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ESEAP Conference 2024/Report/Chinneeb

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I attended the ESEAP Conference 2024 on a scholarship and it was a rewarding, fun experience. This was my first time going to any sort of in-person large-scale Wikimedia event, despite having been a contributor on Wikipedia (mn and en) and Commons for about half my life, and meeting so many like-minded people from multiple countries and cultures was a surreal (in a good way) experience. Editing Wikipedia is quite often a lonesome (not lonely) experience for many of us, but actually physically meeting fellow contributors, I think, was a great way to build some resolve, think about future projects, collaborate, and just chat about interesting things.

  • Mongolia representation at ESEAP
    Mongolia representation at ESEAP
  • A picture I uploaded to Commons back in '08, it was deleted many years back due to FoP rules but has been reinstated due to the outcomes of the conference!
    A picture I uploaded to Commons back in '08, it was deleted many years back due to FoP rules but has been reinstated due to the outcomes of the conference!

I want to sincerely thank the ESEAP organisers for their organisation of the event and choice of location, Sabah is not a region of Malaysia I've visited before, and while my time there was short, it was nice to see snippets of the local cultures, including a very memorable field trip to Mari Mari Cultural village. Maybe next time I can return and actually climb the Mountain!

Events

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I attended the following events:

Aside from these I'd really have been keen to attend some OpenStreetMap events, and I hope OpenStreetMap is representated at future events.

Outcomes

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Aside from generally being an interesting and invigorating experience, all the talk of Commons uploads and Freedom of Panorama (FoP) inspired me to check out any new legislation Mongolia had passed, and turns out that Mongolia has had Copyright law changes in 2021 (with minor amendments in 2024), and they deal explicitly with FoP. So I changed the rules on Commons, and after some discussion, we have FoP in Mongolia 🎉

 
FoP around the world, see commons:Commons:Copyright_rules_by_territory/Mongolia
 
The above map shown during the FoP talk at ESEAP 2024, May 12

To add to that, currency was also found to not under be copyright anymore, so this map now includes Mongolia as well:

 
This has made the article en:Mongolian tögrög very happy

In terms of the future, I chatted to a variety of people about various issues with the various Wikimedia projects, and have gotten to know about (and thinking of doing things in the future related to):

  • Becoming a member of Wikimedia Australia and local physical collaboration (I'm based in Oz presently)
  • Collaborating online (and maybe in person) with ESEAP Wikimedians interested in Mongolia and WikiProject Mongols on enwiki.
  • Thinking more about (and discussing potential ways to increase) engagement with Mongolian contributors
  • Reviewing grants made previously to look for potential miniprojects to run related to mnwiki.
  • Uploading more pictures of Mongolian cityscapes, an act that was forbidden until recently!

Comments

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  • Navan was painless and efficient for trip booking
  • Hotel experience was great, no complaints, great food and coffee
  • Technical glitches were a bit troubling, especially at the start of the conference, but I'm glad we all took it in stride and it didn't affect too much of the substance.
  • Didn't enjoy talks that were videostreamed, the sound/video quality wasn't often the best and there was less incentive to ask questions
  • Not sure if this was conference-specific (might have been a general ESEAP rule), but I thought the voting procedures could've been simplified with various apps/tools, instead of relying on a show-of-hands method
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