Activities in 2017[edit]

August Monthly Meetup[edit]

This month's meet up was attended by Alice, Erina, and Geoffrey . It was a discussion session to figure out the way forward on the upcoming projects i.e wiki loves monuments and wiki loves Africa.

July Monthly Meetup[edit]

This month's meet up was attended by Alice, Erina, Douglas, Geoffrey and Steven. It was a brainstorming session to lay out activities for the rest of the year with clear time lines and people in charge. The following things were discussed

Making more edits

Suggestion BOTs were added to all the user pages of the team members to encourage everyone to make more edits All team members are to make at least 100 edits per person by time of next meeting, this for different topics depending on one's interest. In the next meet up, a uniform topic will be agreed on for a particular month. Erina demonstrated to the members how to keep track on the statistics of contributions to the different Wikipedia projects

Wiki Loves Africa

Steve was tasked to make application the application for Uganda for Wiki Loves Africa

Wiki Libraries

Alice was tasked to take lead on Wiki Libraries in consultation with Felix

Wiki Loves Women

Erina to find out from organizers of Wiki Loves Women on how Uganda can participate.
Erina will work with Ivan to put up articles on notable women in Uganda

Wiki Loves Monuments

Geoffrey was tasked to make a plan for Uganda to participate in Wiki Loves Monuments

Create Bylaws for Wikimedia Uganda Usergroup

Douglas make first draft and share with everyone for comments

Updating past activities to the Meta

Erina and Steve to update 2014
Erina to update 2015
Douglas to update 2016
Douglas and Steve to update 2017

Monthly Meetup

These will happen every last Saturday of the month from 9.00 am - 12.00 pm, the next meetup is on 26th August
The topic will be editing Wiki Data
Steve will make an event poster to be put at the Goethe- Zentrum and on social media

Working Meeting with Felix Nartey[edit]

As we concluded the first ever OpenStreetMap conference in Africa hosted in Uganda - Kampala at the prestigious Makerere University, Felix Nartey a speaker at the event who inspired the need for cross collaboration across the Open Movement through his presentation themed “Cross Collaboration across Open Movements in Africa”. This gave the Uganda Wikimedia User group an opportunity to have a constructive meeting with Felix 2 days after the conference.

Early afternoon Wednesday 12th July, Felix met some of the active Wikipedia contributors from Uganda, those that were available at the agreed time met at the Goethe- Zentrum, which accepted to further support the activities of the Wikimedia movement in Uganda by providing meeting space and any other kind of support and collaboration that’s within their scope and capability. In attendance were; Bukulu Steven, Ssebagala Douglas, Erina Mukutu and Alice a passionate open source enthusiast working for the Goethe- Zentrum in Kampala as the head librarian. A productive meeting with positive outcomes was conducted with major key points discussed being:

A guide for the team to work towards an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation.
How to strengthen the existing persons or groups that are currently working separately to collectively work with a common cause of adding more African knowledge or information onto the World’s largest encyclopedia. Some of these communities were mentioned which included; The Uganda Society.
How Wikipedia can be used as a research and teaching tool in higher institutions of learning under the Wikipedia Education Program. Felix noted that the same platform can be used to teach language students how to translate English Wikipedia articles into different local language with the most dominant in the central region being “Luganda”. “Such content can be more meaningful to the local community especially those not comfortable with reading English Wikipedia articles which is in the majority”. We also tackled briefly on other Wikimedia projects like Wikivoyage that aims at creating the World’s largest free, complete and up-to-date world-wide travel guide.
In addition, Felix shared with the team short term Wiki-Projects that we can fully get involved in apart from Wiki Loves Africa International Photographic competition that happens towards the end of the year, these were; Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth. He also mentioned the opportunity to leverage a current running project Wiki Loves Women, a campaign that focuses on women across Africa and beyond, that works on recognizing and writing articles on notable women with an impact to society on Wikipedia.
Felix went ahead to guide us on which Wikimedia Foundation support avenues existed and explained the various grant request opportunities. This was followed by him demonstrating how we can put together the Uganda User Group Meta Page and arranging it to the international standards as existing pages some which were basic and somewhere a bit advanced and could take some bit of time.

As we concluded the meeting, we had an opportunity to briefly meet with Anja Gobel, the Director of Goethe-Zentrum Kampala who welcomed the partnership between the center and the Planning Wikimedia User Group Uganda. We further discussed possible projects we could work on together. This drew us to discussing a project they are collaborating with the French partners from Alliance Francaise about Migration and Integration set to happen in November this month during their “Digital Month”. Hopes are that we can do something together.

In summary we had a fruitful meeting and below is a list of planned activities or strategies that we will follow as a group to grow our community and achieve our ultimate cause of becoming an affiliate in the near future:

Work plan and General Strategies for the Uganda User Group[edit]

The go to strategies for the group include the following:

Grow the core team to between 5 to 10 people
Create a mailing list to add all members and start discussions about plans to grow
Lay out strategies, goals, possible challenges and make suggested solutions to them (do this as a possible 1st event in the form of a brainstorm session with all members including old and new members)
Create more engagement with the larger community, like having video calls with other chapters or user groups to learn from what they are doing or simply just ask questions.
Collaborate with the international community for global event publicity - Wikimedia Foundation Communications Team
Document events and the groups work/activities through pages on meta, blogs, videos, etc.
Lay out a social media strategy (facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
Keep track of current statistics, note them/make comparisons as projects progress.
Include cartoon artists as well to help publicize wikipedia under their medium of communication. (kwikiriza).

The group also decided that to increase its activity level, we will ride on already made activities such as the enlisted as its easier to follow guidelines and achieve the goals of the project. A host of such identified activities include:

Short Term

Wiki Loves Monuments
Wiki Loves Africa
Wiki Loves Earth
Wiki Loves Women
Photo expeditions

Long Term

Translations into Luganda
Look into the creation of clubs at tertiary institutions or possible Wikipedia Education Program partners.
Target particular faculties (Library) for possible partnerships.
Create awareness campaigns or drives through radio and tv partnerships.

Key Events and Tools to Note[edit]

●Annual Conference and Events (Wikiindaba, Wikimania, etc.) ●Add all members to the African Mailing List ●Suggest Bot ●Studying and mastering wiki markups ●Offline tools/resources (Kiwix, Wikifundi) ●MetaWiki ●Wikimedia Education Dashboard ●Wikimetrics