Wikimedia CEE Hub/News

This page aims to collect news about the CEE Hub in one central place to make it easier to follow the developments. The Steering Committee members (SC) present at the bi-weekly status meeting are listed with their first names.

News

December 21st, 2022 (Status meeting)

• SC Members present: Anton, Gergö, Käbi, Kiril, Klára

Summary

• The hiring process for the 2nd staff person has been started - preliminary conversations have been held with potential candidates. Because the 2nd staffing position requires a lot of knowledge about Wikimedia governance and application processes, the search initially focusses on candidates that have that kind of expertise
  • Anton, Klára and Philip will conduct interviews together with Barbara over the Christmas break
• Contacting the affiliates
  • Barbara has written to the communities about their time and availability for a first meeting with her
  • A meeting with the Turkish community has already happened - some questions will be submitted to the community in writing to enable a more detailed response
• There was a discussion about the annual budget increases for 2023/2024 that the WMF had initially promissed. While in Western Europe adapting the budgets to inflation seems more difficult, there are less such issues in the CEE region (also because the budgets are generally a lot smaller)
• There are currently two cities in the CEE region that have signalled interested in hosting Wikimania 2024, Kraków and Istanbul.

December 7th, 2022 (Status meeting)

• present:
  • Steering Committee members: Anton, Gergö, Kiril, Klara, Michał, Philip
  • others: Delphine, Z. Blace...(who else?)

Summary

• Barbara and Klara attended the Big Fat Brussels Meeting in Brussels on December 2/3 2022, which is primarily focused on EU advocacy work but also offers the opportunity to meet representatives from the European affiliates involved in that work
  • On Saturday, December 3, there was a meeting between Wikimedia Europe, the WMF strategy team and the CEE Hub representatives Barbara and Klara
    • The meeting involved getting to know each other better and what the possible joint tasks could be in terms of informing the movement charter
    • It was agreed that both projects will document the tools and processes used to establish both networks in one document to be published early next year (the WMF strategy team will provide the questions/framework to write this document first)

• The CEE Hub will start contacting affiliates and communities starting before Christmas via email, to establish a line of communication with Barbara before the programmatic work starts
• The SC is planning an in-person meeting in Zagreb in March/April 2023 to take stock of the status at that point and work on the mid- to long-term strategy of the project
• A Telegram group was set up for the wider CEE Hub group for Barbara to have a pool of people to help with onboarding and general questions