Bengali Wikipedia 10th Anniversary Celebration Kolkata/Call for Participation

Expectation and Approach

The following are the expectations from the conference:

Indian Wikimedia community is unique. It is heterogeneous, with people representing multiple languages,literature & cultures. Yet there are many commonalities. The conference aims to provide a meeting place for various communities to interact, share, learn and know each other.
The conference will not be about talks or presentations all the time. We expect interactive, creative and interesting discussions on various tracks identified.
To provide an opportunity to every Wikimedian in the conference to talk if they wish to share anything interesting with the rest of community.We are providing 10 minutes lightning talksin this regard. These talks may not require prior registration.
To utilize the expertise and experience of Wikimedians in the conference, we plan to have open discussions on each track between a panel of experts and interested Wikimedians. Anything related to Wikimedia,Meta-wiki or Wikipedia can be discussed, asked and be commented upon. There will be a moderator for each of these discussions.

The conference will have a mix of

Invited Expert's speech
Submitted presentations
Panels
Tutorials
Workshops
Open space meetings
Lightning talks
Poster presentations
Skype sessions

Submissions will be reviewed and selected in advance by the program committee. Selection of the talks is the prerogative of the program committee and all decisions will be final and binding.

Submissions can be made online, via email or hand to hand to our Wikimedia volunteers listed under the registration page. The online Submission link is placed at the bottom of this page. Before submitting the program proposals, please read the guidelines below.

Tracks

This year's conference offers four tracks for submissions: Community, Technology, Knowledge and Outreach. Additionally papers are also invited in the areas of Open source software and technology, Technological glitches of softwares/platforms/interfaces developed in Indian Languages. We offer a few scholarships for papers from various Indian languages.See Scholarships for details.

Community:

Strengthening the existing community - Ways to improve the existing communities and encouraging participation.
Community Interactions - Interactions within Wikimedia communities and between various communities
Expanding to more languages - Expanding Wikipedia and sister projects to more languages in India.
Gender Gap - Best practices, Strategies, Statistics for filling the gender gap of editors. Reasons and solutions for the less women representation in Indian context.
Best practices and Case studies.

Technology

Issues and Solutions - Input tools, fonts, browser, rendering, etc.
Training, Outreach of existing solutions
Building developer community around mediawiki and Wikimedia, Student programs- GSOC.
Best practices, Case studies.

Knowledge

Digital archiving of Written , copylefted books and importance of wikisource
Alternate strategies for Knowledge collection like Oral Citation, Collaborative Editing
Wikimedia Commons, GLAM project, Maps
Wikipedia sister projects - Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, wikiquotes, etc.
Copyright laws and practice in Wikimedia projects.
Issues affecting knowledge availability for editing e.g. Open science etc.
Case studies.

Outreach

Social media, print, visual media strategies
Workshops, Trainings, WikiAcademies, Collaborations
Focused community outreach -eg: Campus programs, Wikipedia Takes/loves India
Offline solutions
Accessibility
Case studies

The presentations should be in any of the tracks mentioned above.Each Track will have the following sessions:

A 30 minutes talk, workshop, or a tutorial - Proposals are invited for these from all. The 30 minutes duration is as per the standard guideline and can be extended on need basis. The expectations about these sessions are to present innovative solutions, present the existing issues, and case studies or best practices from the communities.
Lightning talks related to each track- These are 10 minute talks by community members and do not require registration. Speaker can just inform the track lead during the session. Duration of the talks may be increased if needed.
Organizers will present an expert panel on each track- Wikimedians interested/working on that track can discuss any issues, experiences, suggestions etc. openly with the panel and within the audience. The discussion will be moderated by the track lead.
Skype sessions - If substantial number of papers come for this mode then skype sessions can be arranged. Duration will be 15-30 minutes as required.
Posters - Some of the innovative ideas can be represented through posters.

Abstracts/full Papers of these talks should be submitted prior to the conference and they should be selected by organizers. Proposals can be sent via email to

conference-bn10wikimedia.in

cc-ed to

atanu.jnugmail.com and tanmaybirgmail.com

Mode & Format

Format of the Abstract

-Abstracts must not exceed two A4 pages in length (including data and references) have one inch margins (2.5 cm) on all sides in Times New Roman font with a font size no smaller than 12 pt and single line spacing.
-For papers written other than English unicode fonts need to be used. If Unicode fornts are not used, the name of the keyboard/ software used must be mentioned.
- The authors must clearly mention the track name, mode, duration and state whether the abstract should be considered for 30 minutes talk/panel/workshop/10 minutes lightning talk/ Skype session/ Poster presentation.

- submissions in .docx,.doc,.rtf,.pdf-format will be accepted.

Format of the Paper

-Papers must not exceed 10 (Ten) A4 pages in length (including data and references), have one inch (2.5 cm) margins on all sides, be set in Times New Roman with a font size no smaller than 12pt and single line spacing. Other instructions as above.

Format of the Poster

-Posters can be sent in A0 size format.

Format of the presentation

.ppt/.pptx files can be sent prior for consideration. For a 10 minutes talk 10 slides and for a 30 minutes talk the slide numbers may not exceed 30.

Only the full papers may be published in our conference proceedings published by a renowned publisher with an ISBN number.

What if you don't have a paper

In case you think you can't manage paper in the given timeline, you can also prepare a power point presentation or a handout. We encourage that too. In that case you can express your interest to us by shooting an email or by sending an abstract.

Important dates (updated)

The deadline for submissions is given below

Call for abstracts/proposals opens: 8th October 2014
Deadline for abstracts: 10 December, 2014, 23:59:59 hours IST (UTC +5.30)
Notification for accepted abstracts : 13 December, 2014 by email and also in this page
Deadline for submitting Full papers: 25 December, 2014, 23:59:59 hours IST (UTC +5.30)
Notification for changes: 27 December, 2014
Notification for final acceptance: will be notified – the full program will be updated soon.

Submission of proposals

The above guidelines are only meant as a pointer to help speakers and is not expected to be exhaustive. You can submit talks within all aspects of Wikimedia even if the topic is not specifically included here. Be Bold/Be innovative.

How to upload paper/ abstract proposals here

In the input box delete 'your proposal title' and write the title of your proposal, click on create page and It will redirect you to a new page, fill in all the details. If you can't do it this way kindly send your proposals through emails. Mention 'Abstract submission' in the subject line

See the list of all Bengali Wikipedia 10th Anniversary Celebration submissions. See also this category.