Grants:TPS/Kiril Simeonovski/Wikimania/2014/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2014!

Participant

Your username goes here

Kiril Simeonovski

Your home wiki goes here

Macedonian Wikipedia

Outcome

Option 3: New Creation: What was one useful outcome that was created at the event for the Wikimedia movement?

Add a link to something new that was created as a result of your participation in this event (for example, you might link to a new tool that you and your co-participants worked on at the Hackathon, or to pages created in a workshop you participated in).

Wikimania 2014 was a very good opportunity for me to meet with the people who were interested to find out more about the activities and projects that we carry out in Macedonia. I had a meeting with members of the Affiliations Committee in order to resolve the status of the inactive Wikimedia Macedonia and to discuss about the operations done within the newly established Shared Knowledge. We all agreed that the case follows no precedent and the resolution should be sought in a more peaceful way. The members of the committee said that Shared Knowledge will be recognised as a user group first, with the right to use the logo and the trademarks of Wikimedia, and could be approved as a local chapter after some period of time. The next day, I met with Alex and Anasuya from the Wikimedia Foundation to discuss about the financing of our organisation, especially our annual plan submitted to the Wikimedia Foundation. We carefully discussed all the strengths and the potential risks of our plan, while Anasuya suggested that it would be necessary to prioritise the planned activities and projects and remove those that would be difficult to accomplish. During one of the breaks, I also talked to Roger Bamkin regarding QRpedia and our plans to introduce it in Macedonia. The conversation really helped me understand some additional features of the codes and how to implement them in practice.

The conference programme was also inspirational. I've learnt about many novelties that could be implemented in the educational programme and heard about the most common mistakes that are made when running this programme. A very nice presentation was the one dealing the coolest projects of the other chapters and affiliated organisations across the world. Some sessions dealt with experimental economics and Wikipedia, which motivated me as an economist to start thinking about our movement from another point of view. I was also inspired by the talks given by the keynote speakers in terms of both the topic covered and the public speaking and have learnt a lot on preparing presentations and using the optimal way to share the knowledge on the matter to the attendees.

Connections

Since this was my third Wikimania, I had already connections with people from many countries. However, there is always room for new friendships and I met with many new friends and colleagues. I had lengthy discussions about some future projects with my friends from Italy and from the countries of the CEE region. In fact, there was a CEE meetup during the conference, which I wasn't able to attend because of having another important meeting at the same time, but I used the time as much as I can to talk to these people about our future collaboration.

Anything else

Thanks for the scholarship once again!