I have been working at Consumer Reports for one year as of today. Our director Jim Guest sent me a a thank you letter today.
What a great experience this has been. I feel like I am on the edge of accomplishing so much and that I am only waiting for an appropriate time to push a little bit and let my work take its place. Until then, I am still polishing things and trying to make my best possible presentations.
From April 26-28 Lori and Dominic, staff Wikipedians for a Children’s Museum and the National Archives, hosted a “GLAM Boot Camp” in DC. GLAM is an acronym for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. They announced it months in advance and I reserved my room and booked my travel as soon as dates were posted, but I failed to recognize that the event was supposed to be for registered attendees and in the end I showed up without an invitation. Fortunately there was not a problem with space although it could have been tight. I already knew half the people who attended and the other half I wanted to meet.
Kevin Gorman (user:Kevin Gorman) I had known from the Wikipedia Education Program as he relieved me from my commitment to manage classes in California. Pat Earley (user:The Interior) was a friend from Vancouver who I had met because of his involvement in planning the upcoming incorporation of an independent non-profit to manage the Wikipedia Education Program after the Wikimedia Foundation discontinues hosting it, as it plans to do with most community programs. Jason Moore (user:Another Believer) I had met at an editathon in Portland and we had collaborated on other projects since. Emily (user:Keilana) I had known from the education program as she collaborated with another friend, user:Biosthomers, in assisting a molecular biology class and at the conference I came to know that I would be seeing her again at Wikimania. Ed (user:The ed17) edits the Signpost. Alex (user:Sadads) lives in Kansas and is known in the Wikimedia outreach community as being beacon for the central US Wikipedians, and I had met him at Wikimania DC. His girlfriend works for an organization which does building material safety evaluation and we talked about collaborating with Consumer Reports, Wikipedia, and his organization somehow. David (user:Neelix) had recently become a coordinator for the education program in Eastern Canada and was a cheerful person I was happy to meet in any case. Nikki (user:Nikkimaria) was another Canadian whom I had not met. Chris (user:Klortho) worked at NCBI and I had not met him only because he was not so active on-wiki. He worked with Hilda at NIH and was friends with Doc James and Daniel Mietchen. Jake (user:Ocaasi) is my friend in Philly who does new user outreach. Jen (user:Calliopejen1) lives in Los Angeles and already knew my friend Adrienne there, so I was happy to meet her and have another Wikipedian in LA. She gave me contact of her boyfriend who is a composer, and she herself does law. I had met Chris (user:Theornamentalist) at Wikimania DC and he is as chill as a person can be. Andrew (user:Fuzheado) was there and he has always been very good me. James Hare (user:harej) was there as an event organizer – I think he is great but he is a bit of a pessimist and told me not to come to the event because there would be no room. When he told me this it was the night before and I had already traveled to DC and checked into my room, so I came anyway and there was no problem at all.
For just part of the event Doug, (user:Doug) was there and at dinner I talked with him for hours about the problem of sharing entire books online and best practices for storing digital versions if distribution is the goal. User:Jarekt gave an insightful presentation on the problem with Wikimedia’s category system and that led some of us to develop an essay called Beyond Categories.
It was extremely useful to me to have some face-to-face time with all of these people. Most of us stayed in the same hostel. I am sure that good collaborations will result because of this meeting.
Saturday and Sunday April 20-21 I attended the annual conference of Students for Free Culture held at the New York Law School. At the end of the conference there was an organizational meeting in which the board proposed and got approval to change the name of the organization from “Students for Free Culture” to “Free Culture Foundation”. This is because the organization has always been open to non-students, and the new name is supposed to be more welcoming to more people.
In addition to the name change, this was supposed to signify a change in professed philosophy as much of the work done by members of the group had nothing to do with students. The organization was also seeking to position itself in such a way to differentiate its specialty to what it already does well – it supports local community meetups for persons to come together with no particular expectation of a particular professional background (such as coding, information science, or publishing) and be able to discuss issues related to the free culture / open knowledge movement. In the past year about sixty such meetups had been organized in perhaps twenty cities in the United States, and all had gotten encouragement and done work under the banner of “Students for Free Culture”.
If I had time to support this group I would want to set up a list of resources available to grassroots community organizers in the United States who either want to host a local coffeehouse meetup or who want to table at a conference. Right now lots of people do these things, and I feel that it would be helpful to them to have a pack of downloadable files which they can print and distribute on paper to promote the standard causes of the most prominent organizations in the larger movement.
From March 14-15 the Cato Institute hosted a Wikipedia meetup. The major outcome of this event was the creation of a WikiProject to develop Wikipedia articles on US Federal Government legislation.
