Grants talk:Conference/WM DE/Wikimedia Summit 2019/Report

Hello

If you have any questions, please let us know and ping us! --Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE) (talk) 16:13, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Grant report approved

Hi Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE), Michelle Poltier (WMDE) and the team,

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this report. I especially appreciate the way you analyzed the results of the feedback survey according to your goals and objectives, and also the thorough overview of the lessons learned in a way that truly focusing on the core learning that is probably relevant to every future Wikimedia community conference. This was clear and very helpful.

Your complete grant report has been reviewed and accepted, and documentation of expenses has been received. Thank you for your engagement with the reporting review process, and please accept my sincere apologize for the very long wait with publicly publishing my comments.

As I already had a deep dive debrief meeting with Cornelius in September 2019 to go through the objectives, pain points and highlights of the event and the report, I will present here the main things we discussed.

• 'Unconference' program design - I'm extremely happy to hear it worked well and allowed you to talk and work 'with' the participants, and not 'to' them. I'm a strong believer in learning methods that focus on 'Show' and not 'Tell' when trying to teach new skills, or to exchange opinions. This is a challenge that we see a lot in other conferences and looking into integrating more 'active learning' sessions, than presentations. I'm sure this will still need adapting as you already mentioned, but this is a good experience.

• Pre-conference calls and Newbies breakfast - such a great idea, and sounds very helpful! Welcoming newcomers activities are always needed and encouraged, but when it comes to strategy, it can sometimes be even more important to bring people closer to the goals of the summit. I also know that the success of the summit has a lot to do with how prepared the participants are (and I know this is something you spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve), so maybe in the future, attending a pre-conf call should be a requirement?

• Live captioning (live subtitling)- thank you for exploring this option for translation. It is one of our recurring challenges and we are still experimenting with different methods for translation in order to be more inclusive. We acknowledge that this is still an unresolved challenge and we appreciate you sharing your experience.

• The challenges in dividing between WG and Non WG was well covered. But I do want to suggest that if both tracks have different programs, than they should also have different metrics and perhaps also different preparation sessions.

• Governance focused training - I want to suggest a different framing to the 'Governance' part of the conference. I'm not sure that the purpose in this case should necessarily be about making decisions, but rather to provide a platform for discussions and sharing practices around governance and leadership on a local scale (or for thematic groups for that matter). There is probably no 'one size fits all' solution here, and this should not be 'owned' by Wikimedia Deutschland or the Wikimedia Foundation as you rightfully pointed out. But it is worth taking advantage of this gathering to tackle governance related pain pointed on the affiliates level.

• The survey results shows a more moderate understanding as for the active role people should take in the strategy process. I think this is referring to the level of understanding strategy, compared to implementing strategy. Discussing strategy is already not an easy task, so when the level of discussion is theoretical, it becomes very hard to translate it into action items and objectives. For next conferences, we talked about the option of having a pre-conference day on strategic thinking.

Thank you again for the work you have done. I hope these comments have brought value to your future work. We highly appreciate your effort in facilitating this very important platform for the Wikimedia community. All the best CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 26 June 2020 (UTC)