Talk by Dr Kira Allmann, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Media Law and Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies in the Law Faculty at the University of Oxford. Kira worked for Whose Knowledge?, a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the internet and this is what her presentation focuses on. Presented at OpenCon Oxford event, 6th December 2019.

1. whoseknowledge.org

2. Who is ‘Whose Knowledge’?

3. 50% of the world is now online
75% from the Global South (Asia and the Pacific Islands,
Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East)
45% of all women are online
The Numbers

4. The internet does not look or sound like many of us in this room.
But…

5. Knowledge Gaps
Published knowledge
and the internet does
not look like the
majority of the world.

6. What do we care about?
We are a global campaign to center the knowledge of
marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the
internet.
Whose Knowledge? is a radical re-imagining and re-design of
the internet, so that together we build and defend an internet of,
for and by all.

7. Wikipedia…
Only 10% of Wikipedia editors are women or non-
binary
Only around 20% of public knowledge is produced on
or by people from the Global South
Wikipedia as a Proxy

8. With permission from Mark Graham and the Oxford Internet Institute

9. So what are we doing about it?

10. When women’s faces
are missing from
Wikipedia, their
invisibility online and
offline spreads.

11. Centering Marginalized Communities
Dalit
By Zhengan, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons By Dondolids, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons By Seeeko CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Queer Bosnian Kumeyaay

12. “Our knowledges are
urgent... They are
plural. Our knowledges
are transformative.
They are hope.”

14. There are 7000+ languages in the world
Only 10 of these languages are spoken by most of
the people using the Internet
(English and Chinese dominate)
The Issues

15. Only 130 million books have been published in about
480 languages (of the 7000+ languages that exist).
7% of the world’s languages appear in published
material, and an even smaller fraction of these
languages are available online.
The Issues

16. The Campaign
● Seeing language as a proxy
for knowledge
● Creating a truly multilingual
internet
● Mapping challenges and
opportunities
● Creating a practical agenda
for actionBy Tinaral, Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

17. State of the World’s Languages Report
How are you or
your community
using language
online?
What do you wish
you could share in
your language online
that you can’t today?
What does
online content in
your language
look like?
What’s
missing?
What technologies
do you use to
communicate in
your language? What is
challenging about
using your
language online?

18. Community Networks
50% of the world is still not online
Commercial providers are failing to extend
connectivity to rural/marginalized communities
Community networks = owned and operated by local
communities (they own the infrastructure!)
Two lessons when you build the internet from
the ground up:
• Sometimes local, not global, is the priority.
• Linguistic and literacy barriers keep people
offline – technologies themselves only get you so
far.

19. whoseknowledge.org