Eugene Eric Kim: Strategy Program Manager

• If you include all of the component sites, Wikimedia is the 5th most accessed web-property in the world.
• 350M regular visitors, $10M in revenue, and only 35 employees.
• 45K active contributors (a term they use to indicate people who make 5 or more edits per month) on English Wikipedia.
• The country with the most visitors is actually Canada (which nobody in the audience guessed).
• Defined the Wikimedia Foundation mission with a Jimmy Wales quote: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.“

Trevor Parscal: Lead Front-End, UX Programs

• Trevor is the guy in charge of “basically everything you see” (wow!)
• Wikimedia research shows that people don’t find the software easy to use (duh), so they have launched the Usability Initiative.
• In fact, when they were testing with users, they had one user who took 20 minutes to figure out how to edit a page (and this wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary).
• Asking people what they wanted in the site proved not-so-successful, but having them try out a new Beta version and observing behavior was really fruitful.
• As of now, 84% of the people who opted into the Wikipedia Beta have stayed (almost 300K) people – (there was no mention of how to find the beta, btw).

Tomasz Finc: Engineering Program Manager

• Fundraising is done annually, between November and January.
• Amount raised: 2006 – $1m, 2007 – $2M, 2008 – $6M, and 2009 – $8.1M
• Most of their fundraising comes from small donations (contrary to usual trend of large donations for these types of efforts)
• Did a lot of A/B style testing to figure out how to optimize contribution – a lot of this is actually shared on the Wikimedia Blog.
• Adding Jimmy Wales’ plea increased the donations a LOT (so much that at first they thought the site was being attacked).
• The iPhone application and mobile gateway are both being developed by the community.
• The OLPC now has a full copy of the English Wikipedia on it.

As you can see, the talks basically focused on three elements: 1) Wikipedia is big and wants to get bigger, 2) Wikipedia is hard to use and wants to get easier, 3) Wikipedia relies a lot on the community. While there wasn’t much that was earth-shattering, each of these elements was pretty interesting – the idea that such a HUGE platform and vast amount of content can be supported by just 35 full-time employees and the contributions of the community is incredible, and speaks to the power that effective community management can bring. As Wikipedia is one of the greatest examples of social software and content production, it was great to get the opportunity to peer under the hood a little bit.

For some more information that may not have made it into this brain-dump, check out my live-tweet of the event here.

STATS: He started off with some data about internet usage (many pulled from here), most notably mentioning that there are currently approximately 1.7B Internet users in the world (also adding that as Google’s ‘Internet Evangelist’, he “still has 75% of the world left to go.”).  What was interesting was his focus on what the numbers really meant – while Asia only has an 18.5% Internet penetration rate, that still works out to about 704M people, which is still more than 2x the entire US population.  In addition, he mentioned that there are currently 4 billion mobile phones, a fact which was new to me, and which implied that most people were using mobile phones as their primary conduit to the Internet.

Major Changes: He also shared some of the major changes that were happening soon.  One of these was about the Internet’s current switch to IPv6, mentioning that we were on track to exhaust the stock of IPv4 addresses by 2011 (perhaps sooner if there is a rush for addresses at the end).  He mentioned that the new 128-bit addresses would allow for 3.8 x 10^34 addresses – “a number only Congress can appreciate”.  In addition, he mentioned upcoming changes like internationalization of domain names (allowing non-latin characters in top-level domain names).

Applications: He then did a whirlwind tour of the kinds of applications that are supported by the Internet (mostly seen through Google’s eyes, of course).  Email (GMAIL), Video-Sharing (YOUTUBE), Maps (GMAPS), you get the picture…It was interesting to hear him talk about Google Wave, because even though he spoke about it with conviction, I noticed that it was still difficult for him to really express the use cases for the service, something that I (and many other people) have had a bit of trouble with.

New Types of Devices: He talked about the grand proliferation of internet-enabled things.  This is a topic that I’ve long had some interest in and have been desirous to get involved with (beyond playing around with my Nabaztag, of course).  He actually got into an interesting anecdote about installing temperature sensors in his wine cellar that text messaged him when the temperature rose above 60 degrees.  He talked about possible additions to this project, including actuators to turn on the cooling system remotely, and RFID-indexing all of the bottles to keep inventory.  This transitioned into discussion of putting sensors in the corks themselves to deliver information about the wine, which reminded me a great deal of Bruce Sterling’s discussion of “spimes” in his book, “Shaping Things” (a quick, interesting read, btw – definitely recommended).

Challenges of the Digital Age: Finally (skipping over some things), he talked about 2 big challenges that he saw for information handling in the future.  The first was the phenomenon of ‘Bit Rot’ – he applied the term not to the decay of physical storage media, but rather to the idea that we might just stop deciding to update programs, and thus 1000 years from now, we’ll never be able to see that Powerpoint presentation from 2004.  The other grand challenge he brought up (something he has been heavily involved with) was the creation of the “Interplanetary Internet“.  The idea (linking things in space to the Internet) is relatively simple, but the execution (as one might expect) is somewhat hard.  Challenges such as vast distances (speed of light actually becomes a factor when Mars gets as far as 235 million miles from Earth) and planetary rotation (now you see it, now you don’t), have led them to develop a Delay-Tolerant Network protocol that uses a “store and forward” approach instead of trying to achieve end-to-end communication.  Their plan is to use as nodes satellites which have been re-purposed and re-programmed after completing their original mission.

Anyways, the talk, which covered everything from mobile phones to cloud-computing to internet-enabled surfboards to Googling in space, was interesting and inspiring.  In case you want to watch it, PARC has started putting up videos of the PARC Forum talks, and you can find the Vint Cerf talk here a few days hence.