Wikimedia Summit 2019/Thematic, regional, language-specific meetups/CEE meetup

The annual meetup of Central and Eastern European affiliates in Berlin (which is also located in Central Europe).

Location: TBD (WM-DE offices) Data: 29th of March 2019 Time: 19:00 – 21:00

Attendees edit

Agenda edit

Etherpad link

Notes edit

CEE Meetup 2019 edit

Agenda:

   * CEE Spring 2019
   * CEE Meeting 2019 in Belgrade
   * Affiliate-selected board seats
   * CEE Meeting 2020(?)
   * WikiScience Competition 2019
   * Wiki Loves Earth 2019
   * Wikidata in CEE
   * Announcements
   * Malta (?)
   * Group photo

Participants edit

Greta Doci Wojciech Pędzich Gayane Vardanyan Dariusz Jemelniak Gergő Tisza Ivo Kruusamägi Natalia Tymkiv Philip Kopetzky Klára Joklová Mārtiņš Bruņenieks MARKELLOS Filip Maljković Ljubiša Malenica Mehman Ibragimov Toni Ristovski Shani Evenstein Asaf Bartov Kaarel Vaidla Szymon Grabarczuk Claudia Garad Camelia Boban Mohsen Salek Stephane Coillet-Matillon Michał Buczyński Toni Sant Rinazh Snezhana Strkovska Susanna Mkrtchyan Vojtěch Dostál

