Wikimedia Foundation Events team/OfficeHours

UPDATE: The WMF events team has been restructured and distributed across different departments. Because of that we are canceling this office hours. Thank you to everyone for you participation!! If you still have questions regarding conference grants please reach out to Chen at conferencegrants@wikimedia.org

General information

• Initially these office hours will have no reoccurring agenda and any community members who have questions about community events or who would like to get to know us better are welcome to drop in, hang out, or even co-work.
• These office hours are generally a place for community event organizers to talk with each other and with the WMF events team.
• Over time, depending on community needs and interests, we may possibly add in themes, presentations, outside speakers or more.
• We also may use these office hours to test out different software options that may be used at future remote events, however generally we will use google hangouts.
• If only a few people show up the office hours will generally be quite informal, if a large number of people show up we will add some structure.
• If nobody shows up for a few months in a row we will discontinue these office hours.

Events team members and what we can talk about

• • Rachel Farrand, Senior Program Officer: conference grants, accessibility, how to run remote events, the future of these office hours
  • Chen Almog, Senior Program Officer: conference grants, risk assessment, capacity building; the new Events portal
  • Joël Letang, Senior Events Strategist: event strategy, Wikimania, scholarships 

Office hours schedule

Upcoming office hours

Date	Time (UTC)	Link to join	Notes / Theme	Etherpad Link
18 March, 2021	14:00 UTC	google meet	This months meeting has no specific topic and is open for all questions and discussion you want to bring related to Wikimedia Community events.	link
Tentative Date: 15 April, 2021

Past office hours

Date	Time (UTC)	Summary of what took place during the office hours	Etherpad
11 February 2021	18:00 UTC / 10am Pacific	International Women's Day / gender gap activities Friendly space in a virtual event context General questions	link|-	14 January, 2021	13:00 UTC/ 5:00 Pacific	Review of Wikimedia Conference North America, the new events portal and any questions or discussion points participants bring.	link
10 December, 2020	15:00 UTC / 7:00 Pacific (1 hour)	We had 6-7 community participants come and discuss upcoming events. The events team shared some updates. See etherpad for details.	Etherpad

Ideas for future

If you have any ideas for topics, themes, or presentations you would like to see in the future at the Community Event Team's office hours please add your comments here and we will do our best to incorporate them!

• @Rfarrand (WMF): do you know anyone in the San Francisco Python Meetup group? They have been using Remo including yesterday evening and it looks like a great way to host fun socially distanced gatherings, but I haven't audited its language internationalization, accessibility, or privacy issues. It asks people to link to their LinkedIn, but I think that's optional and if you work with them they might be able to provide a version that asks for userpages first, if that's even an issue? It won't eliminate all friendly space issues, other than the non-socially distanced ones, of course. Can you find out whether they have a best practices guide for integrating with simultaneous in-person meetings? If not, I have another suggestion; please reply here and I will follow up either way. Grace Law is one of the SF Python Meetup admins if you need a name. And a huge thank you for addressing youth protection issues! Great work! 50.236.12.33 21:35, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Hello! We have looked at Remo and actually experimented with it already at one of our community events earlier in 2020. As you say, it does look like a great way to host however the issues that you point out around privacy, language support, and requiring all users to register before they can use it are likely to make it a deal breaker for our larger community events. That being said, our team mate @JLetang (WMF): Joël Letang is currently looking into the tool further and may have some additional information to add here or during the office hours. You can also see some more details about tools that this community is thinking about using for remote events here: WikiProject remote event participation Thanks very much for your comment! Rfarrand (WMF) (talk) 16:28, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

For organizers

How to announce

Email Wikimedia-l mailing list and ping the remote event organizers telegram group

Draft email:

Subject: WMF Community Events office hours: DATE

Hello everyone!

The Wikimedia Foundation Community Events Team will continue hosting monthly office hours for any community members who are interested. This is a place where movement event organizers can join and share ideas and lessons with each other for upcoming and past events.

This iteration of the office hours will take place on DAY, DATE, TIME IN UTC WITH LINK and will last for an hour. Find the link to join on meta.

This months topics are:

You can find more information about upcoming officer hours and add your comments and questions here and on the talk page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Events_team/OfficeHours

Please pass this invite to others who may be interested in joining! We hope to see you there!