Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2012/program talk from CEE MEeeting main page

This page is an archive of former discussions. --Oop (talk) 06:38, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Schedule/program from Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2012

Founder summit

At the core of the meeting I would like to see a discussion panel of few founders of few CEE Wikipedias. This point would be also a good outreach/media attraction as a "Founders meeting".

This could possibly happen on the first day afternoon.

Given sufficient interest a press conference could be held after this.

Introductory presentations

To make discussion more interesting and to relieve our founding fathers from repeating boring facts I would propose that respective projects prepare presentations about their projects. Each project could present for at most 30-40 minutes now. Those presentations need not or even should not be delivered by invited founders (unless they really want to or there is no one other from the community to delivery it).

This part itself may take most of the morning of the first day.

Two speeds in development of the movement?

Our region hosts some quite large communities, which are widely recognizable in the society and widely used by the average Internet user there. Some projects (especially from smaller language communities) still have a long way to go to be recognized among their respective communities. Assuming we hope to achieve a better reach among those, there are some questions to be asked:

• What are the breakthrough factors to achieve recognition?
• Impact of general economic development on community work and recognition
• Impact of Internet access/cost
• Impact of Google/Yandex/Seznam positioning on project's popularity
• Easy access to some other language resources (e.g. Russian, German or English) instead
• Role of institutional support (government, sponsors, Wikimedia Foundation, chapters ... etc.)
• ...

Every subject on the list might be subject of research on its own. We should invite experts in economics/sociology to discuss this.

This issue might be seen like a small version of a Global South problem and possibly CEE region could serve as a good testbed for various activities in this area undertaken for example by the Wikimedia Foundation. This itself would be an interesting problem to talk about.

A whole session/program block should be dedicated to this issue. A take way from such a session is to find out what are the main differences between large and small projects in the region and point out areas of further study.

An excellent take way would be to have some recommendations for projects and chapter activists.

Our community vis-à-vis public policy and legal problems

Wikimedia Foundation has launched a Legal and Community Advocacy initiative today. What role may chapters and project communities play in the process?

• Issues with representing a diverse community - are chapters willing to take a role?
• How to deal with decision making without getting involved in politics
• Different countries - different possibilities for advocacy on the political level
• Legal affairs: How should chapters support members of community during litigations:
  • defensive, i.e. against community members
  • offensive, i.e. requesting access for public information and re-use of public material

Technical workshop: Wikipedias in multiple writing systems

Many communities are interested in using automatic switch between various writing systems (mostly latin, cyrillic and arabic). Some wikis in the region (Serbian, Kazakh) have this implemented already, some would like to have this (Bashkir, Tatar and others).

This workshop could be used to

• define common goals, identify issues, requirements
• identify resources (i.e. volunteers) that are able to work on development of the software

We should gather representatives of 5-6 communities (especially from the former Soviet Union) interested in this we might end up setting up a proper project to push things further.