Good afternoon. What's your name here, Shay? Ahmed. You can name me? Ahmed. And you should have seen me earlier. So, okay. I know you're not paying attention. I'm sorry. Welcome to the last session of the program for today, before we move on over to the extra classes. We have about 45 minutes. I'm joined here by Kofi, Duane and Sora from the Regional Dispatch. I'll give you a little bit of a background quick, a background where we are, although there is a background for it. You can do some insights for some of the activities, collaborations with you. And then I'll let each of you present the exactly where you're going. So, this time is a little bit of a repetition from the very first time you're in the game on Monday. I hope it's right for me to repeat it. This is a regional approach to capacity building and the access to peace and confidence. What is really like the port of this approach? And it's very critical in sustaining and supporting of this, really in sustainable each of the implementations. And one critical aspect of this is that they are there in the company or in their life company over time, providing almost lifelong support to the community. And with us over time, we are seen as a very trusted partner. That's their own. It's not a project-based. It's really their long track. And that's really important. If you think of how we design and team each of us overall, it's also very important for us to have people connected to software development and system design that are in the team. Talking to the user, listening, getting your requirements, testing your ideas and helping the core team globally to provide input to the software development process. And as we have seen many examples of this week, when those problems are solved locally, they are also shared in this network. Both the terms of things that go back to the core platform but also look at these local innovations, expansions that Austin and others presented this morning. Over time, we also work with a lot of the global partners that support the HRS2 with investments to formalize a bit more of this group model. And also being able to fund it over time so that they can do strong groups providing the support in the new business. For us it's important that all of these groups share a set of core values related to things like open source, reading of ownership in companies, supporting sustainability, integration, data usage, etc. We share these rights and we can raise an impact on all the values that all these groups are signing when they sign the MOU. I'm enjoying the impact of this method. So we have right now 17 groups. First Africa, Asia and Latin America. They all need to be on the right. And of course, the University of Austin is also one of the many groups that have met quite quickly. What we've seen is that many of these groups are managed by former HD students from the HD school that we are coordinated from all stuff. And this also is just going to teach you about the local universities. I think they should mention that the work we do is running master programs to get the local universities and also adding local HD students from the university to make part of our HD program. So that's a key part of our capacity degree. So I just, there's a couple of steps in this thing. Some of the ways we work together and we share a couple of innovations and other results. This is a little bit more of a process how we work together. So one, of course, one very important part is sharing our experiences and innovation. And of course, we do have some across these groups. So we organize, you know, formally, formally, we think very nice, we've done a lot of student meetings during the pandemic, sharing local innovations so that all the groups can learn what other groups have done and then support their colleagues. One very big example where we work a lot over the last days is the vaccination certificates where we don't have a solution coming straight from the court but extensions are developed in politics and then the way that the 70 groups have a lot of 17 different approaches to this, we facilitate the sharing and you see already how it works. We also work on Slack, through history, communication channel, where you have all the court developers and the implementers in my team and all the experts. And there, you know, there is sharing experiences, asking questions and discussions. So that's a very nice challenge of communication. We also do a bit more and more formal seminars on the spectrum of families, on the different technical topics. You probably heard by now of the digital packages, the digital metadata packages. So that's one area where we do a lot of orientation, a lot of disparate, get feedback from them and then all the technical topics to the HR's implementations, top ability, so very security, end-of-mise, etc. New end-of-mise applications, etc. And then of course, another big area is having a program with the HR training program. So we work closely with the experts in developing the curriculum, value training methods overall about the components of the program. And then of course, there's a lot of facilitation around the work, actually doing these training events and that's of course collaboration between groups and also the reporting in the store. And then last week, we had what we call the HIST week and at this we're going to try to get together all of us regularly and discuss many, obviously more on strategic discussions how to continue to improve the HIST program, so if you're just discussing how we can better support companies and organizations and also sharing how we can strengthen our own organizations. So we have a very interesting week last week and under pandemic we also did a talk this week. We had a chance to meet several clients during the other. Another example of collaborative activities is the Data Incidentation Day that was launched by the HIST program at UILO working with all the experts and by the team it is with very, you know, a lot of participation across the HIST network. The idea is to learn from local research and interventions related to data use, how to improve data use and use of the HIST with the support decision. And then one of the software side is the last two points. They're by the HIST product design papers organized by the HIST product managers and then experts and co-developers work together on the standard requirements to use the stories from the team and also experts head to validate to test and validate the features throughout the development process. From that design to the other technologies and getting feedback. So that's a very important way to link software development and the applications to the experts. And then you have long big meeting every year which is more focusing on within the roadmap for the coming releases. And then the HIST groups come together they discuss with the ministries and education of the government institutions to get requirements from each country they put together a regional project list and then during the global meetings each region comes with requirements from different public areas and we try to put together a private list for the software development for the coming releases. So over a little bit to this key topic for today I'm explaining a little bit about this in your course from the region of these clubs which was a model that was introduced by global firm and a way to decentralize the coordination of the HIST-EA of the company supporting the HIST to implement these and I do is to decentralize the government coordination from the UIO and global firm doing it to the HIST groups doing it each region and they're doing there are some new groups that are doing but the idea is the same that we have three regional hubs and they kind of it's a HIST group but of course they're the regional hub secretariat and contracted by global firms so these are the three hubs that represent later on the left and this is questions from Africa contracted by global firm to coordinate and to support in that region and then these are the groups that run the Amazon in Nigeria and South Africa but also supporting some groups in that region and they work collaboratively together on that coordination and support and then Eastern Southern Africa