projects collaboration projects with the cultural sector and with volunteers working on cultural projects And actually five minutes of this slot will be given to Florence Florence they who are user on third of you know quite famous on our projects I would say Who is going to talk about one specific glam pilot project that I'm quite proud of and very happy to present the ISA tool and you will hear about that in a few minutes Next slide please But first I'm going to give a quick update on structured data on comments for those who are not following the project very closely In the past two years and this year quite actively a team at Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland is working quite hard to add structured multilingual and machine readable machine readable metadata to comments from Wikidata something that the communities have been asking for quite for a quite long time time it's finally happening And we're doing that to make comments files easier to view search, edit, organize and reuse next slide please So for those people who are using comments actively and who are uploading files there you might have noticed already that you can do a few new things there at this moment You can add multilingual file captions you can translate file captions there and you can add depict statements through the file pages themselves through upload wizard and if you are so inclined through the API as well Next slide please So if you look for example at this featured image showing a very beautiful lightning strike in a pine tree I think Next slide please and if you would go to its file page as you see it there you will see a new feature or a new aspect in the user interface that wasn't there before A structured data tab next slide please Brand new and clicking on both parts of the tab under file information you can add the file captions and translate captions feel free to do so And under structured data you see that you can add all kinds of tags that are in fact things that are depicted in the image depict statements that are actually Concepts from Wikidata so we are actually proactively integrating Wikidata into comments at this moment Next slide please You can also search already for them at this moment still through a bit of a wieldy I say I would say code like kind of writing but in next iterations that will it will also become possible to search comments multilingual in this way Next slide please So just a quick overview of new features that are coming so as I said to you will be able to search comments multilingual Other statements will be added so you will also be able to say other things about files than just the things that they depict You will be able to say who created them other specific kind of data you want to add about them Quite a few other things and at this moment the team is also preparing upload wizard for campaigns Wikilev campaigns for instance Next slide please My own work I work in the Glam team at the foundation is I mentor a set of Glam pilot projects so pilot projects with cultural content Both content partnerships uploads from culture institutions but also community initiatives that are Glam focused and a few tools and prototypes Next slide please for a quick overview of what kind of projects we're looking at So in terms of content partnerships we have at this moment in preparation quite a diverse set of potential uploads to comments Both from an art museum, one related to decorative arts, one related to maps which is a kind of special material One from an encyclopedic museum actually the Met Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is going to run a pilot with us And then we also have some community initiatives running, there will be an upload of digitized books in Punjabi Two comments to be transcribed to Wikisource to experiment with depth interchange And then coming up also quite soon, we also have some tools that are being built on top of Wikimedia comments that are about making comments quite easy to contribute to by anyone Next slide please This is just the credits, next slide please And now with all pleasure I give the words to Florence because she will dive more deeply into one of the pilot projects the ISA tool Up to you Florence Hello everyone, so I'm very happy to present you today the ISA tool, can you show me the next slide please All right, so ISA, it's a work under development What it is meant to be is a tool to help Sandra and the structured data team on comments to actually contribute content That's what we call the micro-contribution tool, it will work both on desktop and laptop and mobile But the idea is really to make it mobile friendly So next slide please I'd like to give a little bit of context of why we decided to work on that tool Most of you already know that we have been running Wikilevus Africa for now five years We have a brand new parser that you will actually see at Wikimedia in Sweden in a few months And it's summarized the contribution we have oversee for five years now with contribution from over 23 countries Last year we were discussing with Sandra at Wikimedia the outcome of Wikilevus Africa And the conclusion was one of the issues we noticed is that very few description and of course no structured data was available For over 48,000 images submitted during the last five years So please next slide So with Sandra we discussed a new tool that would be provided as part of the structured data on comments projects It was discussed last summer, we finalized the team during winter So they are at the moment two people involved from Wikimedia in Africa Association So that's Ila and myself, there are two people involved as part of the Istropedia that's shown And Navino that you already know from the Istropedia timeline Eugene is the main developer working on that project And of course we have Sandra as our mentor So the project has been at the work for the past months or two months or so We mostly work using fabricators, you can track some of our work over there And the tools will be hosted on tools.vmflabs of course On the right hand