WIKIMOVE/Podcast/Transcript Episode 20

Nikki: Welcome to episode 20 of WIKIMOVE. I'm Nikki Zeuner and with me is Eva Martin.

Eva: Hi everyone. We are recording this episode on May 17th, 2024.

Nikki: Eva and I are part of Wikimedia Deutschland's governance and movement relations team. And in this podcast, we imagine the future of the Wikimedia movement. Eva, what are we talking about today?

Eva: Last month, a text called The Global Majority Wikimedia Technology Priorities was published on Meta. This is an initiative taken by a global majority of tech stakeholders involving a growing number of Wikimedia organizations and individuals. Today we invited two of the individuals who were part of this research because we think that this statement may serve as an important update and an upgrade of what Movement Strategy had to say about technology decision-making.

Nikki: And this poignant manifesto includes also newer topics such as AI, and it is importantly written from the perspective of Wikimedians of the global majority. So I'm just going to quote from the intro, because that should guys interested. “In many countries, authoritarian governments have effectively integrated major tech companies into state propaganda, which makes it especially difficult, if not impossible, to voice and advocate for liberties and digital rights. Platforms like Wikimedia often serve as the sole avenue for human rights. Nevertheless, we are concerned by the restrictive nature of our technology, which hinders the participation of global majority communities.” And it also says, “our current methods of prioritizing technology often do not align with our strategic direction.” So without further ado, I'm going to introduce our guests and we're going to talk more about this stuff. First guest is Tanveer Hasan, he works for the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. And prior to that, he has worked in the movement strategy implementation grants team of the Wikimedia Foundation. And before that, he was part of the team that managed the development of movement strategy. Tanveer, hi, where are you calling in from today?

Tanveer: Hey, Nikki. Hi, Eva. I'm calling in from Bangalore this evening. It's fine evening. The rains are just about to come, so the temperature is coming down. It's a very pleasant evening. Thank you.

Eva: Thanks for joining us today, Tanveer. And with us today is Éder Porto who is a member and a products and technology manager at the Brazilian affiliate Wiki Movimento Brasil. He oversees their tech team and has worked on this research that we will be talking about in a minute. But first, hi, Éder, do you want to say when you're calling in from today?

Éder: Hello, I'm calling from the University of São Paulo. It is also a lovely morning here and yeah.

Eva: Thanks for joining us. All right, so let's start with a little introduction here. Tanveer, could you maybe tell us a bit more about the Center for Internet and Society in India that you're working for? Because we know that you have many different programs. Maybe you can say some things about why you're interested in improving the technical infrastructure for the movement.

Tanveer: Thanks, Eva. Center for Internet and Society is a not -for -profit organization which works as a movement partner with Wikimedia Foundation. We also work on broad areas of internet governance, privacy, telecom, access. A lot of these things are not funded directly by the Wikimedia Foundation, but have sister concerns. We are allies to the larger open knowledge movement across all of the verticals of work that we do. What is consistent is to ensure that the global majority does get an opportunity to both participate and benefit from the Wikimedia movement. And it is in this direction that we think technology plays a very important role. And that's where our interest is.

Nikki: Thank you. So, Éder, you are working with Wikimovimento Brasil, which has also developed its own new strategy recently. But what was your personal motivation to get involved in this research and in this manifesto around tech?

Éder: Yes. So I have been involved with the Wikimedia movement since 2016 as a student in the university. And pretty much from day one, I established that my personal mission was to make the experience of contributing and editing the Wikimedia projects more enjoyable and easier for both newcomers and veteran Wikimedians within my community. This work that we did relates to both that personal mission and the Wikimovimento Brasil's strategy for 2023 to 2025 that includes specifically a goal of supporting a reimagination of the technical infrastructure of the Wikimedia movement by acting from a global south perspective in discussions about access, user experience, and innovation across platforms.

Eva: So now knowing a bit more about your two backgrounds, we understand better how you came to be involved in this research. But before we start talking about the outcome of the research you did, I would love to hear from you Tanveer about the genesis of the project. How does this partnership come to life?

Tanveer: Like all good things in life, this came from a point of frustration. There was a point where a lot of us were in the working group called Product and Technology, which was part of the movement strategy process. And we kept on discussing about how product and technology needs to be democratized, how it needs to come up with a new vision, how it needs to be radically different from the work that we're doing. The one question that kept coming back again and again is that how does product and technology help in bringing new audience? The one question that was not asked in a specific manner was the question of how does product and technology serve to a wider audience? And this was something that João was part of this product and technology working group. And I think he and I had similar ideas or similar frustrations in this case. So I think that was really the genesis of this idea.