At the same time I was attending the conference of the Consumer Federation of America, so I was only able to attend this after that conference. Pete Forsyth organized it and so far as I know, this was the first Wikipedia collaboration between the community and a think tank. Cato’s goal in hosting this was to develop all Wikipedia articles on federal legislation. They want people who search for legislation through Google to be able to find a simple description of the legislation and summaries of all the commentary and responses to it, along with an index of sources backing all this up. I agree with them that this is an attainable goal and entirely necessary for democracy in the United States. What they want is inevitable and it is nothing short of lightening striking from heaven that as they said that this should be so then it really should be so. They gave a review of what educational materials and databases are already available, and I agree that what exists is insufficient to meet public demand. I also know how popular some of the legislation articles on Wikipedia are, and how quickly they become hubs for development after someone establishes the basic framework to get the articles started. We decided to base this from a wikiproject where people could go for support to develop articles on legislation and also track general interest in doing this kind of thing.
Jake Orlowitz was there and I was glad that he could attend this, because he has such good opinions about how collaboration should work between organizations and the community. Some people from Wikimedia DC attended. Joshua Tauberer, host of GovTrack.us was there. I was surprised that he was just some guy, when I thought that site must have institutional backing or be part of a collective effort. It seems to be the case that it is just his personal project.
I met a gentleman there named Miguel Torres Barrios, user:Mijotoba on Wikipedia. I am always surprised when I meet an experienced and proficient Wikipedian who works in my field of interest but whose path I had not yet crossed. I am sure there must be lots of Wikipedians around who just are not visible and do not even think to connect with others to collaborate, and that seems to have been the case with Miguel. He was entirely Wikipedia proficient, knew the community culture, and lived in DC, but he never previously had tried to connect with anyone in person. Besides his Wikipedia experience, the other things that appealed to me were that he was articulate and seemed like he could do public speaking, he spoke Spanish, and he was passionate about sharing more information with people. There are not enough Wikipedians like him in the movement and when I met him I thought how good it would be if somehow he could be convinced to take a Wikipedian in Residence position somewhere to reach out to the Spanish speaking community or even help develop the US development of Spanish Wikipedia.
This was great meetup. I hope that it sets a precedent.
I attended Consumer Assembly, which is the Consumer Federation of America annual conference. Their program gives the agenda of what happened over March 14-15.
Elizabeth Warren, friend of the Consumer Movement, was opening speaker and encouraging of all the work we did. I went to sessions on mobile privacy and warning labels and attended the general sessions, which included talks on the Universal Service Fund. A lot of the attendees worked as telecommunications advocates, which I thought was strange because I do so much Internet advocacy myself but rarely do I meet in my circles anyone who feels strongly about access to landline phones and modest lowering of cell phone prices. The people at this conference were convinced that lowering cell phone prices just a bit would make a big difference in who could afford a cell phone, and they also advocated for the rights of people in rural areas to access to the communications network. I simply had not considered these issues before and if I could, I would like to learn more about this and take the information to the groups I regularly meet.
The mobile privacy talk found consensus even though the panelists had widely varying backgrounds and interests. Everyone was in agreement that there should be phone standardization, explanations for the users as to what they were disclosing through a given app, and some kind of interface for reviewing the history of a phone’s data sharing. The commercial sector wanted this because they get nothing out of sleazing data away from consumers who do not want to share it, and feel that many people would choose to share information anyway. Even though I think the consumer is in a difficult position of wanting to use apps which share a lot of data and not having options to use an app without sharing data, I think it would be a victory if only people could have the choice to learn what data they are sharing, and I would like to see the industry trend in that direction.
The warning label talk was great. No one mentioned the term “user experience” in this talk, so it seemed to me that they were from a different cultural tradition because everything about what they were saying would be what I would call user experience problems. Their complaints were that products which have safety problems should not disclaim the risk with only a warning label, because people often misunderstand the warning labels and the products should be safer at the manufacturer’s cost. David R. Pittle formerly of Consumer Reports was here and I got to meet him.
Stephen Brobeck as president of the Consumer Federation of America was there. I hardly got to speak with him but our paths must cross again. He is editor of the Encyclopedia of the Consumer Movement and I must be one of the biggest fans of that work. He is even writing some kind of updated addition, so he must be doing this from spiritual compulsion because there simply cannot be enough people to care about this level of documentation to make something like this commercially viable. The original book from 1997 is a critical international history and explanation of basics of the Consumer Movement, and this book probably is the best link for a beginner to come to understand deeper concepts.