~ 30 ppl

Protocol edit

  • CEE Spring 2019
    • Toni: CEE Spring 2019 is not ordered, different countries follow different models - only one contest per language
    • Asaf: Situation is messy because countries, languages, communities and affiliates do not match exactly
    • Toni: Problems will arise, because for example there are two affiliates in Macedonia and only one can organise the contest
    • Martins: In the past there was a contest for Republika Srpska, but not for the whole federation
    • Asaf: You can't deny groups to run a contest, but you can deny them the prize money of the international grant - so a joint production just for this occasion would be ideal
    • Philip: We already have a joint production on Serbian Wikipedia, so collaboration will always be preferable
    • Asaf: Maybe introduce a bidding process in countries where it is unclear who wants to organise the contest
    • Greta: Budget for the prices could be a potential conflict, for instance right now the budget is split between Albania and Kosovo for example (which make sense because one user group is organising both, but what if 2 UG per country are involved? -> might be more of a problem for Wiki Loves contests
    • Nataliia: We can deal with this problem when we actually face it
    • Stats: first 6 days - 617 articles
  • CEE Meeting 2019
    • Infos have been sent on the mailing list
    • Busy finding the right venue - Hotel M
    • Grant is approved
    • Engagement survey got too few responses
    • Program committee has been established, have started working already
    • 2 scholarships per affiliate this year (no changes, although there are plans for future). Applications will start soon.
    • Submissions for the program will start in mid-April and end at the end of June
    • What do you think what the best mix of panels, presentations and discussions is adequate for the CEE Meeting? Contact wojciech.pedzich@wikimedia.pl if you have ideas on this or wishes
    • Gayane: We need a slogan for this year to make clear what we want to have as submissions
    • Wojciech: Find best presentations from your local conferences to upscale to CEE Meeting
    • Filip: There is a logo! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_CEE_meeting_2019_01.jpg
  • Affiliate-selected board seats
    • Klara: Not an easy process, issues are quite difficult to solve in the given time. Bylaws now include user groups in this election process. There needs to be some conclusion on how this process should be commenced.
    • Election should be finished by the end of June, so only three months left - there are options that the Board of Trustees of the WMF can extend the term of the currently elected board members
    • Ivo: This doesn't have to be a perfect process and having edge-cases is ok
    • General consensus that solving this problem is not easy (mentioned several times throughout the discussion)
    • Shani: Very unique moment in the movement because of the ongoing strategy process - Nataliia and Christophe are going to run again
    • Philip K: CEE will have quite a lot of votes in this - as long as they're up to date on their reporting by the 30th of March (tomorrow!) -> there is a checklist on Meta on the current status of affiliates
    • Shani: Trying to avoid "duplicate user groups" that do not have unique members
    • Klara: Each candidate needs two endorsements from affiliates to be able to run
    • Shani: Think about how you will conduct this discussion in your user group to come to a decision - you can ask the facilitators for help with this process
    • Asaf: If you want to fix it in 3 years, start thinking about this election process right now, because the discussion will be complex and controversial
    • Dariusz: Think about how we can get really bright people on the board to help us with the issues that we face as a movement
    • Shani: The working group Roles and Responsibilities is also looking into this, so make sure to give them feedback on how you feel about this election process
    • Claudia: The working group needs feedback on which people we need for which committees and how we as a movement select them
    • Shani: There will be guidelines be the end of next week (April 6th) in terms of how to choose a candidate (skills, knowledge, background, etc.)
    • Shani: There will be a special session for user groups to give their feebdack to the Board of Trustees on how they think this whole process can work
    • Claudia: Was it discussed to push this election process back because Nataliia and Christophe are standing for re-election?
    • Claudia: It doesn't have to be a election - we could have a consensus to re-elect Nataliia and Christophe instead of holding a very complicated process
    • Shani: We need to involve user groups and also enable them to run for these board of trustees
    • Claudia: We need to be more practical and think about the people we want to for this job instead of creating a process that will be not repeated (because the strategy process will very likely change the current setup anyway)
    • Asaf: If we want to keep incumbents, this would result in shorter time for the actual election if there is no consensus on keeping the current board members
    • Shani: This process is urgent and the sooner you can comment on Meta, the better
    • Klara: Candidates can apply from April 15th - April 30th, voting afterwards until the end of May
    • Shani: Timeline might be pushed back a week if the process is not going well
    • Nataliia: Advisory committee of the Board of Trustees is open and you can join the committee so you can get a sense for how the Board of Trustees works. We need to revisit all election processes to make them coherent
  • CEE Meeting 2020
    • Armenia offers to host it if no-one else wants to
    • User groups can also host the event
    • Requires a lot of people who help with organising because it is an event for ~100 participants
    • If you are thinking of hosting, please ask former host organisations to talk about the possibility and feasibility of hosting the CEE meeting 2020 or beyond :-)
  • WikiScience Competition 2019 (November, December)
    • Ivo: Happening again this year in November and December, Ukraine and Croatia were among the most productive countries and pictures from Ukraine and Russia were among the best
    • Have local jurys so that not that many pictures are submitted to the international jury - makes Ivo's life easier :-)
    • Many pictures in Commons Picture of the Year 2018 from the competition
    • Local prizes also an option
    • Please contact Ivo if you're interested on organising this contest (again)
    • Nataliia: You need to find the right audience for the pictures - it's not easy to find jury members to make sense of all the entries (because of the complexity of the pictures), so try to find scientists interested in these kind of pictures
    • Ivo: In Estonia we are trying to engage universities, because they already have an affinity for Wikipedia and it's likely to find interested people
  • Wiki Loves Earth 2019
    • Nataliia: If anybody is interested in organising locally, please contact Natallia
    • If you have time to help out in other communities, you can help them remotely by setting up bots, campaigns, lists, jury and so on
    • Ask nature photographers in your community who might be interested in participating in the international jury
    • Also: Wiki Loves Monuments, where not everything for example in Jewish communities is protected, but is noteworthy
  • Wikidata in CEE
    • Asaf: Are communities ready for a stronger level of Wikidata in the CEE region? Two years ago there was a strong push and it is fairly well established in the CEE region
    • Create a CEE-wide collaboration on inserting big loads of data of the CEE countries, which the Wikidata people haven't gotten to because they don't speak the language, so they need your help to make sense of the databases that are open
    • If you're interested in participating and you'd like to try out data partnerships for your community, let's start talking on a (new?) mailing list and discuss how this would work in the CEE region!
    • Martins: How do you propose this collaboration? Asaf: By providing examples, real data that is available, so to make sure that at least Wikidata has information the persons that might have a Wikipedia article (yet)
    • Claudia: Gather ideas and see if patterns emerge, so in case they do emerge we can start organising an international collaboration similar to CEE Spring for example
    • Claudia: Having a network ideas might make funding a good idea while smaller projects alone might not
    • Claudia: Follow up on this at the next CEE meeting?
    • Asaf: Feeling the temperature of the room, quite a lot of interest from participants of this meeting!
  • Announcements
    • Gergyö: Wikimedia Hungary looking at user retention, project is run by a grant, but if you're interested in looking at this, please contact Gergyö
  • Malta
    • No reservations, planned acceptance by 2020 - discuss this on Meta!