is hosted by Uganda and these are the groups listed and then in the Asia region it's hosted by this area and they will write that money that's on the system but the initial spark was to come up with a coordinating mechanism for the three years and we created some local firms from 21 to 23 but it certainly a model to break down and Nigeria was that and this had also not a support from the lead size and business partners that are supporting and understanding contract limitations that this can be built on and they already see some examples in the Asia region also kind of using this model to support and to go from this in the same way in the local region so just a little bit about what's the role of our team at the University of Ops now in supporting this model so we worked over many years with global firm to prepare the concept we had a lot of discussions with all these groups on governance model and if you know we have the time so we spent a lot of work on that and we also have a complex thank you with the global firm which is a lot of continuous working on elevation and guidance to the three groups on improving this model and then we also made a coordinating partnership by leading the global firm here to and they kind of will take on to support complex for example with Derby we see the University of Ops but it's the same many of the same so it makes a lot of sense to try to align with the global firm with Derby and UNICEF we have our own there from the University of Ops and see all this activity we work with these groups to do that in a coordinated way so that it's complete first and supporting complete in a coordinated way and then there's also a lot of focus of course in for this group to be able to take a big contract like this strong demand from global firm and you know the universities to improve admin governance finance and that's something we focus a lot on over the last couple of years we've increased investments in staff admin finance capacity of the local districts and also working with global firms and we have a project supporting admin finance and also working very closely with admin experts and we hear a lot more about this work and then we also of course pair all in a fascinating way to create the groups sharing experiences and learning from each other one more example a complete example of how we work together is that on this global firm contract and I think this could have been with any other local investors as well there is a set of activities that global firm are funding and there is the PRP bottom these are the highest tier activities that are available through and in order to be able to provide a standard support in a standardized way across the region and also make sure that you know it's high quality work we work together with the sprints to provide a standardized support for each of these activities and that includes things like what are expected outcomes and results of this activity best practice approaches to achieving it also some estimations about how many days you need to support this you may need prerequisites a complete proposal and in the previous session you saw the maturity model with some of the dependencies between the different activities and then also working with COMPLIST to see how can this tier which is coming in in a number of days help COMPLIST to that latest standard don't provide them with any support happiness to COMPLIST and then go for and this we did in collaboration with the experts and there were some examples about them this is the long impact this so that was the quick intro from my side and then we are here from the groups so we are going to do the groups and then we will take questions at the end thank you good afternoon everyone my name is Joanne and I am from Euranga but I am responsible for the Southern and Eastern African region within the ecosystem and all has spoken a little bit about how the house was set up and that we have three homes representing the different regions so maybe I could just explain as to why we have the house in these countries and the role of the robo fund so the robo fund pretty much led the conceptualization so they have it is not a legal entity but it is an and a management layer within the system and as we mentioned before it is really around coordinating funding in critical areas and being able to continue to support as many countries as possible now between the house and each and every single group we have an envelope that is signed that states the sum of what and who is responsible for what and I will go back to the question that I think is obvious why you got them to go and be there before the the house was set up and any decision was done to look at the infrastructure between these two homes to be able to understand that do we have program management and financial structures in place to be able to handle this work that goes across different countries and the capacity to do that was done by Pricewaterhouse and we looked at several areas that download and evaluation financial capabilities things like HR policy and things like that and from that assessment certain recommendations were made in the past year me and my colleagues have been really working hard to look up that say that we financial management is in place which is missing these work these these and this is what you've done for the past year you really raise our capacity to be able to offer tier and support the other countries that we are working in and as you mentioned these are just some things we are starting to strengthen the capacity and we are going to escalate the opportunity to do that I would like to invite Zoran Henry to take us to the next stage and Zoran so I think with the development of HR as you will find a lot of potential is given on setting up a management structure we really need to find the tools so that we have good participation from the list of members and each of these structures have your kind of development just again which we operate so this is how it operates this is a common structure in all the three hubs we have a steady company which has a pointed person and one team that work from each of these groups they have a team of us basically a steady company is an overarching group who looks at the strategic direction on vision and kind of coordinate the different opportunities in the region that we are working and then with working with the project management in the progress of the project with respect to the work on the data set project challenges the projects and where the investments are required to be taken in case of certain issues this course we need every quarter and taking a set of people coming to ask for them and what should we do and if there is a planning issue we will teach the main character in the groups for the specific three items then a more operational structure as a project management team which can be one and one depending upon the team which the base group is doing in the region they want the operations side of things they do the actual planning and we ask them based on the team they do have their specific voices which have been approved by the leader of the group they are supposed to make money based on what is planned depending upon the requirements of the technical system they were suggestions and recommendations to have HUB-centric data statements so each of the HUB's had data statements and HUB's focus points so we are basically looking at the where we lose the contracts that is how we need to assign the base groups to find some action then we will ensure that this group gets great quality data so this is probably how this structure has been set up and there is enough coordination between these people to work on the project to ensure that we are doing better than it was before so are you guys hoping to be proud of this? so this is how the HUB is the process how we initiate the TA technical assistance so the beginning of the process we didn't have that maturity model assessment but now it is the requirement for any country to get that TA so the first thing to do is to get that maturity assessment done once the assessment is done there are a set of priority actions to be done so it moves to those requests of TA that will be tied up to the priority gaps