Nikki: Great. So Éder, we've been saying the term global majority a couple of times now. And I think it's potentially a better way to talk about people than saying global south and global north. But can you maybe for our listeners explain that term a little bit or define it for us?

Éder: Yes. So we needed a term that could represent who we are, what we represent. And the first choice was the concept of Global South that is very commonly used in the colonial movements in Latin America and resonates community-driven experiences in our region. This is why the research phase of our work was called Global South Technology Survey. Yet our exchange with Wikimedia organizations in other regions, especially in Asia, led us to choose global majority as a broader term that conveys also the fact that 85 % of the global population is within or came from those communities.

Eva: Let's talk a little bit about the content of this document. Can you please tell us a bit about what were the main insights of this research? And I know that the document that has been published, that sometimes you phrase as a manifesto, has an introduction that really is like this statement about the general framework of the research. And then you have a series of recommendations. So maybe without going through all of those points, I would really love to hear from you Tanveer, what are some of the major themes in the priorities you identified?

Tanveer: I think they get broadly classified insights, themes, impact areas into two areas. The first one is to have a more holistic approach towards the development of technology. Technology cannot be only contained or aimed at developing the media movement. The way the pace of technology is so fast and it's so agile that whether we like it or not, in many different ways, now emerging technology generated AI is going to have an impact on us. So we want to keep that question front and center. And that has been a theme or an insight that is very evident in the research that it's not just the technology that we use now. It's also the technology that is being developed that is crucial and that we should be a participant that as a movement, we should be a participant to that. That was the first. The second one was the question of equity in technology. This does not only conform to numbers. It's not about how many people, how many scholarships, how many events, but also an approach of understanding what are the problems, what are the concerns, what are the issues, what are the new ideas that come from a global majority, and how does it either get represented or how does it get identified when you bring it into a platform where decisions are taken, when you bring it to a platform where new plans and strategies are being made. These are the two major insights that came in about the new and emerging technologies that are not hosted in our movement, but that are definitely going to have impact on our system. And the other one is how does equity play a role in technology? Éder has a lot more insights than I do on this, so I will pass on the baton to Iter on this one.

Eva: So do you maybe want to say something about it? Maybe it could be also a kind of a summary of like what's written in the introduction of the manifesto for people who didn't read it or haven't read it yet.

Éder: The main part that we diagnosed from this research phase, it was that the current infrastructure is killed against the global majority communities. We have a belief that is backed by evidence that technology benefits best those who are embedded in the process of making it and developing it. So when we are not participating in decision-making, and actual development, we are not being represented. So this is something that is really close to the equity part of development to represent and prioritize in our sense, in a sense, the development of the global majority priorities.

Eva: So we mentioned already equity, decision-making, how do we change our movement to make it more equitable? So we are already moving towards the second part of this conversation that looks at how do these tech priorities fit into the larger framework of our movement strategy. So, Éder, you mentioned many things already, but please for our listeners who may not really know much about technology yet, can you try to give us concrete examples of how we could improve our technical infrastructure to meet the needs of the global majority?

Éder: First, I want to congratulate the people and all the teams that are involved in creating and maintaining the platforms and tools that we use in our movement. It's a 21st century wonder that Wikipedia and the other projects work. We are just trying to set a change on how things are done and trying to prioritize the needs of the global majority communities. And secondly, given concrete examples, I would take one or two priorities from the list that are more concrete in a sense, that are the mobile infrastructure for editing the Wikimedia projects. This is something that we see in the global south communities that the majority of people from those communities access the internet via mobile phone. When they try to edit, they don't have a user-friendly platform or infrastructure to do so. This is one of the priorities to improve the visual editor in mobile. Another one that is a big problem in the global south is IP blockage. So the IP blockage in the global south is especially hard because we don't have a very large tech community to deal with these problems. And this goes back to the beginning of IP blocking in the Wikimedia movement. So the priority that we put is to take immediate action to circumvent the IP blockage. This is one example. And this doesn't mean that we are trying to go around IP blocking policies but it's a creation of, an implementation of tools and protocols that make the process of unblocking non-vandalism editors, but unblocking these editors that are not vandalizing the projects faster, so they can contribute their knowledge to the sum of our knowledge.

