Grants:TPS/I JethroBT/Wikimania/2014/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2014!

Participant

I JethroBT

en.wikipedia

Outcome

Option 3: New Creation: What was one useful outcome that was created at the event for the Wikimedia movement?

One of my goals at Wikimania was to connect with my Individual Engagement Grant team to work together on some fundamental planning documents. One such document detailed our use cases, or conceptual ideas about how our mentorship space would work and how editors would use it. Our program developer (Soni) and I had drafted a set of use cases prior to the conference, but we knew we wanted to a few more sets of eyes on it and further flesh it out. Soni and I met together with Sbouterse (WMF) to complete our use cases. Our work will make for more productive discussions later with regard to design and coding needs down the line in our grant.

Connections

I made connections with a number of editors involved in helping new editors, many of whom were actually not involved in the English Wikipedia where I am primarily active. My roommate was Strainu, active on the Romanian Wikipedia among other, who I had some interesting discussions with about programming ideas related to my IEG. I was also able to speak with a few editors about GLAM-related work that I am involved in, such as those coordinating GLAM efforts at the National Library of Israel and briefly talked to Andy Mabbett at his presentation related to smaller GLAM institutions. I also spoke with several editors interested in welcoming and retaining new editors such as Worm That Turned, WikiAnika, and Deror avi that got me thinking about strategies that we can adopt in our mentorship space to treat new editors better than we do now. There were also many, many Foundation members I was able to meet with to talk about grants and get to know in general, including Vgrigas, Jtmorgan, Quiddity, Wolliff, Toby Negrin, Ahalfaker, and many others. I was very pleasantly surprised to see the interest and awareness of my IEG from many individuals at the Foundation.

Anything else

This was the first Wikimania I went to, and I'm excited about Wikimania 2015 in Mexico and intend to go.

As a note, I have been able to do pretty well without a smartphone or laptop so far, but I will definitely be investing in one or both for next Wikimania. I resorted to using the Barbican's public library computers, and borrowing laptops from the super-generous Ocaasi for most of my e-mailing needs. But lacking those things didn't prevent the conference from being an enriching and thoroughly rewarding experience for me. I JethroBT (talk) 19:59, 22 August 2014 (UTC)