that has been identified from the maturity assessment and the global reform is saying that for the whole world the global reform we need to have 80 yes 85% that are coming directly from the maturity model assessment and 18% will be 15% will be on demand request of TA's so once we have those requests up then we undergo an approved process we have a back and forth process until the TA is approved we have to develop a scope of work that states clearly what activities are going to be implemented and what are the deliverance that are weighted from the TA and then we undergo the implementation of the country with the country players like the HMIS team the program team and so on then once the it is implemented we undergo a quality assurance process it is required for us in quality assurance the deliverance that we have in Q and TA so we have two tools to assess the quality of our TA's we have the plan satisfaction survey that is being let's have to be completed by the country also by the country team the global country team and then we have the first quality review both of them are looking at deliverance ensure that they comply with the quality requirement that has been defined with UI and with global song so once we have quality assurance those deliverance then we can close the TA and invoice the global song global song so I will continue with the work we do as her in the WCA the West and Central Africa her the lead is the host I can say the host is WCA which is located in Togo but it covers a bunch of countries in West and Central Africa so the members of this group are Nigeria, Mozambique and Sargentus and Rwanda and the chair is Alucan Alucan is the lead for this Nigeria unfortunately he is not able to get there because of administrative considerations so together we cover 24 countries if you are in the list of those countries then you know that we are the Togo to help you in achieving your HMIs and THIs objective to catch up the funding and the TA so I will figure out if you are in the list then what you have been able to achieve until now is to perform maturity assessment in two countries Togo completed so far TTS and there are eight more going and we have concentrated maturity model two in French it is to be reviewed and to be approved so that we can use it so till now that's the route you have completed it's not that much and we are eager to do more and that can be done only if you request it thank you I joined again I joined from Greece, Southern and South Africa and as I mentioned before this program takes the peak in the region and the chair of our steering committee is Dr. Winfrey Zeon from East Transnair the members are East Ethiopia, East Kenya East Malawi, East Mozambique East France, East Transnair and East Uganda we cover countries and territories 29 of them and three languages now if you look at this program you can definitely see a broad spectrum of different cultures and different languages and this presents definitely a challenge in terms of implementing certainty but as we have every confidence in the skillset and in the ability of the elite to be able to act to the needs of the countries and I will show that from the kind of work that we've done from the maturity assessment so we did our pilot team and also in Uganda and from that pilot we have put in approval to do assessments in the country in Somalia Southern Sudan Zimbabwe and Malawi now you can see that some of these of us we are French speaking some of these are Portuguese speaking and again from the profile of the teams here we have every confidence that we are able to do that we have done two level one academies East Transnair and Uganda and in these academies the teams from Uganda from Kenya to support the training we are able to give approval for the experience that we receive in the training they have been they have managed to take advantage of the skillset that exist in the history of Uganda by doing training of DHRSWS and in private areas I also want to call everyone from Uganda who was able to work with the team in Malawi to deliver online training and in this online training there are teams from all over Southern and East Africa and it is very interactive they get feedback as the training is going on and from that we also share this experience because we also discovered new areas that we needed to explore and build upon another one so I'll go to the kind of key areas that are in the planning stage we are going to support more Sudan and Eritrea in these areas in the DHRSWS developing DHRSWS doing a secondary move and we also developing logistics management in Sydney I mentioned the issue of Uganda which is an adaptation of everything from training to different training materials and this is very, very vital that it takes place because we have to make sure that any work that we are doing is really as long as possible and as loose the teams on the ground so this idea of translation and adaptation of materials is very important and I say to you thank you very much thank you he is Tessia we have leaders in Uganda we have members from his family he shares Pakistan he said that he does a few countries where he has put operation and I support him in his streets there is a point in time in many countries Pakistan is a new west group that is going to be his family to pair He is a support team in Uganda Vietnam is a support team Vietnam and Pacific are we can provide so we have initiated our majority sessions in 5 countries of that time. In 6 more countries in the region, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Laos, Nepal, Gopi, and South Thailand, they are still in Thailand as the countries that they are supposed to come to. We did similar because of the two half-year organized regional activities in Thailand. They were done as focusing on COVID-19 vaccination and surveillance at the same time in these institutions, later implemented in the region. And as I mentioned, we were able to use the HMAP model to meet the requirements of the integration of the HMAP. We had similar work opportunities here at the HMAP. We're carrying out HMAP sessions, specifically focusing on the HMAP program, political participation, so that we are collaborating again with the HMAP community. This was the last day of the vaccination. Thank you. We have a limited time for questions. If not, we can start the launch further. Can I jump in with a question? Okay. Sorry, this is Michelle Monroe from the Global Fine. First, just to say thanks to all of his pubs because they've done an amazing amount of work this last year to set up this new level of network and really starting to see a lot of options from that. And then just to highlight, say, I think you just as mentioned in the presentations like Global Fund is a champion of this, you know, adding this level to the network. But definitely don't want people to think that the hubs are specific to Global Fund. They're, you know, that's part of the network. We're just the first group, I guess I should say, supporting our portions of our TA that we would otherwise fund them and us putting that through the HIST pubs. And lastly to say, I think, you know, for us, what Global Fund has found and one of the reasons why we have supported this so strongly is that we're really for the TA that we would normally fund centrally, not just for GHS2 or analytical capacity and other central TA. We're really trying to focus ways to do that at a more regional and localized level. So they can have this better coordination across and with it in the countries and across donors and others. We still of course have TA and such that's going through the grants as well. And that is directly funded with different HIST groups. We, yeah, just wanted to explain that background there. I'm definitely happy if people have any questions about that from the kind of donor lens to follow up with folks. Thanks. Any questions? We have two hands. Another one. We have Chris here and then the lady up there. Let's start with Chris. How this would be related? I think there are two things that I saw that you know through this part. You meant it's perhaps not through this, right? Yeah. Alright. So as I mentioned before, one of the problems that we have is that challenges of downages. So a lot