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Grants:TPS/Anthere/Wikimania/2019/Report

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Welcome back from Wikimania 2019!

Participant

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Anthere

Wiki in Africa

Outcome

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I shared my experiences and also learnt from community on largely two different events

  • The Learning Days
  • Wikimania itself

I also briefly joined the m:CivilServant's Wikimedia studies/Summit Stockholm 2019 to discuss an activity I plan doing with their team on Wiki Loves Africa.

Learning Days

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I joined the Learning Days during 2 days, cohort 3. This year, the Learning Days were organized in a rather different way than previous years in the sense that

  1. there was a preregistration and approval process (as opposed to just jumping in)
  2. there were three groups, depending on degree of experience/involvment in the mouvement
  3. each group had a special program, fine-tuned according to its participants
  4. it was mandatory to attend the full 2 days program

The topic we explored was essentially about Campaigns/Organizer Framework, community roles, and reflecting about our own path to being a meta organizer.
I found two days attendance a bit too much, in particular in the sense that it did not allow me at all to attend any cultural crawl event. But the programme was definitely interesting and I support this format for the future.
More information about the Wikimania:2019:Learning Days.

Related connexions

  • Alex Stinton, Lauren Miranda, and a fair number of other participants during the learning days. A real pleasure to talk with all those folks.

Sessions at Wikimania

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I actively participated to the following sessions at Wikimania 2019 (as an organizer):

As an attendee, I must say I particularly appreciated the Keynote address by Michael Peter Edson, and was an interested attendee to the state of Wikimedia Research (which I attend every single year), the hackathon showcase, and otherwise mostly attended sessions related to diversity. My regret was that there were just too many sessions, and only such much we can do. Big kudos for the effort to record some of them.

Poster sessions

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I submitted several posters during Wikimania and was at the poster session to feature them.

Just as in 2018, I really enjoyed the Poster session, which I found was an excellent way to feature/showcase a lot of the great work done within our mouvement, in a time-limited format. All posters were of great quality and from memory, most of the authors really stood in front of them, being available for questions and discussions. I also found the time to enjoy appreciate get a taste of the herrings...
Side benefits of the poster sessions include 1) the work of preparing the poster is done in advance, so no last minute hurry to get a presentation done 2) long lasting outcome as the poster visuals are uploaded on Commons and may be consulted again and 3) free print of our poster, to drag around with us the rest of the year in other conference venues...

Other activities

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As usual... Wikimania was mostly about reconnection and new connections. LOT's of them. The place (the university) was a good and sound choice to help people mingle.

Interviews

Committees

  • I attended two Wikimania Committee meetings, one including some of the Wikimania 2020 team. I will not say I enjoyed those meetings though. Interesting to meet people face to face, but horrible meetings. The type I wish to forget about.

Meetings

  • I attended the African meeting from beginning to the end. We discussed the future of Wiki Loves Africa, Wikiindaba 2019, and return of cultural artifacts to Africa from European Museums. I thought it was a very interesting and constructive meeting, with a big crowd for the first half of the meeting (second half plummeted a bit... we took the group picture at the end of the meeting alas). From memory, it was the biggest African meeting in a non African environment and it felt good.
  • I attend half the WikiFranca meeting (the first part overlapping with the African one). Quiet and constructive discussions about the future and the operational go forward.

Social events
The closing party (with free visit of the whole museum whilst people were eating drinking and dancing) was quite a treat. The opening party was very impressive.

I'll mention that I really loved the cultural "side" elements proposed during this Wikimania. Choir was delightful and the closing dance a lot of fun.

Anything Else

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  • I posted on twitter during Wikimania [1]
  • I took some photos of Wikimania 2019, and uploaded them into wikimedia commons (only the best ones, and only those for which I had approval)

Thank you Wikimedia Foundation for appreciating my work done during the year and granting me the opportunity to be part of Wikimania2019 and enjoy every moment of it.

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