I met Robert Weissman from Public Citizen, and he seems like a powerhouse. I heard him talk and spoke to him briefly and wanted to know more about him. I met other people from other organizations, including CR’s board member from US-PIRG, Ed Mierzwinski; staff of UL, a librarian from the Kansas State University Library’s consumer archives, and have other business cards of all kinds of people with fascinating product safety stories. I feel like I have a lot to learn.
The NYSHealth Foundation (New York State) today hosted Alan Weil of the National Academy for State Health Policy to talk about health care reform strategies in the United States. I attended in the place of Chuck Bell, my colleague at Consumer Reports, because he was otherwise busy today. I hardly knew what to expect. I am just coming to realize how much Chuck knows about healthcare reform policy and how long he has been working in the field. He has history in this field since at least the 90s, and he has a lot of information, experience, and contacts.
He told me to find two people at the event. I walked in, greeted someone and told him where I worked, then he told me that he had worked closely with Chuck for a long time. Without my prompting, he then immediately introduced me to the two others I wanted to meet. As best I could tell everyone at the event was a participant in healthcare reform subculture – they were tall doctors, lawyers, advocates for foundations, or otherwise stakeholders who knew a certain language and could communicate breathlessly about the nuances of a highly complicated cultural phenomena.
The problem in the United States healthcare system is that, for various reasons, this system is consuming a large percentage of the country’s economic output and delivering poor health outcomes in comparison to similar countries’ healthcare systems. One of the reasons for this is that the US has less government and more corporate influence in healthcare, and another reason is that the US gives some regulatory authority to states in deciding their own healthcare policies. I am naming these reasons but do not want to suggest that they are fundamental or of most importance; they are just two reasons which were raised at this particular talk.
Weil listed five points for consideration in anyone’s plan for enacting healthcare reform. Those points as I understood them are as follows:
Weil mentioned the Choosing Wisely campaign on which I work as one initiative to enact change. He did not describe the campaign, so apparently he expected everyone in the room to be conscious of it, and it was a small surprise to me that this community which I was visiting but which was not previously known to me is so connected to my work. There must be implications for this.
Marcus was upset with me when I was in India. I did not feel that he was justified in his original complaint, but in the end, we decided not to talk anymore. It was a bad breakup but I am not sure what could have made it better.
While I was in India, I did not use email for about 10 days. By that time when I wrote to Marcus he was upset. I thought that was a little melodramatic but I did not say anything, but actually in hindsight somehow he was really hurt. I told him that I had Sou as a lover in India and he took it really personally. In the past, he had told me that it was okay for me to date others while I was a away for a month, and he also wanted an open relationship for his sake, but somehow having me with another guy made him really feel hurt. I felt absolutely terrible; I never would have expected this response from him, particularly because he as a Broadway performer had a lot of opportunities to meet who he liked.
Not longer after having returned to America I emailed Marcus. He had asked me not to communicate with him again, but when I wrote him, he said that he did not mean to say that and that he would have written me after a while. We exchanged some emails, then we exchanged some chat, then we talked on the phone once. My priority at this point was determining how to communicate safely with him. I had a six-month romantic relationship with him and he had taken action to end that abruptly, so while he was talking to me I wanted to salvage something and make a friendship. If need be, I was thinking that we could just not talk for a while and then resume some kind of friendship after some more time passed.
He was making me feel weird and he was tripping hard for a lot of reasons unrelated to me. I sympathize with him but for him to have cut me off from our established relationship while I was in India and really occupied with other things was transgressing polite behavior for me. I was getting the sense that he was willing to freak out and freak hard without giving me any chance to communicate with him. I can deal with a lot of drama but refusing communication is more than I will ever tolerate.
We had these talks, he seemed fine, and I thought that we could peaceably coexist. He told me I upset him in various ways, but said he was not comfortable saying how. He told me some things but he is quite a reserved person in expressing his feelings and I hardly understood him. I asked him to come to relationship counseling with me and he again refused, as he had repeatedly since literally our first date, and I asked him to talk to my counselor if I were to go on my own, and he was ambivalent.
We had another talk by phone and we talked about various things. Nothing in that conversation stuck out to me as hurting his feelings or getting any emotional response from him. He told me at the end to have a good night, and that we would talk again soon. From my perspective we had a safe and leisurely conversation. He did not really express much emotion, or rather, he seemed like his normal self to me. That night over a period of hours he wrote me some crazy emails accusing me of bizarre and nonsensical offenses, and then the following day he wrote to me that I was worse than a particular random criminal who in his past had tried to kill him during a mugging. He often talked of that attack throughout our relationship as a bad event of the worst kind, and for him to suddenly hate me for reasons I do not understand was upsetting to me. I suppose that getting accused of being a bad person was better than him cutting me out of communication without me understanding what was wrong, which was his original plan, but when he cut me off this second time it was for offenses he only imagined and with a hate I feel that I did not deserve. Ultimately, I am taking this breakup as him fundamentally not accepting me for who I am, because we were together for six months without a complaint from him. This is the worst breakup I have ever had, and also the only bad breakup I have ever had. I do not understand him and throughout knowing him I always felt that he had emotions that he could not express to me and that he did not understand himself.