Eva: We've had many people here on this mic talking about the IP block. Do you remember, Nikki, we've had contributors from Africa, you know, sharing their frustration, you know, after organizing events and then seeing that most of the people just like get blocked and can't even contribute. And then we've had another perspective shared by admins that were exactly bringing in your point, Éder, of like, the need to have tools to fight vandalism. So I really like your approach to try to find a balance between those two things. A question I have Éder or Tanveer, whoever would like to take it, is that I know in one of your priorities, you talk about AI, artificial intelligence. And that's blind spot of our movement strategy, because obviously back then when it was being developed, AI just wasn't the thing it is today. And there are many conversations happening around the role of AI and how we should react to it. So I would love to hear from you. What does your research say about it?

Éder: All right. So the first two priorities, and it's important to note that they are not ordered lists, they are just 10 points. The first two that we put on the priorities relates to AI and relates specifically to the participation and representation of global majority communities in discussions about AI. We, the movement, need to have a discussion with the big players and big techs that are behind this and advocate for ethical standards that respect indigenous knowledge, for example, or even that have transparency in source of information. There are a lot of government actions with big techs. This is in the introduction of the document that make the Wikimedia platforms and Wikimedia movement, sometimes the only reliable source of information. So we need to fight with regards to AI, the colonial bias. If all the sources are coming from a privileged position, all the information that you are trying to relay with new AI-generated content or new AI content in general, it's coming from one place. So we need to fight the bias that we already see in AI, and we need to establish protocols to protect marginalized communities, and especially indigenous knowledge that have a special relation to the Wikimedia projects.

Nikki: Thanks, Éder. So I'm going to steer us back to movement strategy a bit, since Tanveer, you're a veteran of that process, also coming back to you. So, just a reminder for people, you know, we have a strategic direction and it rests on two pillars and one of them is called knowledge as a service. So this idea that we're building the technical and social infrastructure of the movement so that everybody can partake in knowledge and help create it. So can you make the bridge for us Tanveer? How do these improvements that you suggest in the manifesto relate to that knowledge as a service concept?

Tanveer: Let me try, Nikki, the priorities that we are trying to indicate here and ask for collective action is not only at the level of technology, it is at the level of the social knowledge of technology. It makes no sense for us to be investing in projects that already have considerable amount of traction, whether it is about the investment in our future communities, whether it is about the investment in the future of the movement itself, it requires for us to think of actions, to think of investment that will bring us a new audience, that will bring us new modes of engagement. And this can only happen if we have a collective vision of where is it that our technology is not performing its best, not in terms of product alone, but also in terms of social understanding, in terms of generating community consensus, in terms of generating new kinds of knowledge that will enable the Wikimedia movement to serve its original vision. That is the bridge that we are trying to build here. The last thing that I want to say is that knowledge as a service is not easy for us to imagine because knowledge itself is abstract and service could be many, many things. We want to give a very concrete imagination of this saying that the knowledge that is untapped and the service that is not done. The untapped knowledge is all of the communities that have not yet found a voice in the system. The service that has not been done is to shift the attention from projects that have already received considerable technical imagination representation to projects, to ideas that are still in its nascent stage and can be the next game changer for our business.

Eva: So for the people that are used to listen to WIKIMOVE, you may know that Nikki and I can't help but talk about global decision making. Somehow it always goes back to how do we as a movement make decisions collectively and collectively decide how to build this movement. And looking at your research, it's not just about the priorities, but it's about how do we actually make those decisions together. It's about technology decision making. I would like to talk a little bit more about it. I know that in your research, you mentioned the Technology Council. So, Éder, do you maybe want to tell us a little bit more about, yeah, how the idea of the manifesto ties into the idea of a technology council.

Éder: Yes, the movement strategy recommendation number five, coordinate across stakeholders, or hence the creation of a technology council to improve how our tech community works together and how priorities are decided. And we have addressed this point directly in our document by indicating fair principles, for the creation of this council and before it emerges of anybody that might be created to guide technical principles. Principles we refer to are inclusive representation, deep democracy, the colonial agenda setting practices, and transparent governance, ensuring work, equitable participation from underrepresented projects, Wikimedia projects and global majority communities. The creation of a tech council is being proposed then both by the movement charter and by the WMF in its annual plan. These are not really designed in these documents. So we are coming up with a design proposal. There is also a caveat on this. Any tech body should not have an advisory role, but a little more leverage and say, on the tech development. This is a key point to make sure we are moving forward together, not creating any relevant entity.

