The Product and Technology Advisory Council is a group recently formed to advise on the development of product and technology in the Wikimedia ecosystem. It is composed of community members and some Foundation representatives.

In this session, the PTAC members will present the Council, its work in these first few months, and its recommendations, followed by questions and discussion.

This talk will offer a quick tour of scholarship and academic research on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects from the last year. It will give a bird's-eye view of Wikimedia research and go into depth on a dozen or so of the most important findings from the last year. The goal is to explain both what our community is teaching others and what Wikimedia editors, the foundation, and our community as a whole might be able to learn about ourselves.

Despite varying in many respects, most large Wikimedia projects' editor bases have followed similar patterns of growth, maturity, and decline. I will present a body of evidence that these patterns are a more general feature of “peer production”—the model of collaborative production that has produced millions of wikis, free/open source software projects, websites like OpenStreetMap, and more. I will argue that this growth, maturity, and decline pattern is not caused by newcomers who have stopped showing up but rather by communities that have become less open to the newcomers who do arrive. I will present a theoretical mathematical model and a range of empirical evidence that suggests why this surprising dynamic may be a rational approach to the shifting governance challenges faced by digital knowledge commons. I will end by exploring this model's implications for community governance.