I just feel used; I feel like I was the same person throughout our relationship and that I was open about who I was, and then somehow when he had time to reflect he decided to tell me that he never liked me. I have no idea what he might like. I liked him. I regret the loss of time. If he did not like me then I wish we could have established that a lot sooner.
The biggest problem for me in the relationship was that he had a mental problem with low self esteem. His condition was really odd – in person he seemed completely normal except that he refused to initiate social engagement with anyone. The strange thing was that I doubt anyone ever noticed this shyness because his mental barrier was only initiation of contact, so if someone started talking to him in a social setting, he behaved as an extrovert and was proficient in leisure conversation. He worked as a Broadway performer for years, and in an unrelated skill set he was a total handyman and electrical engineer. He liked to say that when he was touring with theatre then he made friends with everyone. He was highly creative and had analytical skills, plus he could do all kinds of practical work with his hands. He was educated, good looking, a great conversationalist, and had a lot of impressive talents, but he would get extremely depressed if anyone ever complimented him. He never had a reaction to anyone’s face, or would ever be anything except completely happy around everyone. I never saw him unhappy in all the time I knew him. He would only get unhappy when he was alone, and when that happened, he would review every nice thing that happened to him and start dreaming that all good things in his life were some kind of trap to catch him.
When I was in India he told me I was crazy, and I said fine, I will go to a counselor. I asked him what he wanted me to tell the counselor and he said to tell the counselor that I do not read emotions in others. That is probably true – other people have told me similar things, and for my own self, I know that I am wound a bit differently and always run optimistic even in bad situations. I do not think I ever have problems being optimistic except when there is trouble, and generally I stay out of trouble, so my inability to see things any other way than optimistically usually works out when everything is good around me. In any case, I got a counselor and am seeing this person for a while. I definitely do not ever want to have a bad ending to a relationship like this ever again, and maybe I can get some insight.
On his blog, statistician for the Wikimedia Analytics team Erik Zachte asked, “Which single Wikimedia metric would inspire you most?” Here is my response to his blog post.
I want page views for specific sets of articles, and I want this data presented in such a way to call for people to respond to it.
My personal interest is in health articles. I have a hunch that Wikipedia is the world’s single most consulted source of general health information, which is a specific case of my belief that Wikipedia is the world’s single most consulted source of information which can be found readily with typical keyword searches on a search engine. If anyone made a statement that Wikipedia were the world’s most consulted source of health information, then that would obligate every single government, health foundation, medical research organization, public health office, medical school, and non-profit organization to respond, since all of these institutions are stakeholders in how their service base accesses health information. I want them to respond by beginning to understand that all people who share information with the general public must consider whether their audience is demanding their information through Wikipedia, and if so, the extent to which they are responsible for ensuring that the Wikipedia articles are high quality. I feel like if it were so that if there was supporting evidence that Wikipedia mattered as a source of health information, then that would be the start of Wikipedia’s transition from something which can be ignored to the thing which is the most important concern for a large number of top people working in information dissemination.
Another instance of important pageview data might be the Wiki Loves Monuments programs. UNESCO does great work and is a very necessary organization for providing experts and issuing mandates, and every country also has some kind of cultural or historical office which also designates what heritage sites are most important, but I wonder how the sum of what every government in history has done and the entirety of the United Nations’ media efforts compare to the prestige and awareness WLM has brought to the heritage sites of the world. My suspicion is that WLM as an awareness campaign is an order of magnitude more successful than every other heritage site awareness campaign in the world in all of history put together, if the metric to be considered is number of people who come to be aware of heritage sites based on a media campaign. To me, whatever metric would be supporting evidence for the popularity of health articles would also be supporting evidence for articles relating to monuments. Once a scheme was developed to support bold statements about the impact of either of these, the scheme could be generalized and applied to every other field.
