WikiCon Portugal/Strategy Process report

Wikicon Portugal 2020 report by Francesc and Lucas

Wikicon Portugal was a three-days event that occured in Porto, Portugal between 17 January and 19 January. It was organized by Wikimedia Portugal, which has been actively participating in the Strategy Process, with support from Wikimedia Foundation.

Introduction

The event wasn’t designed with that purpose, but the date ended by being strategic to provide awareness of the Process to Portuguese stakeholders. Francesc, liaison of Spanish language community, and Lucas, liaison of Portuguese language community, represented the Strategy Process. For Portuguese community it was an important event, because it was their first Convention ever. 10 years ago, they were a strong chapter with Manuel de Sousa as president, but once he left, the Chapter got a drop-down.

The event

After knowing that liaisons would be present at the event, the organization allocated them a spot for presentation of the Strategy Movement on the first day. We used slides to present the process with focus on the yet to be publicized recommendations. About 20 people participated. We thought it would be better to provide a general understanding of the process, talking a little about its history, focusing on a summary for each recommendation, so it could fit on the presentation time, and wouldn’t overburden stakeholders with a very dense content. It was mentioned by Lucas in the beginning that they could use that moment to discuss and let it open for comments, but none had any questions or remarks (maybe because there was a delay on the starting of discussions and it ran out of time).

Outcomes

In the 3 days of event, we also had some time to talk about Strategy between presentations.

Overall, the recommendations were well received and participants started to provide some feedback the following days. Mostly commented on a high level, without specifying too much on recommendations. We had a few specific comments regarding the recommendations, like one from a female user (Rute Correia) that comes from Ubuntu and Mozilla community. She brought the recommendation number six (Foster and Develop Distributed Leadership) in conversation and mentioned that we should use the experience of Mozilla on choosing a way to accomplish its goals, by working on the diffusion of “mentors” across countries.

Another important outcome of the conference was the contact with Adélio Aleluia Lopes, member of the government of Guinea-Bissau and representing the user group in the process of initiation in that country. We kept in touch during and after the conference and he added Lucas to their User Group’s WhatsApp channel with 24 other members, so we can continue the conversation about the Strategy Process with them.

In general, there was not a strong engagement from participants. Most of them were getting to know about the Process for the first time, specially those that were not members of Wikimedia Portugal. It is expected that at least some of them feel invited to join the discussion and the conference worked as both an introduction and invitation to participate.