of countries in West Africa, there are some countries in East Africa that are facing the same thing with Portuguese. So, but physically speaking, they are living in West Africa. So what we have done is that for example, this is for the big ones, the police are living in South Angola. South of Negros is all on the other side of the country. And I already get there. They are the biggest country and the most established physical group. So what we do is we work really closely with the police in West Africa to make sure that the only thing that we are doing is coordinating. So that there is no problem. And the biggest example, last quarter, in West Africa, they did an academy. And so this was a big post-coordinated translate in the economy. And then this quarter is going to be done in East Africa. And some of the Portuguese-speaking countries are going to obviously attend. So we work very closely. We work very closely together to make sure that we don't leave anyone outside. Thank you. There was one more here. I cleared it. Good afternoon. Hi. I heard from the great show, the two people you talked to today about this. Do you have any experience working with the literature faculty of participation and all this is on internet in W. Patricia's. We have this, like, Asia. We have Asia in the inner world. So how do you work for any of these packages? And if you'd like more of treatment for those packages, how do you work with them? No, sorry. Yeah. We have a collaboration with a number of meetings in Seattle and Europe. We work with countries in the internet. We have a special called BBI. They already have, either with any kind of scratch in the package or you have a package that has to be the last package. So the package work depends on the use cases. Like for Myanmar, we work with the BBI directly to do the BBI activity when the package is there. So, but there are a lot of things, especially in Seattle where we are redirected. We have to talk to the faculty of course. So everything has to do with the package work. So it has been spent on the program, which is a company focusing on. And the package is where we do the most specific for that. So when there is an opportunity to collaborate with the faculty of the institute, which are in Seattle, so in command, it is specific. Just a follow-up question. For example, when you have signed a contract for this, and you have a large agency, and who should I work with? Yeah. I think if you follow this case, then each case has the history. So it can be for a time limit. And depending upon the time limit, where the interaction has to be at best, can be an incident where it is to focus on the time limit, the interest in the patient's time limit. So, I think if you are going to be able to make a connection, you will be able to make that connection so that you can touch the light. We just have a quick here. Michelle is on the phone soon. And for this particular global program, of course, it's HRA TV, but I am a talker. And Global Fund has a similar arrangement with WHO. So we are working also globally together with the WHO programs, to develop these packages. Some of these are just in here called case based and aggregate through the three programs. And we are working with the distributors in coordinating the implementation of those packages. You know, regarding their own packages, the implementation is very nice. And, yeah, I will see the examples of all the programs. Coffee, that's something. And as you see there, for example, looking at faster than we have there, to support TV track development was based on the packages, the WHO recommended packages, that has been developed together with UIU. So the same thing with the immunization packages that we implemented with the support of the other countries, and also with the surveillance packages, and we get ideas on cases, so I mean, using those packages, when you are with us together and we have the benefit of the countries, and some countries have been doing it together with the WHO, the office, the country office, or UNICEF, and in Western Central Africa, we have been able to push national data into the individual database, regarding surveillance and realisation as well. So there are practical and global collaboration with the individual and using those packages. I don't know if you can add something. It's a good point. Yeah, please. That's what it says. Yeah. That's what it says. Well, those are the points and the constraints. The presentation has been kind of in this contract with the global forum. I think in practice, it's really in the global forum to account. But actually, even before this hub system was for analysis, we realised that the main hub network was really quite nice. So for example, the acquisition support that we've been talking about since 18, 20, 19, there was a sort of form that is a ritual apple, in the fact that it was too easy for the community to coordinate with the authorities, because you need to actually coordinate with their authorities, because it's not necessarily much, it's no way that they can coordinate with their supermen on the 90s in Africa. So it was, in practice, more efficient, the same for everyone, and then this is important, after a few months, for one example, this is the hub. So this was the administration, and this was able to do all the relationships to the system, to the database, to the program. And the same point I wanted to do as I had made in the previous slide. In the country, the support was really huge, or a huge amount of relationships in the people region. And I think it's also, you know, which is what I'm thinking of as well. So I'm always going, I'm always talking to you, I'm always going, I just want to stress that a lot is clear. And they are ready to go, and I just want to stress that the support and the process which you end up analyzing are the successful facilities. And my last point was, I think it's, in each country, as you know, it's on the website and in certain national contexts and all of that, I think it's free to have some help with a very network that can defend the facilities of every region. And I think this is important in terms of the language bias in terms of challenges and aspects to some vision. So I think the various industries that are kind of involved with the violence that are which are just the problems that we need to solve. Thanks very much. I think we can just comment because I think that that was your way of seeing what I found in this slide. So, and we are working, and the network is expanding and some of you probably might have seen it, we have Pablo Ramon, Syrian-based in Turkey and you know, are speaking with last expert and we are exploring ways to strengthen I think in my mind where we are, I have been speaking at least and I think having a hope and the experience of some of these groups like I did not sit on practice in helping new groups to be established, I think it is very powerful and it is in our past that we have been working with people in Pakistan as well. We are working also in Latin America there is a small group and we are also working with other people in the region with experience in the region to see what are making better established in the world. And we just are very different and in some of the networks in East Africa may not work but we just have to do it in a different place. We just have to take on an emerging and a new region is also in Europe, Central Asia, the Russian speaking and the country culture and also being able to find a good partners there and in the Middle East it is important to support these in one of the ways. We have in a few minutes before we open the lounge outside, I think we have a few more questions or we can talk. So if there are more questions I can just maybe explain quickly the expert lounge so in the step up you see that it is a mix of sessions that are assigned in the book for you and so on and so on. The main groups that are having the book for you are assigned with the Latin American area which is good for science for example and good configuration especially enhancements we just do implementation support those will be down the table stations out there we can approach the expert and how long it will take and then there will be two sessions that are more group sessions that will be auditorium 1 and 4 so here in this auditorium there is a session called discussion on problems and problems that come this way that's what he has right now we like to know and then he will refer it to the expert lounge discussion of the best professional efforts. So we got there and the four experts and we are the lounge thank you so much.


