Wikimedia Developer Summit/2018/Keynote by Adam Cheyer

Keynote by Adam Cheyer

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T183396

DevSummit event

• Day & Time: Monday, 3:20 pm – 3:50 pm
• Room: Tamalpis Room
• Notetaker(s): Matt F, Franziska, ...

Session Notes:

• Adam Cheyer: Glad to be here. This will be higher level than prior session. I'm sure people expected me to do soething about AI, but I decided that's not what I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to put forward an idea about soething I'd like to exist. Maybe you'll build it, maybe MW is the platform.
• Adam: Who designed these things (mice, wiki, social networking, real-time communications, etc.). Actually, these were all pionereed by a single person, Doug Engelbart In 1968, Doug showed the national computer society a demonstration that will forever be known as the Mother of All Demos. This year, 2018, will be the 50th anniversary of this demonstration. This is one of the reasons I'd like to go through this history lesson again. At a time when the world was really programming computers with punch cards (you had to wait a day), Doug showed on screen an interactive/personal computing experience. He had a mouse (with a patent), left side with a chord set. Could separate hands and type with only left hand and use right for mouse (or type faster in center). Wasn't just a simple click. He had advanced links, not just top of doc. Entire system was command-based. Emacs in many ways was the closest thing I've seen to Doug's system. Literally programmable, built-in. Was one master environment, everything you did was in the same environment. Completely integrated. Later on, there was an explosion of editors. They all have different capabilities. In Doug's world, everything was edited in one integrated environment, versionable, distributed. Didn't have to learn a wiki language, would just edit a page and it would keep versioning. Also had drawing. Had the first multi-window systems. Here's kind of a puzzle for you to figure out, a multi-window system with tiled spaces. No scroll bars, would zip across spatially. The speed with which this was happening blew me away. Very cool demonstration, on the web. He could, when you were collaborating, could have multiple people editing on same document. Could look at each other in eyes while editing doc (behind text). All of these tools, this amazing collaborative environment, was to harness collective intelligence of world. Whole country levels, down to working group. His group in a 5-year time span created more innovations then any other group in computing history.
• Adam: He thought it was essential to create a Distributed Knowledge Repository. When you really look at the Internet, it's a shining example of people working together in an organized and structured way. The reason he was doing this was to use collective intelligence to solve global issues. Humankind will be faced with increasing ever-urgent global problems. [Slide listing 15] These are big problems you're not going to solve with one magic bullet. The only way we'll survive as a species is if we can solve these problems together.
• Adam: I'm going to talk about another kind of system, change.org. It's the world's largest petition platform for good. 200 million members. When you see something wrong in the world, you start a petition. Every petition has 3 things. I want:
  1. This person
  2. To make this change.
  3. For this reason
• Adam: If you get enough signatures, they may not make the change, but they at least have to respond to the petition. Started with a fictional play someone thought was real on NPR, then a petition, then Apple responded. People said, isn't that weird, you were at Siri, then change.org about Apple? Since I'm talking about pioneers, let me just shout out to Ben ? He's the CEO and Founder and has done a fantastic job.
• Adam: Wikipedia is the world's collection of knowledge. There's something missing. This is what I want to exist in the world. It feels related to MW or Wikipedia or the community. You have what, 1 billion people.
• Adam: Wikipedia is structured after an encyclopedia article. You can't act. You could imagine a sub-project, or tags on existing articles, for big problems. If we don't solve plastic, it's going to swallow us up. We eat fish, they eat trash. It's global problems, it's not political. Imagine there was a place to go to find problems to work on. What do we know about these problems? What do we not know? Where's the evidence? Can we have links to the papers? What are the pros and cons of the solutions. Maybe we need questions answered, and can get community do experiments to gather data we need.
• Adam: Finally, if we start to emerge on a plan, can we act on it, can we execute? If we don't act on global issues, we'll end ourselves as a species. It's apolitical, it's multilingual. Can we add an axis to start focusing on issues?
• [Happy Birthday Doug Engelbart]
• Matt: I like this idea. E.g. if you see there are 450 parts per million of CO2 in the air, and that's too high (this is a made-up number), you could go to edit it on Wikipedia, but you can't edit it because it's veriably true. So instead you see an option to edit the fabric of reality, and it points you to a charity working on this. But this shouldn't be done by WIkimedia Foundation, since we should stay focused on our core mission of neutral education. Also, you need dedicated software support for features like event organizing and membership. In theory, this can all be done in MW extensions, but in practice, that may not be the best solution. Or may want to integrate MW with other software.
• Aaron Halfaker?: This is a government.
• Adam: I'm not sure I trust government to solve this. The first major issue for change.org was corrective rape for lesbians in Uganda. Government rules were changed in response. There is government, but I don't think they can solve it alone.
• Leila: I agree with Matt that Wikimedia platform or projects would not be the best place for it. Part of the reason is things have worked as they have worked is that the action component is not there. There are similar initiatives in academia around crowd-sourced democracy. Decision-making at the citizen level. Looking into that kind of research may be interesting for you. Crowd-Sourced Democracy, out of Princeton. Also, crowd-sourced budgeting, e.g. in California. A lot of theoretical application challenges.
• DJ: I think this touches on several things. I think it's closer related than we think. One of the unique things about WP is the social collaboration model. It's not well-described, we don't even know it ourselves. What makes it work, like Leila said, is we don't have this action item ourselves. But we can at least describe these action ideas, maybe expose to larger audience [?] Take social elements of wiki and make part of technology service that would by itself allow other people or other platforms to look into this or reuse it to achieve these goals, without changing WP encyclopedia concept. During our sessions, e.g. strategy meetings earlier this year, I felt a lot of things were different ways to engage with knowledge. Different types of content, diferent things with it. There's a lot of appetite among people for this kind of thing. Whether we needto take all of this opportunity, make use, different debate, but there's space. I used to put evidence and something in middle [?], we need that on other side too. There's places where there's no effective journalism. Where do you gather your facts? Also, some of those places may not ever develop journalism. Dying language has no space for journalism. That is something where we might be able to help.
• Adam: To be clear, I'm not proposing a new wiki project, maybe there's small things that would fit.
• Gergo: What you're proposing is 5% technology, 95% social, that's true for most things. It's also social that Foundation doesn't understand right now. WP is not innovative social structure right now. Foundation is not experimenting with different social structure. [...] Jimmy Wales, founder, also founded another company, Wikia. Originally that was very open, many experiments, including politics Wikia. Let's make politics sensible, didn't work. Couldn't find right social structure, group norms, maybe not right people. I don't think we have special expertise in this area.
• Victoria: I know you don't want to talk about this, but I do. This guy here, he made Siri. We want to be in many languages, we want to be mobile. Do you have any idea our chances to take our content from supported languages to new ones? Can your AI help us turn mobile devices into productivity devices? While you're here, it would be remiss not to answer obvious question.
• Adam: What many people don't realize is we are on the cusp of a new interface paradigm. PC, web, smartphone, ... The Assistant is next. Today it's not very important, that's about to change. The Assistant as a metaphor will be just as important. I really believe it. Should we be mobile-first, should we go mobile web. It is interesting to think about how we leverage this.