side this is not the final tool because it's still a mock-up So you have a mock-up from the main page And on the next slide please Here a mock-up for the main campaign directory So let me give you just a little bit of input of what we intend to do The tool is meant to be useful for project leaders We're all going to pre-define set of images on comments and define campaigns So for example a campaign might be let's improve the structured data About images from Wikileaks Africa in Nigeria in 2016 for example So the leader will define which categories on Wikimedia Commons will be proposed For improvements and on the mobile tool there will be the list of all campaigns available Then this person will make a call to contributors In a very traditional type of way you will have to be logged in to work on the project And the leader will also have some leaders and everyone actually will have full statistics available on desktop And some of them will be available from download Next slide please On this slide you will see the typical campaign proposed by a project leader It will be very simply defined with a beginning time, an ending time, the category of images to work on And we will work only on two different type of structured data which are depict and caption Then the project leader will send invitation directly for this campaign Next slide please And this is the typical screen of the input participation screen It will display images from the category selected, one image after the other It will also display some information directly collected from Wikimedia Commons In particular the file, the description, the categories so that it helps the user to actually look at the information And then choose to add depicts and caption information below Then it will very simply be able to save this modification or cancel go to next image At the end of the campaign information will be collected over time Information will be collected over time with points so that it's seen as a bit of a context So for example each contributors will have points attributed to the number of images he modified And we will be able to see how many people contributed for each campaign Which were the biggest contributors and how many images were improved during the campaign So next slide please So I'd like to insist that the tool is under development at the moment The ISA word means information structure to acceleration But it's also an African word from the Shishona language, it means put or place The tool we hope will be available probably during summer Will it be before Wikimedia, after Wikimedia, we don't know yet, it will depend But what we know is that we will present the tool anyway during Wikimedia And we will also hold a small campaign which is currently called metadata week But note that this is a working name, so the idea will be to make an open call during one or two weeks For people to improve information related to Wikilovs Africa images Next slide please And finally how can you help, that's a very important element So first there is a page that has been open on commons, that's commons ISA tool Please go there, put it in your watch list and help us describe the tool Improve the tool, improve the help page and set up the metadata weeks Test the tool, it's probably too early on but if you're interested in helping us to test the tool Please drop me a word, I will be following up with you Participate to the metadata week, so probably during summer There's also an issue related to translating the interface because it's very important for us that this tool is available in as many languages as possible And of course African languages as well So there will be instructions published very soon to help on the translation of the interface And finally for this summer we will do a basic first version of the tool But of course there will be a bunch of improvements to bring And we invite you to actually volunteer to help There will be probably a collection of tasks proposed during Wikimedia Hackathon So if you're interested stay tuned please, get in touch with us and track us on fabricator Essentially that's it, I thank you very much Great presentation, thank you and for our next presentation we will be learning about the Wikidata info box on Commons So take it away Mike Hi, so I'm a volunteer on the project, I guess quite a few of you know me already This has been a project I've been working on over the last year or so as a volunteer So if you've gone to Wikimedia Commons recently, anytime in the last year or so And have a look in the Commons category, you'll probably see an info box in the category now If you go to the next slide please It'll look something like this one on the right So it gives you basically the information about the category So it's the name of the thing and an image of it and kind of a summary of what the category is covering The info box is completely multilingual and it's a single info box that works for everything So it's very easy to apply to Commons, you just have Wikidata info box in the Wikidex for every category And that shows the info box This is all information drawn from Wikidata So it uses a whole load of properties to try to display the information in a nice way If you go to the next slide So as well as the basic information about it, it also shows a map It's a multilingual map where that's possible And also includes the authority control information and a whole bunch of useful links at the bottom To some of Manus' useful tools Amongst all this It also does automatic categorization So for categories about people, it will automatically add the birth and death date categories And also awards everyone and things like that It also embeds information into the category So I think the multilingual search for categories at least should already work So it pulls all the labels from Wikidata and puts those into the source for category And I think that's picked up by the search engine If you go to the next slide please So it's had very wide support from the Commons community Unlike other places where Wikidata info boxes