So, today we have the pleasure of having Brianna Law to talk to us about distributed wikis. Brianna was a Wikipedia editor for about four years and she claims to still be recovering from this. But now she's writing Python. She has a particular interest in free culture and free content generally. And today she'll be exploring with us some ideas around the motivation and potential for what a distributed wiki might mean and might look like. So please join me in welcoming Brianna. Thank you. Good afternoon Freedom Lovers. Thank you very much for coming to my talk, it's good to see you all. So I should dispel a few minutes in case you've come along and you're like, yes, wiki's on peer-to-peer or wiki's on git, I'm all over it. Because that's not really what I'm talking about. So you will be disappointed. So you can leave or just flame me on Twitter, I guess. So my history is as a Wikipedia editor and it was kind of three Wikipedia that I found free software and open source. So I'm quite into that whole culture. And yes, there's not really any code in this talk, so in that respect you might be disappointed. But I think it's helpful to think about things before we build them and imagine what they'll look like and what purpose they will serve. So I hope that this goes some way towards that name. So when we think about distributed wikis, well, first of all, who considers themselves fairly familiar with one or more wiki engines? That's good. And who considers themselves fairly familiar with version control? Distributed version control? Yep, cool. All right, so when we talk about, well, when I say distributed wikis, it seems to me that there are a few different components or different parts that you could consider that might be worth distributing. And so I've listed a few of these here. And maybe the thing that you would normally think about when you talk about distributed wikis would be distributing the repository or the storage. So if we think about wiki as being very closely aligned with a version control system, it'd be just the same except we'd use distributed version control. Well, that doesn't sound very interesting to me. So I think the other more interesting parts are different components. And so we're going to talk about a few of these throughout my talk. And if you have questions, please ask questions throughout. And I'll try and see if you raise your hand. So one here I've got is this marketplace of ideas model with a distributed access point. So these parts are kind of related to each other. So if you had a distributed repository or storage, you might also have a distributed access point. And this is something that Anil Dash talked about recently in a blog post called Forking is a Feature, talking about how awesome forking is and how wikipedia should basically embrace distributed version control. And in some respect, I'll talk about wikis in general. But in other respects, I'll talk about things that are relevant to wikipedia because it is the largest wiki that we have. We just had the 10th birthday and people have been talking about how it's now part of the infrastructure, it's part of the information infrastructure of the web. So it's something that's very important to a lot of us. And so it's the motivation for a lot of these ideas. So the marketplace of ideas where we might have distributed access points to a wiki is basically just we throw away the wikipedia rule that says there is one article per topic. And this rule is extremely important in making wikipedia work at the moment because it forces people to collaborate. You're not allowed to have John's version and Mary's version and Fred's version of an article. They all have to be a single version. And that's what everybody goes to and that's what everybody expects. And in my opinion, that rule is what makes wikis work most of the time. And it seems to me that the opposite of it, if you say well, anyone can have their own version and somehow the best one will rise to the top or people will evaluate them and it'll be ranked higher or something like that, it works for some projects. Seems like that's what Noel did, but it didn't really work for Noel. But things like Urban Dictionary or Stack Overflow where people vote on different responses and the higher ranked ones come to the top. It certainly does work for some domains and some types of information. But I don't think it would work particularly well when it comes to encyclopedia articles.  And there's a few of these problems. And this canonical, reliable version, I see that as being a feature for the user rather than the contributor. So the contributor and the user have sometimes competing needs. So Anil Dash talked about this. So he says it could be based on git style technologies and they could be just not one article per language but an infinite number of them. Each of which could be easily mixed and merged into your own preferred version. And my response to that is kind of like well, how do you know what your preferred version is? How is the average user coming along going to evaluate dozens or hundreds of branches and somehow know how to mix them in? So I think there's a few problems with this idea. And it's hard, I think, knowing about wikis and then learning about version control, they're obviously very closely tied concepts. And if you grok version control, then you will grok a wiki. And so it's like version control but we have this single user interface or point where people contribute stuff. And that's different to version control where people can use the command line or they have clients, they've got a Clips plugin or whatever they've got. And also we're working on pros. So pros and code have their own, I mean generally we're working on pros. Like it's interesting that nobody writes code in a wiki, although they could. But obviously there's a reason why people don't do that. And I'm also very interested in the idea of the copy left license. So things like the GPL, creative commons, attribution, share alike license. Because it's this license that creates the right to fork. And I think that's a really important thing for contributors to any kind of project actually. Because that's what keeps the bastards honest, keeps the people in charge, has to keep them on their toes.  Now when we come to version control, there's something that software has that wikis don't tend to have. Which is this idea of releases. So although we have a trunk when you're writing code and everyone's committing, you also have a release. Which is where people in charge have decided, okay, this is an official starting point or access point for users, for members of the public. For people who are not contributing code but just want to use what we've created, this is what they should use. And so that gets publicized. That's what gets put up on fresh meat or whatever. And that's where people start. And wikis don't tend to have that. Wikis implicit is the idea that the latest version is always the release version because that's what you get. So it's always a moving target. And that's the same whether you consider the comparison with a single article or with the entire project, multiple articles. And so Wikipedia turned ten just a couple of weeks ago on January the 15th. And so there's quite a lot of celebration in the press. And it's a great thing, it's an amazing achievement. And it makes the web a different place. It makes our world a different place. But can it survive to 20? That's an interesting question. I don't see that the answer is necessarily yes. In a sense, it's too big to fail because we all rely on it and we need it and we assume that it will be there. But I think the same was true about Usenet at one point in history and yet where is it today. So the idea that it's too big to fail is not correct. We can't just assume that everything's hunky-dory and it will