Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2015/Preparations

Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014

Preparations for Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2015 started with the announcement of the next CEE meeting being held in the form of the retreat in Estonia during the last session of Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014 held in Kyiv, Ukraine on the 21st of December 2014.

The first idea was to introduce a central topic to annual meeting and thus the title "Money talks" was proposed. Initial idea was to discuss: 1) possibilities of fundraising and 2) possibilities of doing great projects without money, in order to come up with great collaborative projects for the following CEE year.

Wikimedia Eesti took its time to develop the idea and presented a more detailed overview of the plan to wider CEE community on the 15th of May 2015 during Wikimedia Conference 2015 CEE-meet-up. In following discussions the central topic "money talks" was dropped, as it did not respond to some of the needs in regional cooperation. It was substituted with a more general slogan "sharing&learning", which captures the quintessence of any Wikimedia gathering and corresponds to actual activity during the regional meeting.

Wikimedia Conference 2015 WMCEE meetup

On the 15th of May 2015 CEE group had 2 meetups during Wikimedia conference. First of them concentrated on general state of the regional cooperation, as well as Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015 event. Second, late night session was held to discuss Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2015 in detail.

It was decided that:

The dates of the conference will be 10th to 13th of September 2015.
Preliminary general topic "Money talks" does not actually correspond to the vision and goal of the meeting and should be changed.
The core of the meeting is sharing & learning, which happens in the form of:
- sharing learnings from different (successful and unsuccessful) practices in the region,
- practical workshops of projects (namely Wikidata) and different tools,
- sharing projects that can be done with relatively low financial input,
- collaborative work on future collaboration projects.

This discussion was continued on the mailing list, as well as in CEE needs assessment for 2015.

2015 Wikimedia CEE Questions&Needs survey

On the 24th of May 2015 the public questionnaire on meta was created to collect and structure data about organizations, groups and communities in the region, in order to organize the annual meeting in the most meaningful and impactful way.

All actors in the region are asked to fill in the part relevant to their organization, group or community on Questions&Needs page.

Wikimania 2015 WMCEE meetup

Wikimania 2015 meetup