have been a bit more resistant to I think part of the reason for that is it's completely multilingual And that's not something you can easily do in playing Wikidex There's a very active engagement to improving it If you go to the talk page for the info box Then there's constantly new ideas being suggested And additions being made to the info box to adjust and to expand it And one thing I should say is a particular thanks to userXS Who has written the Lua code that the info box uses Although most of it's written in Wikitext Next slide please One side effect is that interwiki links for Commons have dramatically improved So the reason for that is the info box uses a common side link To find which Wikidata entry to show the information from And it's been a huge project to add those side links Because mostly they didn't exist until 2018 or so So we've added well over a million side links to Commons And that has the dual benefits of on the Wikidias You get the common side link a lot more often And also on Commons you get links back to Wikipedia as well And the info box also shows some of these links in the relevant language Next slide please So on the down side there's a lot of cleanup to do So a lot of these side links didn't really It wasn't very easy to check them So there's some which are bad side links need to be cleaned up There's a property for Commons category as well on Wikidata P373 And there's a lot of duplication with that and a lot of differences that need to be resolved I think the main problem is that Wikidata needs expanding So people need to add more information to it to show up in the info boxes So for lesser known items and things on Commons Then you don't get much information in the info box But hopefully the info box will encourage people to add it The server load probably increased with the info box I was quite glad that it didn't fade Commons when it was being rolled out last year But I think it probably does use a bit more CPU time nowadays One thing I'm not sure about is whether Google and other search engines actually access information And use that to index Commons It would be quite nice if they did to increase the visibility of Commons, particularly multilingualy Some of the info boxes do get quite demonstrated on the right But they are useful information and they are tucked out of the way on the side of the category So they shouldn't get in the way of browsing the information As in photos in the category Next slide please It also works on Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is always an interesting challenge But it is set up there and does work there at the moment Although if you try to use it, it will come along and undo the edit shortly afterwards It could easily be installed on smaller wikis Those that want just a universal info box that works for every single topic in that language It's a bit of a fast to install but it's not too bad If you know anyone that's interested in having it on their wiki They're going to be interested in helping them set it up there Another kind of side project is that common side links from the English Wikipedia Are being synced up at the moment So there's a lot of clean up that can be done with that To sort out redirect links to category redirects And erroneous links and things like that And also I'm hoping that we can switch the Commons links on Wikipedia And the English Wikipedia to be completely wikidata So that's the point at the moment Next slide please So some of the next steps There's just over 2.275 million categories now have the info box There's about 6 or 7 million categories on Commons So there's quite a few more to go So we're trying to add links to match those up There's ongoing maintenance to improve the info box I just said linking new categories There's also a possibility of auto creating new wikidata entries For things that have Commons categories Tried that with people earlier this year There's some resistance so far with that idea There's questions about whether Commons categories are notable The subjects of all Commons categories are notable or not There's ongoing discussion I guess Next slide please So some things that you can do to help There's a wikidata game that lets you link Commons categories to wikidata and Wikipedia Which you can access through the Distributor game or the Manusas tools Go and have a look at your favourite Commons category And see whether it has an info box If it has a Wikipedia article and no info box Then you can add the site link in And a bot will come along and automatically add the wikidata info box to Commons later on One of the things I'm hoping for future steps is So with structured data on Commons There's all these depict statements being added to file pages The info box could access that information as well And show relevant information multilingual again in the file pages But at the moment there's no Lua access or bot access to the depicts information So for developers if that's something you might be interested in sorting out It would be nice to have in the future And that's everything I've got so thanks very much for listening And now we have our wikimedia 2030 status update Thanks everyone can you hear me? Yes Great, next slide please So hi everyone my name is Kelsey Steinrao And I'm the community relations specialist for the movement strategy core team I'm really excited to talk to you today with my colleague Rupika Sharma Who is our strategy liaison for the Hindi community And today our focus is going to be talking about community conversations Which is the area of movement strategy that I manage And as everyone here knows Who's been involved in the strategy process so far What we're trying to do with the 2030 movement strategy Is to figure out who we are as a movement Who we want to be and what our future should look like Next slide please In order to do that Your voice matters in shaping our future And it's really important that all sectors of the community Have the opportunity and feel invited to make sure that their ideas And thoughts are considered in shaping