continue and it won't face any problems that will cause it to self-destruct. And another related problem, perhaps, is that it's essentially too big to fork. Which is that all the laws and the culture is in place for you to fork it. But practically, when it comes to the hardware or the bandwidth, the only people who could fork it would be like Yahoo or Google. And even then they have another problem which is that they wouldn't be able to have the kind of insta community that you would need to fight off vandalism. So maybe it is too big to fork and maybe that's a problem. So this is, I think, in my mind, this is a very concise way of describing what a wiki is and what its relationship to version control is. But one thing that wikis don't really have is an idea of branches or anything that really resembles it. So every commit is just straight back on to what would be your trunk if it was a single article. So straight off the bat, how could we have branches in a wiki? Would that work? Could that be possible? You can kind of do a kind of manual branching if you say in Wikipedia, keep a copy of an article in your user space and you're working to write up some particular section of it. And you just manually fold in other people's changes that are going on in the main article. But that's not branching, that's manual branching. So what would it be like if we had real branching? So there's a few differences again that come when you're using version control for a prose project versus code. So I don't think it's, they're not exactly, you can go from version control to wiki, apply all the features across. There are a few differences that we need to keep in mind. And so if we have branching then we're going to need really good merging tools. And merging prose is something that I don't know has had a lot of thought about how that works because the intent, when you write code, the intention should be fairly clear. Maybe it's to solve a specific bug and you can just put that bug number or it's to create a specific feature or fix a spelling mistake or something like that. But when you're contributing prose, it can be a lot less clear what your purpose is. If you're just rearranging two sentences or if you're adding like a new section then maybe that's quite straightforward. But a lot of the time the meaning and the overall effect of the article is a lot more intertwined with prose compared to code. So the thing that makes me think that Wikipedia might not survive another 10 years is mainly to do with the feeling around the community. It's so large now that it's quite impersonal. There's a lot of bureaucracy that just continues to expand. It's hard for newcomers to find a foothold and feel like what they contribute might actually be noticed or paid attention to. And without a robust community, Wikipedia will self-destruct in the blink of an eye in my estimation is what Clay Scherke points out about vandalism. So you have a low barrier to entry, high visibility which creates kind of motive to perform vandalism and you have heaps of pages. So you need heaps of people to be monitoring vandalism. And code doesn't suffer this in the same way because the initial barrier to entry is a lot higher. And it's not like if you commit some vandalism in a code project, it's not going to immediately appear in everyone's release. You have that release cycle which slows that down. And you generally have a lot fewer pages. Even if you have a couple of hundred pages of code, that would be small wikis for a prose wiki. Wikipedia is in the situation now that it is a kind of monopoly. And that was never really the intention but that's something that has happened as it's kind of picked up momentum. So there are good things and bad things about it. Obviously for users, it's a good thing if you know it's just Wikipedia that you will have it, that's great. And the fact that so many people link to this single project is really good for the page rank so that brings up the results and so that gets more contributors. And that makes the articles better and that makes the page rank go up. So it creates a virtuous circle in that sense. There's some potential for serendipity in editor activities in that there are many different types of activities going on in Wikipedia. People edit in topic areas but then they also do copy editing or they fix links or they welcome newcomers or they discuss articles for deletion or they add images or there's a million different tasks they can do. And once you get the kind of wiki addiction, maybe you started out being obsessed with Linux. But then you have the wiki addiction and you just go and do something that's completely unrelated that you never would have bothered to do before. So that is definitely a plus and that's a significant benefit for Wikipedia. But on the negative side, as I mentioned, it's so large that it is basically impossible to fork. I don't see how anyone could do it. As I said, Google or Yahoo might have the hardware and the bandwidth but they don't have the Insta community that you would need. If you're going to put thousands and thousands of pages up there open for editing and in a sense you could say well maybe you can fork an individual article but it's hard to see what the motivation would be for people to work on your single article compared to entire Wikipedia. It would take quite a while for the page rank to come up. Then we have this Instruction Creep and Spearocracy as I mentioned and so there's a lot of, if you have a narrow focus then you're just interested in your Linux articles. There's a lot of manual of style and a lot of stuff that's irrelevant to you but it's going on around you and you may or may not engage in that and you may or may not care about that. I mean Wikipedia, a media wiki which runs Wikipedia has a right API. I don't know about other wikis but it's had a right API for quite a few years now. So you could write another interface for it but no one really has that I've noticed. There's another feature that came up, it's been talked about recently which is called penning changes or flagged revs. And so the idea with this is that edits might not immediately be visible on the Wikipedia page and they'd have to be marked as approved before visitors would see them by default. So if a page and they did a trial with it on the English Wikipedia and it's still being used on maybe a couple of hundred pages so it's not hugely visible across the whole wiki compared to the German Wikipedia where they basically rolled it out across the board. So the question is who marks it as approved? There's different user levels and one of the levels is a reviewer. So if you have an account and then you get marked as a reviewer which is relatively easy to get, then you can mark other people's commits as approved. So this article, if you were looking at the article, the top bit, you would see this little icon if it was using pending changes and then you click on that and you can see three pending revisions. So you're missing some of the latest information. And then if you look at the history page it looks like this and so the pending ones which are not yet visible by default are the yellow ones. And so if you have permission, there'd be a link there and you can click it as like markers accepted, something like that. Is it the high risk pages? It was initially used, yeah. The conception is that it's a way of reducing full protection. So articles by default anyone can edit them including anonymous users. But if they're subject to a lot of vandalism and traffic, they can be marked as protected. And that means only administrators can edit them and administrators are nominated or chosen by the community. And so instead of doing that, using pending changes was a way that you could open it to editing by anyone again. But because their changes wouldn't be immediately visible, you could still control the vandalism on that page. So it's used, it's like Britney Spears, George W. Bush. These are some of the pages that I saw in this one. And so they had a community poll about should English Wikipedia continue to use flag revisions or pending changes? And there's not really much consensus, so the community said very loudly maybe is the end result of that one. But I think pending changes introduces some interesting new ideas to the process of editing. And it separates, in my mind, it separates the change I want to make.  