Nikki: Great point. The advisory discussion, advisory versus actual decision-making is obviously also happening at other levels, including the discussion around the global council. But so it's great you guys are a step ahead of everyone else's thinking around this technology council, which has sort of baffled many people terms of how to do that and enhances or adds onto the language that's in the movement charter, at least the last version we saw. So there's one thing we didn't talk about. Maybe I can intersect that a little bit, which is to me this idea of building capacity maybe of software developers. And you have in your recommendation eight here, it says “invest in core development within the global majority by prioritizing capacity building, fostering the growth and sustainability of its technical community and cultivating a culture of innovation”. And there's a few other places where you talk about decentralization and project-based working groups. So what I see here, and we're imagining the future of the Wikimedia movement as much more decentralized model of people working together to improve tech. Can you build onto that vision of the future a little bit for me? Either one of you.

Éder: Yes, so as I mentioned before, we need to be represented in places of decision making, but we also need to build and sustain our tech communities. There are a lot of places and regions that have some capacity of core development and other parts of the development within the Wikimedia movement, but we need to foster those communities. And we propose doing that by capacity building, training people and fostering the recommendations says fostering the growth and sustainability of this technical community that includes events to train, to show talent, the talent that is within those communities and really fostering the relation, the social relation that we have in other parts of the movement within the technical community. And we, of course, we talked about this in other points of the manifesto as well, but also capacitating people from the global majority communities to address and develop, develop and address their needs, their community needs themselves also, not relying or waiting for the whole movement or a part of the development teams that there are out there, but to really be able to contribute to core development and address the needs of their communities.

Nikki: Sounds great. And it also, for me, ties back into the principle of subsidiarity and decision making. The people closest to be affected by the decisions that are made actually are participating, or in this case, in your case, even building the technology. So let's move into Tanveer. You want to say something? Yes, please.

Tanveer: Thank you. This is very close to my heart. If you were to take a step back from the Wikimedia Mooskman and the technology around it, and if you were to ask the technology with the capital P question, capital P framing, any global indicator that you take, any global report that is done by a body that spans across the continent, almost all of the indicators say that the technology solutions that come from the global south are far more efficient and are far more subsidiary. They embed the principle of subsidiarity in the picture. One of the core principles of developing technology in the global south is to provide solutions to the problems that they encounter. Technology there is not a tool that solves the problem of the future. It solves the problem of the present. It's a very real, it's a very agile medium to work with your problems. And now if you were to engage this to the Wikimedia movement, the Wikimedia movement has very current, very important problems. And like a very dear friend of the Wikimedia movement had once told me, longstanding problems. So if we are able to shift our outlook from looking at technology being developed in same place one, to say global majority where your everyday engagement with technology is to solve something, is to move ahead, is to find a way to break that lock-jam. That would magically transform the better word to think about this problem is inertia that we are facing now. So there is a very real urgency in the way Global South interacts with technology. And I think that urgency, that agileness will do us a lot of good at the level of the internet. So the culture when we say in the recommendation number eight, we use this term very consciously that we call it a culture of innovation. If you look at the number of patents that are filed from the global majority, if you look at the number of billionaires that have come about from the global majority in the last five, 10 years, technology has played a huge role. And I want to, as part of this conversation, I want to say that the same energy, that the same idea, that the same dream can also be extended to the Wikimedia movement when technology and the global majority kind of joined hands and worked together.

Eva: I really like what you just said Tanveer. So now let's just look into the future of the movement. How do we make it happen? You mentioned in the document that currently we have different methods on how to prioritize tech priorities in the movement, different wish lists, tech plans, hackathon and so on. What are now the next steps for you as a collective to advocate not only for the priorities that you identified, but maybe also for this new approach that Tanveer, you just mentioned.

Tanveer: The first one is to make the technology conversation as inclusive as possible and as expansive as possible. To put together those two theoretical concepts, I'm going to use the term decentralized. Decentralized not just the development part of it, decentralized the discussion part of it as well. There are very robust groups, developer groups, advocacy groups, you know, coders, if you look into the conversations of how many people apply to the Google summer school, if you look at the number of applications that come into OutLeach, if you look at the number of internships that other technology platforms receive from the global majority, you will be surprised at the volume of the number. So the decentralization also has to happen at these two levels, that the conversation has to be expansive, it has to reach as many people across as many platforms, across as many languages as possible. And the development has to be more inclusive. So it's that method. The second one is an inherently sustainable method of capacity building. A lot of institutional, a lot of state level support is already present in the global South to develop this muscle of working with technology. Government of India, for example, has set up an entire skills portfolio. Google puts in a lot of investment in developing the GDG, the Google Developer Group, within the Indian context. Similarly, I'm sure there are many, many other examples across the global majority. How do we use this already set up environment? How do we set up already working cohorts to help us out, to contribute to our movement? Those two, according to me, are going to be the ways that we have to think in future.

