Grants:TPS/Noopur28/OpenSourceBridge13/Report

Event name:Open Source Bridge 2013

Description of your participation: I was a speaker at the Open Source Bridge, 2013 organized in Portland, Oregon. My presentation and talk were titled: Failure and Wikipedia and the focus was on queering knowledge production on Wikipedia. Here is a link to my presentation. I interacted with other Wikipedians present at the conference (like Sumana H, Sucheta, Andre, Roan) and other participants who are contributors to various FOSS projects.

What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events? The OSB is a very well organized conference. Just before OSB I attended the Adacamp in San Francisco. The main difference I noticed between both and other conferences I have attended in the past is how to conduct multi track sessions successfully. At OSB, every track (and the room allotted) had a coordinator who would help set up the presentation and guide the speaker through the basic setup. They also insisted on having a copy of the presentation on a flash drive just before presenting. Another great idea at both the conferences was the "quiet room". It can be overwhelming to attend so many sessions and meet so many people in a day. People could go sit in the quiet room and take a nap or finish work. Nobody was allowed to talk there.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation? My participation was much appreciated after my presentation because it helped fellow attendees understand exactly the complexities of doing Wikipedia outreach in Global South, addressing questions of gender gap and such. I also illustrated these with the help of three case studies (my own Wikipedia experiments) and showed how alternate knowledge can actually be plugged into Wikipedia to make a real difference to content diversity.

Detail of expenditures: Airline tickets: San Francisco - Portland - San Francisco (return): $203 (plus baggage cost:$20) Total: $223 Hostel stay (4 nights): $93 Miscellaneous (dinner expenses, bus and train tickets): $120 Total: $436

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency): Left over: $64