It's almost like marking something as suitable for release in my mind. And so this goes back to the idea that I said before that Wikis don't really do releases. The release is implicitly the latest version of whatever was edited. So what if there was a way to explicitly mark something as release or approved? So this is what I think it's like now if we were using pending changes. So there is a right API and we've got the free content license. So why haven't people written interfaces to it? I think a couple of the biggest problems are the wiki markup which unfortunately is not very independent from the media wiki engine. They're very closely tied. And the templates, template syntax is like this awesome control for users. But on English Wikipedia it's like this incredibly horrible mess of nested, nested, nested, nested stuff. And there's some ifs, you can put some programming logic in it. And it's bad. So most people will ignore templates but there's information in them which you occasionally need like warnings are included in templates. A lot of the info box tables are included in templates. The nav box templates which have links to related topics. They're all in templates, citation needed, that's going to be a template. Even a lot of the date stuff is templates to force dates to appear consistently. So I think a way forward for the Wikipedia community is to embrace more strongly ideas relating to wiki projects. So wiki projects are something that has grown up on English Wikipedia and probably other language Wikipedia's which is when it became so large that the whole Wikipedia was too large to be considered one community. You could create a sub community which is people who are interested in editing articles around a topic area the same as you. So it could be dogs, could be Linux, could be Brisbane, could be Queensland, could be floods in Australia, could be any topic like that. And so they're just completely self-nominated.  That's how you get in. And that's how you start one. You just start a new page and say, okay, now there's a wiki project for this. And so because they have a narrower focus, you know, there's fewer people, you already have some common ground with the people who are also on that project. So what I would like to see is a way or what I think would be interesting is if people were able to create separate interfaces that were wiki project specific. So you might have a completely separate website that had a front end, but all the edits went straight back to Wikipedia through the right API. But you were able to enjoy, you know, having an interface that was specific to your topic area. You would spend time there with other people who were just with the same wiki project. So you'd be less concerned with what was going on in the general Wikipedia bureaucracy. But your contributions would go straight back. So you'd still have that motivation. I mean, we look at, you know, Twitter is obviously a much simpler thing, just 140 characters and you're not really, you're not editing each other's work. But their API, you know, how many people use the web interface to Twitter versus one of the clients? It's been embraced, you know, a lot more widely and I think there could be some benefit if we were to see a similar thing happen with media wiki. I mean, it's a lot more complex because you're interacting with existing code and you don't want to recreate the kind of interface that version control has. So maybe we need to unify those things a little bit. So I saw this question asked, you know, why would anyone contribute to this feeder wiki?  And I think people would do it if their content was going to Wikipedia and they had the promise of a smaller community that was more relevant to whatever they were working on. You know, if people are working on a small wiki and the idea is, well, one day maybe our stuff will get accepted by Wikipedia upstream, that's not a very good promise and I don't think too many people are going to contribute to that. But if there was a much more transparent way for the branches to be merged back, for example, then there could be a real uptake in that kind of idea. And so in a way, that idea is the kind of forking of, not forking of distribution of the interface and also the community. So like, what does it mean? Does it mean anything if we say you could have a distributed community? If you think about Linux as an operating system, there are people who work on the kernel, there are people who work on GNOME, there are people who work on individual pieces of software and they may or may not see themselves as contributing to the entire Linux machine. But there are things that are able to be pushed upstream and accepted. So could something like that work for Wikipedia? The things that are key, I think, for that to work are agreement on the intent and the aims, which is basically adopting the key policies of Wikipedia, like neutral point of view and the free content license. Obviously it's not going to work if you have conserverpedia who don't have neutral point of view trying to push their article on George W. Bush back to Wikipedia, that's not going to be accepted. But if there was another Wiki doing it that was also adhering to neutral point of view, adhering to no original research, citing sources, that kind of thing, I don't see why the Wikipedia community would reject such a thing. So this is all coming back to this idea that forking Wikipedia is kind of impossible and that's bad because then there's no check on the power that they have. So what can we do to make forking practical again? And so what I'm thinking of with these forking the UI and the community thing is forking the topic area. So topic area of Linux or dogs or mathematics. So making, you know, the whole Wikipedia is too big and one article is too small, but maybe a topic area is just the right size that is suitable for forking. But I think this is a question we should ask ourselves and I'm not, I don't ask it with malice or implication that Wikipedia is corrupt and needs to be forked and needs to be brought down because I don't think those things are true. But I think having the check on power is important. Helps keep them honest and that threat of competition is something that is good for the community. And I'm possibly really short, I don't know. That's the end of my talk. Do we have any questions? Well, I have one. How do you actually see, like say you had a community that was forking off of Wikipedia to work on, I don't know, Australia or Brisbane, for example, like what would that look like? Would it be an install of MediaWiki and then these people working on this and then eventually then kind of releases back to Wikipedia or? It should be MediaWiki, but it doesn't have to be MediaWiki because of, as I said, the right API. So if you're tying yourself to MediaWiki, you're tying yourself I think to the markup and well, the history and the logs, all those things are good, but the markup is something that is a barrier. And so it'd be quite a bit of work, but maybe there's a potential for someone to create something closer to a WYSIWYG interface that converts back to, well, has to convert back to WikiMarkup to push anything back to Wikipedia. But yeah, I see in a way a community could work on an article or a set of articles until they think that they reach some fit state and then propose that revision or that set of revisions to be pushed back to Wikipedia and the Wikipedia community. In a way, I see that the Wikipedia community could become the thing that is managing the branches rather than doing the writing themselves. Probably not everything would be in a Wiki project that someone wants to set up separately, so there would still be editing happening on Wikipedia, but there would be a lot more, I see that there could be a lot more explicit kind of branch management, basically. Very similar to the way that Linux kernel is developed with sort of lieutenants. Yeah, maybe. You mentioned people being approved to approve revisions. Do you see there being any connection between that sort of thing and the