our future So there's a few different reasons why we're working so hard To give opportunities for community members from all over the world To have their voices heard And that everyone is really around content In order to have excellent recommendations about what our future should look like We need a diverse array of perspectives So that these recommendations best represent our movement And what our shared future should be The second reason is that community member voices, your voices Are essential to making sure that this process fits our values We need to be diverse We need to be inclusive, participatory, transparent and bold That's who we are as Wikimedians And that needs to transfer into every aspect of what we do around our future Next slide please The best way to do that is through the community conversations processes So community conversations are the aspect of the movement strategy process That brings community perspectives into the work of our nine thematic working groups For community conversations at high level We're operating with two broad phases The first one is enrichment and the second one is recommendations Right now in the enrichment phase What we're focused on doing is soliciting and facilitating community input On all nine of the thematic areas at whatever level of depth Or whatever scoping questions from the scoping documents People are interested in with the goal of shaping the ideas And general content of the working groups Later in this year when working groups release draft recommendations Community members will then be asked to give feedback on their proposed ideas And there's a lot of different ways that you can get involved and participate We're trying to reach people across all languages All areas of volunteer interest All geographies and levels of experience in Wikimedia And we're also active on a large variety of channels There's conversations that are happening on Wiki On social media platforms, over conference calls, and also in person Next slide please Our real on the ground leaders, the heroes in community conversations Are our strategy liaisons There's two types of strategy liaisons that we work with The first are volunteer strategy liaisons And they represent each one of our affiliates And their role is to facilitate discussions within affiliate groups And their members about movement strategy topics The second group of strategy liaisons is a hired team of seven contractors That lead community conversations across seven different language groups And there's a few different tasks that strategy liaisons do The first one, which I've already talked about Is their discussion facilitators within their community But they're also ambassadors on behalf of the movement strategy process They help our various communities and affiliates understand What movement strategy is about, why it's relevant to them Why their voices are so important and what we're doing And to do a little bit of understanding and breakdown Of the strategy topics to make it a little bit more accessible And offer people a meaningful on ramp The last thing that strategy liaisons do is They then take the feedback from the affiliates And from our broad language communities And they feed them into the efforts of the working groups So that there's that content bridge between the two areas of the strategy process Next slide please I wanted to give you all a very quick overview Of what our calendar looks like for community conversations So the period of April, May and June Is what I referenced earlier as our period of engagement For open conversations across affiliates and communities We're also shortly going to be coming out with a community survey In a number of languages that people can participate in As we move into the summer, we're going to start shifting from Broad and collectively structured community conversations And strategy salons Strategy salons are a small grant process that I manage That provides amounts between $500 and $1,500 to affiliates all over the world To host in-person conversations usually over dinner or a meal On one or two strategy topics with the members of their local community These were done as part of the strategy process in 2017 And they're a really great opportunity for inclusion, relationship building And topical deep dive within a community Then as we move into September and October And we start to receive various forms of draft recommendations From the working groups It will be opened back up again with strategy liaisons Soliciting feedback on those recommendations Next slide please For those of you wondering so how does the feedback from the communities Get into the working groups? Well don't worry there's a report on meta about it And what I mean by that is every single month The I put together a summary report Of all of the discussion summaries sent to me by strategy liaisons Translated into English from a number of different languages And they're sorted by three thematic areas and compiled into a report on that These reports are sent to working groups so that they can read directly the feedback from the community There are chances for them to ask feedback or to follow up in this report And close those feedback loops and let the community know sort of what they're thinking And how their ideas are being received Next slide please The first report came out last month and it was a March and April summary report The report for May will be compiled in the next few days and posted online If you haven't engaged much with movement strategy so far I would really encourage you to take a quick glance at this The value is it is a way of reviewing what people from your geographic or language or project based community Have been saying about movement strategy and about our future You can check to make sure that your perspective is represented accurately Or to see what other ideas are not included that you would really like to see your voice too Next slide please I'd like to turn things over to Rupika now to talk a little bit about how it's going being a strategy liaison What are