Wikimedia Summit 2024/Event report/Lessons Learned
Program
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Lessons Learned - Program
What worked well
Building up on the lessons learned from previous events, particular attention was given to the following points in this year’s event planning, which highly contributed to the success of the event:
Define clear roles and responsibilities and create accountability for decisions in the event planning process
A key lesson learned from this year’s event was the importance of establishing a Steering Committee early on, composed of decision makers from the WMF and WMDE, later joined by MCDC liaisons. In previous editions, many design decisions lacked necessary support from the leadership of the co-organizing organizations, therefore creating some confusion as to the mandate of the program and conference team. This time, monthly meetings were scheduled to align on high-level decisions, including the purpose and desired outcome of the event, the selection process, as well as the format and the program of the Summit. The inclusion of the MCDC liaisons in the Steering Committee helped manage expectations on both sides and align on the involvement of the MCDC in the Summit. The work accomplished at the Summit would not have been possible without a close collaboration with the MCDC, whose input was essential to finalize the program design. Generally, defining and documenting clear roles and responsibilities (decision-maker, accountable, responsible, consulted, informed; DARCI) helped create a productive environment and avoid confusion and misunderstandings later on.
Keeping a paper trail, writing down proposals for feedback, setting clear deadlines and documenting decisions proved to be good practices throughout the event planning process and created accountability amongst all stakeholders. It was also beneficial to check back on shared understandings to ensure that the group remained aligned. Transparency could have been improved by sharing all important decisions on the event meta page to keep everyone informed of the work of the steering committee, including its members who couldn't attend every meeting. Future organizers might consider these practices to ensure a smooth event planning process when relying on the buy-in and support of many stakeholders.
Start the conversation prior to the event to optimize the use of in-person time
One of the lessons learned from previous Summits is that in-person events should be the culmination of engagement, not the beginning or end of the conversation. Organizers can use the pre-engagement phase as an opportunity to engage with participants and think about actionable next steps and post-engagement as they design the program for the event.
Ongoing engagement around the Movement Charter conversations from July 2023 to April 2024 allowed Summit participants to engage with the Charter content, share ideas, and learn from different perspectives before the event. A series of online engagement sessions were designed to create a level playing field for participants to think about governance in general, and onboarding materials on the content of the current draft Charter were created and shared with participants prior to the event. This allowed participants at the Summit to engage in high-level conversations without spending too much time on general onboarding. The conversation around purpose 2 was also kick-started before the Summit, with an affiliate survey and an online call to discuss the data collected in the survey and possible next steps.
While it was not possible given the timing of the draft in this case, it would have been beneficial to support earlier review of the Charter and time to understand the proposal more thoroughly before convening to ensure that all participants had the same basic level of information going in.
Create room for emergence and give participants agency over the program
A valuable lesson learned from this year's program design was the importance of designing a container that would empower participants and enable them to determine the outcome of the event. For the program team, it was critical to learn to let go and avoid over-designing the process to let participants take ownership. The program team's role was to design a structured process and ensure it was well facilitated, without influencing the content of the conversations. This approach empowered participants to take an active role in the conversations and stick with the process, as they felt it provided a vehicle to voice their concerns and highlight their hopes for the future.
Participants could decide which topic group they wanted to join and had the possibility to visit other groups. They were given the agency to form working groups to focus on specific aspects of the Charter particularly important to them. An open space on the last day allowed for discussion of topics that emerged from the conversations on the first two days. Long breaks and dedicated time for meet-ups were built into the program to facilitate networking and create space for new collaboration to emerge.
Hire external professional facilitators to facilitate the conversations in the breakout rooms (one facilitator per room, max. 20 participants per room)
Unlike previous editions, the organizers decided to hire external professional facilitators for the breakout sessions. This investment in professional facilitation proved essential to reach the desired outcomes and create convergence towards the final outputs. It was also appreciated by the majority of participants in the evaluation survey who said it contributed to the quality of the conversation in the breakout sessions. When working with external facilitators, organizers need to plan sufficient time for onboarding, including insights into the Wikiverse and its power dynamics. Organizers should therefore be aware of the costs associated with paid facilitators and make an informed decision based on the desired outcomes of the event.