Wikimedia projects are important. I would like to be able to quantify just how important they are relative to comparable projects, and I would like for the analytics team to back me up with data so that I can make bold public statements. The one metric I want is the one that will let me say, “Wikipedia is the most popular source of information in field X and this data supports my saying so…” After I say this, I feel like that would be leaving an open challenge for anyone to either find a more popular source of information or accept my assertion. Whatever response the world may have to such a statement would be very interesting, whether they accept it, challenge it, or ignore it. Thoughts?
Wikipedia Day 2013 in New York City was held on Saturday 23 February at the Tisch School of the Performing Arts. So many people I wanted to see were there, including most of Wikimedia NYC, Mike Christie and Jami Mathewson from the Wikipedia education program, Adam Hyland user:Protonk who has helped me in the education program and who just got a job doing data visualizations for a small company in Boston, Jake Orlowitz from Philly who is promoting the Wikipedia Library, Katie from Wikimedia DC/Open Street Maps, Eric user:EMW from DC who does 3D modeling and who has adapted versions of the Wikipedia article traffic reports in a way that is useful to me, Tom Sulcer who had helped me with the Science 2.0 article, Eric Hellman who has a project called unglue.it for making books more available, and lots of other people.
I presented on a panel moderated by Jennifer Baek of Students for Free Culture along with some others. We all talked about access to information. Here is a 7-hour video of the day. I speak with others on that panel at 2 hours 42 minutes.
I am grateful that Columbia University’s EdLab made this video of Wikipedia Day 2013. I am interviewed here. I was told that the program retains copyright over these things and I was wondering why because my thought was that the video would get huge exposure if it could be put on Wikipedia, but I understand the fear that the last generation has of sharing its media.
I arrived back from India on Saturday 16 February. Monday was President’s Day so I did not go to work. Tuesday I returned to work and prepared for the Choosing Wisely phase II press event. I had left Varanasi in good health but I think I ate bad food either at the airport or on the plane, and upon returning to the US I was sick. I tried to concentrate as best I could at work because I wanted to be sharp for the conference. Wednesday I was to travel to DC, and I did, but I rearranged my schedule to see a doctor first. She threatened to only test me for bacterial infection rather than give me antibiotics. I had been experiencing stomach problems since Saturday and wanted antibiotics and did not want to wait until the test results were returned and upon getting another appointment. I also had to wait for four hours to get into the walk-in clinic near my home.
The doctor gave me antibiotics at my request and I got better by the time I awoke the next day, but it still made me think about the prescription process and about the Choosing Wisely campaign. Part of that campaign was advice that doctors and patients should talk together, and I was in the mood to demand antibiotics against my doctor’s advice to get tested first. After having been sick for days with no relief I attributed my recovery to the antibiotics.
The conference was on Thursday 21 February and was great. I saw some coworkers that I wanted to see after coming back plus the organizers did well to invite lots of journalists, and many people asked me about the connection between the campaign and Wikipedia.
At this press event an additional group of medical societies agreed to participate. With the new participants, the majority of medical specialty organizations were now participating in the campaign, and I got new perspective on how important this campaign was. Also, the speakers introducing the event (Jim Guest and Chris Cassel) both dropped the number “22 million” as the number of access requests for the information which I had distributed through Wikipedia. I reported that number as the number of pageviews received by the Wikipedia articles into which I had inserted the campaign messages. This was a significant percentage of the campaign’s total outreach, and there is a lot of room for further expansion. I am actually after many iterations of my work just formalizing what it is that I should do and share, and I am really excited about further outreach. I find the work I have to be entirely aligned with what is important to me.
After the press event we from Consumer Reports went to a lunch with donors to the organization. This event was a way to thank people in the area who had contributed money to Consumer Reports’ campaigns and also to ask them for more money. The first time I recall ever going to such an event was, coincidentally, when I went to a fundraising event for the 2000 presidential campaign of Ralph Nader, who was formerly of CR’s board of directors. At that event it was a novelty to me to see how polite attendants of Nader could so sweetly and directly ask attendees for lots of money. I was just a student fan at the time, but I remember being impressed and thinking that if causes need money then someone must request that money.
I got engulfed into conversations with just a few of the attendees. I really had no plan going into this lunch and it happened that I had a lot in common with each of several of the attendees, all for different reasons. If I had the lunch to do over again I would have been more of a butterfly around the room because in hindsight, I am sure that I had a lot in common with a lot of the people there and I wished that I could have met more of them.
The entire experience was striking to me for several reasons. I watched the organization of the press event, and I was thinking, “This is how mass communication happens.” I watched the representatives at the press event make statements for their organizations, and I was thinking, “This is how organizations back grassroots social movements and start something big.” I went to this lunch event after and met all these donors, and I was thinking, “This is how activists with a bit of money leverage it through organizations to effect a particular change in the world.”