Eva: Éder, do you want to add something to that?

Éder: Yes. So in regards to the Wikimedia movement part of outreaching this document and thinking about the future, we are now focusing on collecting interest for this process. Wikimedia organizations and individuals have been signing our meta page to show support to the priorities, the 10 priorities we are discussing. We have also approached the Wikimedia Foundation to explain what this process was and how we could work in collaboration around the priorities we have laid out. And this is also an opportunity for the Wikimedia Foundation as we are coming with a bottom-up process and an agenda that they can engage with at a higher level. Next phase is to discuss with whomever is interested including organizations, individuals that have been involved in this process or have signed the document on meta, specific performance indicators for each of these priorities and to list relevant documentation and resources about what is already happening about each one of them, improving our joint diagnosis about them. This is, of course, a live document and will be shaped as the collaborative process evolves in the very spirit that led to our movement recommendations.

Nikki: That sounds like a very efficient and collaborative approach rather than saying, we demand, you know, just saying, look, we're offering you this and it's a good way for you to start engaging and improve how we build technology and make decisions about it. So kudos, but still related to that, do you have any call for action that you want to share since you have this platform right now?

Éder: Yes, we are asking everyone listening to read the document and add your signature on Meta to support it.

Eva: And the link to the document can be found in the show notes, obviously.

Tanveer: I have a Meta ask to ask of all of the people who are listening to this. As part of the global majority tech priority research, I also want to say that these are questions that we should start talking about now in the next board meeting, in the next user group meeting. Even though we don't work with technology in a primary way, we don't have a lot of developers, our user group is not centered around the concepts of technology. But it would be important for us to think about this as a starting point of conversation. So we expect the conversation not only to be at the level of engagement, but also at the level of the strategy. So a strategic conversation at your board, at your user group, at your decision-making body, if it's a hub, then at the level of the hub, all of these would be really helpful.

Eva: Okay. So maybe just before we wrap up, I would love to get some visionary statement from you. So our strategy goes until 2030 and who knows how the internet is going to look like in 2030. So I would like to hear from you. How do you envision how tech will be developed in our movement in 2030. Éder, do you want to go first?

Éder: Yes. So we'll brief. I envision a more diverse and sustainable environment in which innovation is driven by the needs of the communities and the development is led by a more representative and decentralized federation of stakeholders.

Eva: This sounds really nice. Tanveer, what about you? 2013, how do you envision how tech will be developed?

Tanveer: Exactly what Éder said, but I have a slightly different imagination. I don't know if this is a vision or a fantasy, but one can say that all visions are at some point fantasy. So I would like technology in the Wikimedia movement to be developed like biryani. It's an Indian dish. Sometimes it has vegetables, but the big thing and the great thing about this is every single thing that you taste, including the spices, will hold its flavor. Nobody tries to mask the others. If there's a cinnamon, there's cinnamon for a reason, right? If there is meat, the meat is there for a reason. If there is saffron, the saffron is there for a reason. If there is cardamom, it's there for a reason. You get the flow. I'm saying that technology is a combined effort. It's not trying to overachieve, mask anything. It's not a rat race. It is about the balance, it's about harmony, and I hope that we achieve that harmony when we develop technology.

Eva: This is such a nice analogy.

Nikki: You made me hungry now. I need to go eat some rice. I'll cook it for you the next time we meet. Yeah, please. All right, we hope that many people share your hunger for the Biryani way of tech development and that you will have much success in promoting these ideas and they will improve the way we work together in the movement and the actual technology that people get to use. So wonderful. Thank you for being here. This is a wrap of the 20th episode of WIKIMOVE. Thanks to our guests, Éder and Tanveer. And thanks to our listeners for listening.

Tanveer: I would like to thank Wikimedia Deutschland for giving us this opportunity and for the idea of WIKIMOVE. Thank you so much.

Eva: WIKIMOVE is a production of Wikimedia Deutschland and its governance and relations team and is available on podcast apps and YouTube as usual. Our music was composed and produced by Rory Gregory and is available under CC by SA on Wikimedia Commons and so are all of our episodes. And since a few months, we are also publishing the transcript of the episode on our Meta page.

Nikki: You can visit our WIKIMOVE Meta page to listen to the previous episodes and you can also suggest topics and guests for our next episodes. React to the podcast, connect to other listeners, and subscribe to be notified when a new episode releases.

Eva: And if you want to reach out to us, you can always do so via the WIKIMOVE Meta page, or you can send us an email. All the relevant links are available in the shows. Bye, ciao, au revoir. Tchüssi, goodbye.