things like on a day-to-day basis facilitating movement strategy conversations I know both from the team that I lead and for the volunteers that I work with There's been a lot of learning curves and the way to best engage people and take a really inclusive approach To make sure that more experienced Wikimedians and newer Wikimedians have a chance to have their voices heard So Rupika take it away and talk to us about the Hindi community experience that you've been having Thank you Kelsey Hey everyone this is Rupika Sharma I'm community strategist from Hindi community It's pleasure to share our team's work with you all today One of the most beautiful things about the strategy process is that it is collaborative work with the community Mapping how the future of Wikimedia movement will be by 2030 And in this collaborative process it has been of utmost importance that we have diversity of different voices and players of community So we have to create balance and equity in the strategy direction of our movement Most of the active Hindi community is situated in India It is one of the most emerging communities of global south And we have different actors who are active in different online platforms such as Wikipedia with source, dictionary, Wikidata While others are more active in offline contributions from organizing outreach events to plan partnerships And in order to ensure diversity of different voices and process We have reached out to community on different channels Some of the loud voices that are most active on Hindi messenger group Whatsapp group chat and village bomb of Hindi Wikimedia And in one of the surveys we found out that most of the members felt more safe and secure in giving feedback anonymously Where they had no fear of being attacked by some of the loud voices And this was especially true for the underrepresented voices of female members, other caste and religious minorities That are not able to express openly and participate in decision making process or open community conversations We found out that this was a bigger issue in emerging communities Like India where cultural and religious aspects affect the contributions of the community members And how important it is to bridge the gap for the minorities who are still the underrepresented part of movement In decision making process and online space And giving them a chance to express their voice is essential If we want to create a balance in the development of the strategy direction for our movement And for ensuring we have diversity and inclusion of all voices We have tried different approaches We have special social media channel for the minorities And we are taking special efforts to provide safe space to members who want to provide anonymous feedbacks With one-on-one interviews and anonymous surveys And the result of these efforts has resulted in making community members feel appreciated and included And many members from minorities have expressed their gratitude and delight in this inclusive approach by foundation And for us it is a very special feeling to make this happen Thanks Thank you Rubika Next slide please Just to wrap up on community conversations We really love to hear from you Do you like the approaches of how we're engaging with your community? Are there ways that we can do it better? Are there perspectives that you think are not being heard? Please feel free to reach out to me, myself, Tenvir, who also works with our working groups And Rubika as one of our strategy liaisons You can also find out contact information for strategy liaisons for our other languages And for our affiliates on our page on Meta Next slide Thank you so much And now we will open the floor to some questions and discussions I believe James is monitoring IRC for questions Yes, so there's been some discussion in IRC Which about the best practices on commons On how to link between gallery pages and category pages to WikiData and vice versa I don't know, Mike, if you're on and want to talk about that Yeah, can you hear me? Yes Oh good Yes, so the problem is that WikiData entries can only have one site link to a Wiki And commons has both galleries and categories It doesn't have too many galleries, but it still causes a problem when you want to site link the category And it's being blocked by a gallery So there is a workaround for that where you have to create a second WikiData item And then use the properties to link between the two Which the info box supports, it doesn't make any difference to that But it's something that is a bit of a faff and there isn't an obvious solution to it at the moment Thanks Is there a kind of place where this is documented or best practice is being discussed So people can weigh in and suggest what they would like to see There's been discussions in various places, particularly WikiData and Notability I think But apart from starting a new conversation somewhere, there wasn't really anywhere Excellent, thank you Alright, any questions from people in the room? Last chance? Any more questions from IRC? Alright I guess we will proceed then If you have ideas for this meeting, we would love to hear them Go to Meta, go to that particular page on Meta and send us your ideas We want to hear them, thank you And now it is time for WikiLove Please feel free to submit WikiLove on IRC or line up at the mic here and share your WikiLove with the world Sandra, did you say you had some WikiLove? I have so much WikiLove All my WikiLove at the moment goes to the Wikimedia Commons community and I'm feeling a bit tacky saying this But when I started working on structured data on Commons, I have to say I was totally frightened Because I thought we are going to introduce a very big change to this project And although, you know, I've always heard that the community has supported it quite for a long time And wanted this for a long time, it was still a scary thing But throughout the three years that we've been working on the project for now, or a bit more than two years Collaboration with the community has been really fantastic I really have to