Projekt:Podcast/Avsnitt 348
Avsnitt 348
Inspelningsdatum: 31 januari 2026
Publiceringsdatum: 8 februari 2026
Lyssna:
Extern länk: https://wikipediapodden.se/wikimedia-futures-lab-bernadette-meehan-348/
Programanteckningar
Programledare är Jan Ainali.
Special episode
This is the seventh episode in a series of ten short interviews recorded at the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt. In this episode, recorded on very end of day two, we meet the new Chief Executive Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, Bernadette Meehan.
Transcript
Welcome to Wikipediapodden and this series of interviews from the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt, the last weekend of January 2026. My name is Jan Ainali. Here we will meet participants, panelists and organizers to give you an idea of what happened at the lab. The interviews took place over three days, with the first one just before it started and the last just after the closing ceremony. So you will get to gauge where the attendees were at each point in time. This is the seventh interview out of ten recorded on the end of day two.
Hi, I'm Bernadette Meehan, the eight day into my tenure as the new CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Welcome to the podcast and welcome to the movement.
Thank you so much.
I asked a couple of the other guests what made you come here and they have all different reasons. What reasons did you have to come to this event?
So, eight days into my tenure, I feel really lucky that the Futures Lab in Frankfurt was taking place because it is the perfect education as I begin this new journey as a member of the movement in this very unique position as the head of the foundation. It has been an opportunity for me, not just to listen and learn, which is my focus for the first few months, but to engage, to ask questions, to engage in these conversations that are happening, to learn what the priorities are for members of the movement, to understand what their concerns are, and to understand most importantly who are the humans that are behind this amazing collection of projects because at the end of the day, the unique value is human knowledge and this is the thing that connects us in this movement.
I'm guessing this is probably your first Wikimedia event. What expectations did you have coming here?
So, I will say on day three, I had the opportunity to meet several long-time Wikipedia contributors and Wikimedians in Washington DC, which is where I am based, and these were folks like Kevin Lee and Andrew Lih and some others, but this is my first official Wikimedia event. What were my expectations? You know, I was curious to see what the areas of commonality were and what the areas of disagreement and differences were about what the future of the movement is, but my expectation which has been met is that this would be a welcoming community, a community that assumes good intent and good faith, that welcomes newcomers and is really proud and excited to explain what this movement means to them, what their history is, and embraces people joining the movement no matter what the phase or stage of their life is when they join, and that expectation has definitely been met.
And to perhaps go a little bit deeper then, what were your expectations before coming here with thinking about the future so early for you as well?
Yeah. So, as I said, my priority right now is listening, learning, and engaging, right? I think it's never a smart idea for a leader to come in and say, I have all of these preconceived ideas and notions and now I'm going to execute on all of these ideas. So, I come in here free of assumptions and presumptions about what I should do or actions I should take, and it really has been a blank canvas for me. And so I approach it as, when I begin to think about strategic planning, what are my goals during my tenure, this engagement and hearing directly from the community is the perfect way to begin to shape my thinking. And so that's what I'm using this as an opportunity to do.
We had the luxury here to both have internal experts but also external experts coming here talking to us about trends within the consumers, within the content, within the contributors. Is there anything that you feel like, oh, I didn't expect this, this is shocking news almost or some, maybe not shocking, but unexpected?
You know, it's a great question. I love how all of the external experts are all users of Wikipedia or Wikidata or other Wikimedia projects, right? That's the first thing they say. And some of them represent like these really amazing, well-known brands and they say, everybody uses this. We love this, right? This is a service to humanity. I think what I have found incredibly interesting is less what the external experts or specialists are saying and more how the Wikimedia community responds to some of those. Now, some of the things that these commentators and experts and specialists have said are things you would expect. Some of them are slightly spicier, right, they've been making assertions or prognostications. But what has been really interesting is the conversations that happen afterwards in the breakout sessions or when you're getting coffee and hearing what has been really, not surprising to me, but I would say informative has been the areas where there is agreement in the responses to some of the things that are said and the areas where within the Wikimedia community there's great divergence and there's not a consensus about some of the reflections that have been shared.
And we have had a lot of breakout rooms forming insights, creating hypotheses and now we have about a hundred of them sitting here on a wall grouped in different ways. We're going to duplicate them later on and try to sync them. What are your feelings, like your initial reaction on this wall of ideas really?
I am excited by the fact that there are broad theme clusters, right? There are very few outliers on that wall where you're like, where's this person? How are they connected? Because that's just totally out there. So you can see that for the group that's here, the challenges that have been identified are broadly shared ideas about what the challenges are. And the same for the opportunities because you see a lot of coalescence around ways that we can address the challenges because it's never really fun or productive to just say we know that there's an issue and not propose a solution. What I have found a little bit surprising is sometimes it feels like there's a little bit of dissonance between, to me as an outsider, in just these two days we've been here, really bold ideas on the wall coming out of these breakout groups. But then when you talk to people, there seems to be sometimes a little bit of a hesitance to change things too much, right? So you'll see this really bold idea that someone wrote down, but then in the broader conversations, it's like, well, we need to be more cautious. And so I wonder where does that come from, right? Is it like when you have to defend the idea in front of a group of people, are you fearful that the judgment will be, no, this is not what the moment calls for. But I'm really encouraged when I look at that breakout wall, these ideas, people are smart, people are creative, people are passionate about finding the solutions. And I think that is going to be the key to the success of bringing this movement forward and continuing to innovate and provide the world with all of the key components they've always loved about these projects, even as we are thinking about how they apply in this new world that we're all navigating together.
Perhaps the last question, I guess, for everyone who's not here now, there's going to come out, I guess, a lot of documentations and conclusions and these testable experiments. What are your message to them who couldn't be here and sort of enjoy the process?
So that's another great question. I think the one thing I really want to emphasize is this convening was organized by the Wikimedia Foundation with Wikimedia Deutschland as sort of a joint project. But all of these ideas that are being generated here today are community driven. This is not the foundation or any one affiliate saying, here's the wall of great ideas, right? What do you think about them? These are ideas that like people who have been part of this movement since the very beginning are generating and putting up on those walls and on those stickies. So I think it's really important to emphasize that this is a community generated idea and brainstorming session. To your point, this is a really small and important but small subset of the broader community. So my message would be there are really great ideas here, but this is one part of the process of contributing to how do we figure out what the future is, right? There are people who don't like to come to convenings or don't want to come to convenings or want to focus on one very specific topic and maybe don't care as much about the other ones. So my message is there is a path and an open space for every single one of those ideas, whether it's through the foundation, through the affiliates, through just another user that you know. But this is a space where every single voice has a pathway to being heard. This is not, I think, also important to emphasize this was not a decision making session. So it's not like anyone comes out of this and says we've decided to allocate funding or resources or this is the new strategic plan. It's to generate ideas and get people talking. And it's only one of many opportunities to do so. So I think that's the key.
Thank you, Bernadette, for joining the podcast. Welcome again to the movement.
Thank you so much.
And enjoy the rest of the conference.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
This was the seventh interview out of ten. When all are published, you will find them on Wikimedia Commons, both in the Wikimedia Futures Lab and Wikipediapodden categories. And, of course, on Wikipediapodden.se under the Wikimedia Futures Lab tag. There you can also find other episodes in English.