process of scientific peer review where people who have published papers in a particular area will be the people who would be able to make the articles the most approved, so you can get someone who's a real specialist in the area to say, yeah, I've checked this out, and it conforms to what we were all talking about the last time we had our conferences about this. Yeah. That sort of thing. So you're talking more about expertise. Yeah, yeah. Expertise in doing that review, because at the moment, if you've just got one, sort of one global hierarchy, I mean, someone who knows something about geology might not know something about, might not know everything about, you know, the synthesis of climate change as a topical example. So that, to me, seems like it could be, this could be something that could be useful for scientific journals to kind of like, or for universities, that sort of thing, to have a sort of a really scientific, scientifically backed version of Wikipedia. So that was more of a discussion than a question. That's okay. So the way the permissions are handed out on Wikipedia at the moment, they're done quite liberally, and it's not that you're an expert in any particular area, but that we trust you to use your best judgment. And part of that best judgment is respecting, you know, contributions from what the community says about what is appropriate. So I think the way that that would work at the moment is that people who know about a topic area should, you know, post on like a talk page and say, this is great, this should be included, or this is rubbish, this is missing, this is biased. And those opinions should be taken into consideration when doing the merging. So there's this model where the people who have permissions like reviewer or administrator are not the experts, but are more like the janitors and are just enacting the consensus of the community. Of course, it doesn't totally work like that, but that's kind of the ideal of how it should work. But I mean, if a university had its own wiki, they could set it up in a completely different way and say, all right, this reviewer permission means you are this expert for this area. And that seems to me a little bit similar to what Citizenium tried to do or is trying to do. They have that kind of, you know, you're the expert on this and this is your responsibility. Any other questions? And that sort of thing in our wiki's engines is because we're worried that it's too difficult for users or at least too much of a startup cost understanding the consequences of making a branch, merging it, figuring out what happens when 12 people around the world have made changes that are not compatible and figuring out how to bring that together. And for us, we think in pros that might be too hard to do. You're basically telling us technical people that we're wrong. Sorry, saying it. You're basically telling us coders of wiki engines that we're wrong, which sounds great. But I guess my big question is, are you sure? Okay, so your question is about branches and merging with pros. Yeah, because that's really the basic building block that you'd need to make wikipedia or any other wiki more distributable. Yeah. And like, we've made a few attempts in our wiki engine and it's...  Well, FOS wiki now, but yeah. It's always ended up being something where most of the users don't understand what's going on, so they're afraid to edit. And that's then potentially the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. Yeah. I mean, distributed version control is quite a recent technology and it's mostly used by technical people. Oh yeah. I've mentioned this about merging. Like, I don't know. I'm actually interested because I haven't heard a lot about attempts to do branching and merging with pros, so I'll be really interested if you have some research or just some anecdotes about that. You know, is it possible? Is pros, can it be atomic in the same way that code is? You know, it's not at all clear that it can be. And maybe that's just... Higher than what each individual developer often has as well. Yeah. So some companies, for example, have somebody who's in charge of merging all the changes. Yeah. Because they're the only person who understands everything. Yeah. So I don't think pros is necessarily more difficult than code. It's just that you're trying to get a non-technical user group to understand what currently is a technical area. Yeah. And confuses the heck out of most developers. Yeah, for sure. It's very confusing and getting the interface right is the hard bit. But, like, it depends a bit on the size of your wiki, but often a wiki will have, you know, it'll have a range of people with different technical abilities and some people are just happy adding text and they stick with that. But then other people will get into the technical stuff. And you could have the case where you're merging and your branch management is done by a small group of people who, as I mentioned before, they're kind of empowered by the community, but they're not really making the decisions about what's appropriate to merge. They're just doing whatever the community consensus is. So, yeah, probably you don't want every contributor having the ability to branch and merge because it'll just confuse the hell out of them. And you want to have the default thing be just like make your edit to the trunk or the latest, the most recently edited branch or something like that. But I think, like, I'm just interested to see ideas around this because there's so much potential. You know, what could be possible? When I went to Wikimania in 2005, we had a discussion that Ward suggested we think about. What do we do when you can't have all of Wikipedia in one system, which is pretty much your thesis as well, really.  For example, as a funny case, you're flying to Mars, so your pipe to the world is nice and small and you've taken with you a version of Wikipedia and you're updating it with what you know. And so you've effectively got a latency of information, which is the same as what you'd have when you merge only when people have decided the Mars stone's been reached. And that sort of thing. There was some discussion on it, but again, we just threw up our hands and went, we don't know how to approach them normally.  The whole idea of offline editing is like something that's supremely interesting to Wikipedia for countries which don't have good internet connectivity. And I don't think it's solved or even, you know. Fundamentally, I think it's fantastic that you're interested. We obviously need more people like you to tell us what is functional because we can make Distributive Wiki really easily, but only we can use it. Yeah, like this is why a lot of people are like, oh, Git and Wikipedia, it's awesome. But it's like for... Okay. To what end, you know? Yeah. So yes, I've tweeted you anyway. Okay. You'll know where to go. All right. Have one last question or... Yeah. Do you think it sort of comes down to the nature of how we do distribution of information on the web at the moment where we have big pipes, huge websites, and when things get slow, we make them bigger rather than splitting them off into small different services? And do you think it kind of reflects on the underlying technical issues about websites and how we do that sort of stuff? I don't know, but it's interesting because it seems like a lot of the benefits and the power in the web is that anyone can put up a website really easily. So that's quite distributed.  I think that's an interesting pattern. I don't know how that works. Seems to me that the larger monolithic things are bad for the open web, but they're good in some senses because they're good for users like you just go to Google or you just go to Wikipedia or you just go to Facebook and all your friends are there. So how do you balance the distributed thing which is good for freedom versus the kind of monolithic thing which is good for, I don't know, first-parset usability, I guess. Could Wikipedia been interfaced to a number of smaller sites? Yeah, in a sense, that's kind of what I was thinking about. But if you put it like that, I'm not sure the community would embrace it. But yeah, interesting ideas. All right, thank you very much, Brianna.