WikiProject remote event participation/Documentation/WikiCite Virtual Conference 2020
- Title of the event: WikiCite Virtual conference
- Date: 26-28 October 2020
- Organizers: LWyatt (WMF) (talk)
Format of the event edit
- Main format
Livestreamed sessions of video presentations. Mostly individual conference talks, but also including some panel discussions and some tutorial/workshops.
Each session was independently coordinated by a pair of hosts - with a timezone, language, topic and format of their choice.
- Duration
32 hours of presentations delivered in 14 sessions (ranging between 1-4 hours each) over 3 days
- Main goal
Providing a platform to share the current state of open citations and linked bibliographic data in Wikimedia, as part of an annual conference series and in association with the Wikidata-Birthday celebrations.
- Main target audience
WikiCite community; Wikidata community; library-specialists interested in Wikimedia.
- Total number of participants
Presenters = 82
Audience (on Youtube which was only one of the viewing platforms)
- "Peak concurrent viewers" = 56
- "Total watch time" by November 1 = 193 hrs
- "Unique viewers" by November 1 = ~1300 (this number may include duplicates across multiple sessions)
- Number of organizers
1 Coordinator, 23 session hosts
- Language(s) spoken during the event
- Unique languages = 7.
- Sessions hosted = 7 in English; 3 in German; 1 in French; 1 in Indonesian; 1 in Portuguese.
- Other individual presentations = 1 in Hindi, 1 in Spanish.
- Tools used
- ‘Multi-cast’ using StreamYard
- livestream viewing locations were into 9 locations: youtube channels, facebook pages, twitter accounts. The location varied according to the audience of the session, maximum of 3 per session.
- Notetaking on Etherpad.
- Methods used
Months before the event, a survey was made to gauge interest. 51 respondents.
Then, a googleDoc was set up for people to express interest in hosting a session (in pairs), their proposed topic, time, language, and likely speakers.
From this, the coordinator contacted prospective hosts directly and helped form their plan, empowered them to recruit speakers, and schedule timeslots.
In some cases, the coordinator specifically approached people to invite them to host a session. Each host-pair was responsible for recruiting their own presenters, coordinating their attendance, and defining their session format. Significant time was spent in ensuring the schedule didn't have conflicts.
In the weeks prior to the event, significant time was spent providing personal training for all hosts on how to moderate a session using the StreamYard software.
- Communication
Event promotion was done via mailing lists of previous conference attendees, Wikidata comms channels (weekly newsletter, facebook group), WikiCite twitter account. Each pair of session hosts were also partially responsible for the promotion of their session - especially where the language of the session was not English.
Lessons learned edit
Success edit
The delegation of the task recruiting speakers to the session hosts meant a diversity of topics and styles (and languages) which would not have been found through a centralised 'call for papers' system. It also divided the workload so that no formal call was required and no central list of all speakers needed to be maintained.
Allowing hosts to organise sessions in a timezone and language of their choosing also increased the inclusivity and diversity of presentations and attendees.
The Streamyard platform (with a $25 'pro' license) allowed for professional quality broadcast management (onscreen graphics, display formats, live comments, multiple pannelists) and, crucially, allowed the video to be 'multicast' to 3 simultaneous locations. This allowed the content to be pushed to 1 common location (the 'Wikipedia Weekly' Youtube channel) + up to two channels of specific relevance to that session (e.g. the session in Indonesian was broadcast to the Wikimedia Indonesia YouTube Channel and Facebook Page). This brought the content to the community rather than the other way around. It also allowed for multiple sessions to be broadcast in parallel without conflict.
Challenges edit
Using a software platform, and program design, where much responsibility is delegated results in a lot of time investment in team-coordination and individual training/followup. The Streamyard system is designed for a single person/user to be the 'host' of their videos, and others being invitees. In order to share multimedia assets and multi-cast links for the consistent broadcast locations - it required every single 'host' be given a password to login as the same user account, a cumbersome 2FA process.
Video upload to Commons
The Streamyard platform automatically records the videos of each session, which can be downloaded (slowly) for any post-processing. However, converting such large files (multiple GB each) for upload to Wikimedia Commons proved difficult. A new workflow was created - described here – by user:Fuzheado.
Documentation edit
- YouTube Playlist of all sessions.
- Commons Category of all session videos.
- Conference program here, Etherpad for each session linked from its description
| 📅 | 🗣 | 🕰 UTC | Hosts | Topic & Link to details |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday 26 | English | 10:00 - 11:00 | Jakob Voß & Eva Seidlmayer 
|
State of WikiCite |
| English | 13:00 - 16:45 | Simon Cobb  & Jason Evans 
|
Author items | |
| Deutsch | 14:00 - 17:00 | Rabea Müller & Konrad Förstner
|
Hands-on: Wikidata-Einführung (Library Carpentry style) | |
| English | 17.00 - 20.00 | Jan Ainali  & Daniel Eriksson 
|
Citations in Swedish Parliamentary documents | |
| English | 22:00 - 24:00 | Thomas Shafee & Alex Lum 
|
Research output items | |
| Tuesday 27 | ||||
| English & Deutsch | 10:00 - 12:00 | Eva Seidlmayer & Jakob Voß
|
Wissensorganisation und Bibliographische Daten | |
| English | 13:00 - 15:00 | Amir E. Aharoni & Eran Rosenthal 
|
The frontend of WikiCite | |
| Français | 15:00 - 19:00 | Houcemeddine Turki & Mohamed Ben Aouicha 
|
WikiCite et scientométrie ouverte | |
| Wednesday 28 | ||||
| Bahasa Indonesia | 09:00 - 10:30 | Raisha Abdillah, Biyanto Rebin & Hillun Vilayl Napis 
|
Proyek Wikicite Indonesia | |
| English | 09:00 - 10:40 | Leyla Garcia, Arindam Halder, Muhammad Elhoussary
|
Gene Wiki | |
| Deutsch | 12:00 - 13:00 | Jakob Voß & Eva Seidlmayer
|
Methoden und Beispiele für Wikidata-Datenimporte | |
| English | 12:00 - 13:30 | EricaAzzellini & Sturm 
|
OpenVirus and Scholia interfaces | |
| English | 13:00 - 16:00 | Merrilee Proffitt  & Houcemeddine Turki
|
Advancing Librarianship and Scholarly Communications | |
| Português | 17:00 - 20:00 | EricaAzzellini & Sturm
|
Estruturação de projetos no Wikidata |
Questions & discussions edit
If you want to talk to the the organizers, ask further questions, feel free to use the talk page.