Grants:TPS/Remux/Wikimania/2017/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2017!

Participant

Remux

Spanish Wikipedia (es.wiki), Esperanto Wikipedia (eo.wiki)

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience:

This was my very first Wikimania (and also I was the only Wikimedian from Colombia in this Wikimania), So I tried to use my time wisely. I had the opportunity to participate in the pre-conference (Spoiler alert: It was great!), I participated of the WikiConference North America, in which the attendees enjoyed an excellent tour through the University McGill and other interesting places of the city, and also we attend the talks of our northamerican fellows.

During the next days I mainly attended talks about minority languages (We are working in this topic in Colombia), GLAM projects and Educational programs. I think I got a lot of information about experiences and activities that people from other countries are developing and maybe in a future in Colombia we could also do (Science photo contest, Wiki Loves Folk, revive WLM Colombia, and a lot more!).

I wrote a blog about my experience in Wikimania: http://wikimediacolombia.org/2017/08/wikimania-2017/

With the experiences that I brought from the congress, I organized a meeting in my city that attracted a great interest from the public and the media. I was interviewed about this meeting on a radio show of one of the most popular radio stations of the country (You can listen to the interview here. In spanish:http://alacarta.caracol.com.co/audio/097RD130000000568969/). Also one of the most distributed newspapers in the city interviewed us and made an article about the meeting. You can read our blog post about this here:http://wikimediacolombia.org/2017/09/tuvimos-nuestro-wikiencuentro-en-cali/

Over +100 photos uploaded on Commons And there are many more that I will upload when I have some more time)

Connections

Martin (Interlingua Wikipedia), Castelobranco (Portuguese and Esperanto Wikipedias) and me.

I met a lot of incredible people in this Wikimania, and this was maybe the most important part of the congress for me. Wikimania was an opportunity to make stronger relationships with people that I met in other meetings (Specially the people from Iberocoop). Also I make new connections with people from Brazil, Amical (I took the opportunity to practice my catalan), Estonia (We want to join their Science photo contest next year), Russia (There is an user group working about the minorities languages in Russia).

Three very special connections that I made in Wikimania were with my roommate Samuel Guebo (African Hope) (What a great guy!), Martin Lavalee from the Interlingua Wikipedia and Michel Castelo Branco (Castelobranco) from the Esperanto and Portuguese Wikipedias and the Brasilian user group.

Anything else

As I said this was my first Wikimania and it was an amazing experience that I can hardly express with words, it was a lot more than just talks and workshops. Met people with the same interests as I do, talk with them (In english, spanish, esperanto, interlingua and catalan!), laugh with them, drink a beer with them... I can hardly believe that all that actually happened! Thank you all for this unforgettable experience.