Thank you fir submitting this proposal. It is so great to see that you had a good experience organizing the 2022 Wikidata Training For Turkic Wikimedians, and that now you wan't to lead a community gathering again.
I have reviewed your proposal and have a few comments and questions:
Following last year, I trust that you are fully capable and have adequate capacity and experience as a team. I just want to address the fact that some of the organizing team members also have a significant part in organizing the 2023 CEE. So I want to highlight the capacity concern and ask how will you mitigate that. As both Mehman and Zafer have a leading role in both events.
It seems there were not a lot of responses to the survey. Do you have an idea why? Are you confident there is a need for this conference as an annual convening? I'm not sure that these survey rates represent a sufficient demonstration of the need.
I identify main focus areas as - community building , skills building and management capacity. But you also have a strategic component. Can you please elaborate on how does this conference goals and objectives role up into the CEE regional strategy and priorities?
As you are inviting Non affiliated contributors as representatives, the selection process will need to be facilitated and supported by you. It can sometimes be hard determining who is in the right position to act as a community representative. I know some non-affiliated communities do that by a village pump voting.
Budget
I'm not sure I follow the catering breakdown - for how many people have you budgeted for? It supposed to cover for the total 70 participants, no? But I see different amounts for lunch or Dinner.
I see many items budgeted for 100;130;150 people (such as swag, agenda ,name tags, Saturday night dinner), but you indicated a total of 70 p. Can you please clarify?
We generally encourage to limit SWAG to more environmentally friendly goods (such as stickers and low cost items).
Will you be using a travel agency to book the tickets? I don't see that in the budget.
I'm sorry for addressing it as a consideration, but I was wondering how and if the horrible earthquake that occurred in Turkey a few weeks ago affected your plans to host this conference. As the proposal was received before the disaster, I want to make sure this is still relevant as you haven't mentioned the exact location in Turkey for the conference. Will in be Istanbul as in 2022?
Hi @CAlmog (WMF), thank you for checking our request and giving us feedback. I will try to answer your questions and comments as clearly and concisely as possible.
Thank you for your trust. I would like to clarify that Zafer is not the organizer of the CEE conference and has nothing to do with the organizational issue of the CEE meeting. Zafer will be fully involved in the Turkic Conference. As for me, of course, I will partially supervise the work of this conference, but Zafer and other team members will handle the full conference. I will only supervise the work of the team and the process and will also be a liaison between the WMF and the organizers. As for the involvement of the other two team members in the conference, here only the designer and the photographer will be involved, but both positions are not critical. They don’t require special attention, so there will be no problem. I am fully confident that the team will fully cope with their responsibilities.
We think in relation to the size of the community itself, and this is a good number since the community is small and not very active, which we want to improve through regular meetings, projects, and conferences. It’s also possible that this number was influenced by the fact that in addition to this survey, the community also needed to complete the CEE community engagement survey, and people forgot about this survey while filling out another one. In addition, the survey was available in English, and perhaps the language barrier is one of the reasons for this result. In addition to this survey, we had the opportunity to hear from the community at our regular meetings, and we have included their wishes and ideas here. Based on these facts, I think it’s worthwhile for the development of this region, the community, and the Wikimedia Movement locally to organize this conference and make it an annual event for the community in our region, which has great development potential.
Despite the fact that our region is an integral part of the CEE region, our goals, and strategy differ from the CEE strategy in that we are more focused on the local community. CEE covers a large community and is focused on global issues, but we are focused on the needs of specific local communities, and we also cover the needs of only Turkic languages and communities. All this allows us to be more focused on local needs and more quickly respond to these needs. Local focus is our priority.
Our team has the appropriate knowledge and capacity to evaluate and decide which delegates are best to represent their communities. In addition, we have sufficient knowledge about our local communities in the region, and we know which community members are the best to represent their communities. As in the case of CEE, we have sufficient resources to oversee the entire process of electing delegates in these communities. Of course, we will monitor them and assist them if necessary.
Budget
The food budget is for 70 people, but there is a difference between lunch and dinner. Lunch is designed for all conference participants, but dinner is calculated only for those who do not live in Istanbul. Istanbulites can dine at home as the dinner time is 7 pm, 2 hours after the end of the conference.
Pens and notebooks are designed for 100 people, from where 70 is for the conference participants, and all the rest for the university participants and staff, as a branded gift from our conference, and we will also maybe have random guests and calculate for them also.
Name tags are designed for participants and guests of the conference, where there can also be representatives and students of the university, as well as random guests.
As for the Saturday dinner, unfortunately my colleague made a mistake and I didn’t notice it (we used the sheet from the CEE conference as a template), I corrected the number and it’s calculated only for the conference participants, which is 70.
Yes, we only order eco-friendly materials that are cheap and don’t harm the environment.
A separate budget for the travel agency is not required, as the agency receives its profit from ticket sales. Thus, the agency fee is already included in the ticket price.
Regarding earthquake: The conference, like last year, will be held in Istanbul at Uskudar University. The earthquake occurred in the southeastern region of the country, far from Istanbul.
I hope I was able to accurately answer all your questions. If you have any additional questions or comments, please let me know and I'll be happy to answer them. Kindly, – Mehman22:54, 27 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
As we agreed on email, we want an additional budget to cover the overspend. The amount of the additional budget is 8,000.00 USD. Thanks for support. – Mehman20:47, 8 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