honestly say this We've gotten very very strong support from especially the administrators on Commons People have continuously provided very good feedback Sometimes critical, we know we have some people who are not quite convinced about the value of structured data on Commons But that is very valuable too And we're also grateful for the people who speak up on that part At this moment when we deploy, we have quite a few people already jumping on stuff Writing documentation as soon as new features are being deployed We have people thinking about structuring licenses We have people thinking about modeling stuff We have people very strongly submitting constant streams of feedback on every community consultation we do And I really want to give a very very big heartfelt thank you for everyone who puts time in this Who puts their passion in this It's been a right. It's still gonna be a right, but it's been absolutely awesome And I'm very happy to be part of this process Thank you all And Marshall, do you have wiki love? Hello I have wiki love for the Czech Wikipedia community Who has been one of the communities piloting the help panel feature that helps New editors ask questions to the help desk And I want to give them a shout out because their community has been answering questions on their wiki's help desk With a median response time of 13 minutes over the last few months So there's seven or eight of them that are really active on the help desk And getting newcomers responses really fast And that helps them continue their edits and hopefully be retained on the wiki So thank you Hi, I wanted to give lots of wiki love to the turkey user group And also to M&A for their fantastic work on the recent social media campaign to lift the block of wikipedia and turkey And also for keeping us updated on local developments and news that's been really helpful And also to the affiliates who mobilized around that social media campaign as well Thank you so much I wanted to send some wiki love to wikimedia check again This time for the hackathon, for organizing the hackathon and to support us within the foundation This was one of the best organized hackathons that I've attended and I've attended quite a number already So thanks again Following on from that, I'd like to voice Lukas Verkmeisters But also my own heartfelt thanks to everyone that came to the hackathon and made it such a successful experience The organizers did a great job but also all the participants made it a wonderful experience So thank you We just wanted to share much wiki love for Sati and Katie who have been wonderful colleagues over many years I have been moping around the office all day making very sad noises But yeah, thank you Yeah, I want to say thank you to Sati who's here, yay I hadn't gotten a chance to work with Sati until this year when we were on strategy together and it was a delight And I was finally able to see all the joy that people get from working with her and I was really happy to do that Katie has been an amazing mentor, I feel like she's always calling me out on things and making me do stuff So I would definitely miss her around here, so lots of wiki love for both Sati and Katie Sorry, I'm going to take you back on this Hi Sati So both Sati and Katie have, they've been the two people who introduced me to the movement So before I start like cracking up, either in laughter or in tears, I just want to say thank you to you both Yeah, you're both great And Katie is not here, she's great wherever she is I wanted to offer some wiki love to the CR team, especially you, Elena, who was up here a moment ago We've done a four month consultation on the brand proposal It's had lots of discussion in lots of places, it's wrapping up right now And the reason it went so well was because of Kim and Elena being great partners with us on that So thanks to CR and to Kim and Elena Florence, I think you're unmuted Why did you leave me the microphone? No, I didn't Okay, new to me Would anyone else like to share wiki love, either online or in person? Well, with that, I think that wraps it up for the activities meeting this month We will see you all next month, thank you


For more than 50 years, scouting in Northern Japan has enjoyed a strong bond bridging cultural barriers between young boys and girls. 2016 marks the 24th consecutive year Misawa Air Base has hosted International Scout Day. It's a good experience. I get to talk with a lot of the English scouts here and I make many new friends every year and learn more about the American scouts. Misawa's 35th Fighter Wing Vice Commander Colonel Travis Rex was the event's featured speaker. I can tell you both on the the Boy Scout side as well as the leader side what a different scouting makes in the lives of our young men and women. They learn values, they learn skills that they're going to use throughout their the rest of your youth and into adulthood. International scouting is the largest voluntary youth movement in the world with a membership of more than 28 million boys and girls. Betty Officer Benjamin Kittleson, Misawa Air Base, Japan.


Fleet Week New York is now in its 27th year, kicked off May 20th. This week-long celebration is an opportunity for the citizens of New York and the surrounding tri-state area to meet sailors, marines and coast guardsmen and witness the latest capabilities of today's maritime service's first hand. Following 28 years of service, the Navy's last guided missile frigate, USS Kaufman, is scheduled to be decommissioned later this year. In the final months of her life, Kaufman will be patrolling South America and the Caribbean in support of Operation Martillo. The Navy's newest Joint High Speed Vessel, USNS, Brunswick, was recently launched from the hostile USA shipyard in Mobile, Alabama. Brunswick is designed for the fast intra-theater transportation of troops, military vehicles and equipment. And finally, congratulations to those sailors who advanced this cycle. Check out the complete list now available on ah.mil. To get information on these stories and more, visit navy.mil.