What could be improved
We hope that future event organizers can learn from the challenges we faced during the Wikimedia Summit planning and execution, and avoid repeating the same mistakes:
Mitigate power dynamics to allow equitable participation in the breakout sessions
One of the main challenges for the program team was to create an environment in which everyone could share their opinions, concerns and wishes on governance topics, but also listen and learn from the perspectives of the others. Complex conversations are always challenging, particularly when the topic is shifting positions of power for equity. In the context of the Summit, we faced additional challenges such as different levels of expertise, participants speaking various mother tongues and holding different positions of power. Questioning the status quo in front of power holders can be intimidating, even more so for participants who are tied by multiple dependencies outside of the Summit. To successfully create room for honest and constructive conversations, organizers should take into consideration power dynamics between participants in the session design, and strive to find ways to mitigate these imbalances and promote equity amongst participants. It was helpful that facilitators prepared with prompts and approaches that encourage constructive dialogue especially when topics are emotionally charged.
Drafting of the final statements on governance
Because this year's Summit was designed as an outcome-oriented conference, the focus was on achieving tangible results at the end. This was detrimental to the depth or relevance of some of the outputs. While all of the Summit's final statements received majority support, the quality of the statements would have benefited from more time for wordsmithing and sense-making in the final session before voting.
One of the challenges of the final session was to create coherence among the statements drafted by different groups and to harmonize their level of precision and wording in preparation for the voting session. While delegates from each group met to discuss the final set of statements and create a coherent output, this last session was quite rushed due to the time pressure to get everything done in time for the voting. Looking back on the process, we believe that the MCDC should have been able to review the statements prior to voting and follow up with the authors to ensure that they received constructive and actionable feedback at the end of the Summit. This final session received a lower level of satisfaction from participants, who expressed some confusion about certain statements and the process leading up to the final vote. It is also possible that the final output would have benefited from a voting mechanism that ranked the priority of the statements against each other. In this way, the final outputs would have reflected which statements were considered absolute deal breakers, as opposed to which statements received the strongest level of support.
Create better conditions to ensure a smooth transition of responsibility to the newly created group for the future of affiliates gatherings
The organizers commend the fact that a diverse group of affiliates came together at the Summit and decided to work on a concept for future gatherings to ensure that global conversations continue beyond the Wikimedia Summit. However, we realized in the evaluation that some participants weren't fully aware of the reasoning and process behind this transfer of responsibility.
Due to the primary focus on the governance track, less time and resources were dedicated to the design of the sessions on the affiliate gatherings track and general communications on this second purpose of the event. Physical breakout rooms were allocated primarily to the governance track, leaving only one room for the conversations happening in track 2, which limited the number of possible participants for each session. In addition, the decision to run two parallel tracks resulted in many attendees not being able to participate in the conversation about the future of affiliate meetings. Looking back, we believe that at least one session from this track should have been a plenary session, to ensure that everyone was aware of the process to transition responsibility for an affiliate gathering design from the previous Summit organizers to a new group of affiliates, adding legitimacy to the mandate of this group. Better communication of the desired outcomes of the Summit ahead of the event, including to non-Summit participants, could have alleviated this issue.
Additionally, having a clear and transparent written agreement from the Summit Steering Committee on the mandate and the availability of resources to support the group prior to the Summit would have helped the group establish their initial workflow.
Be strategic and explicit about hybridity to manage expectations of online participants
Due to budget constraints, we unfortunately couldn’t accommodate the participation of representatives from all existing affiliates in person and had to set up a selection process. To balance this lack of equity amongst affiliates, the organizers decided to enable online participants to share their written output and follow the conversations happening on-site. In opposition to the previous Wikimedia Summit, this year’s edition only offered very limited online interactions: live stream of the three key plenary sessions, access to online diary and online version of the Gallery Walk to share feedback on the Charter. This decision was motivated by financial and programmatic constraints, and followed multiple conversations where pros and cons of different scenarios were carefully weighted against each other. Unsurprisingly, online participants were very much less satisfied with their experience at the Summit than on-site participants. Not only did they feel they couldn’t contribute to the conversation, but they also didn’t feel that access to live streams was enough to ensure transparency and many didn’t feel welcome as participants. While this feedback is the result of decisions made by the organizers, we wished we could have created a better experience for online participants despite the constraints mentioned above.
The lesson we learned from organizing the fully hybrid Summit 2022 and the 2024 edition is to be very strategic about the level of online inclusion and hybrid interactions that is desirable to reach the event’s purpose and realistic given the resources available. No online experience might be better than a bad online experience. Be very clear about what to expect for online participants to be respectful of the precious volunteer time. Event organizers should make an informed decision around the level of hybridity early on in the planning phase, and communicate it clearly with all participants.
Logistics
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Lessons Learned - Logistics
What worked well - tips for event organizers
Building up on the lessons learned from previous events, particular attention was given to the following points in this year’s event planning, which highly contributed to the success of the event:
Visa Application Process
Building upon the lessons learned from previous Summits, we decided to start registration 7 months before the event to ensure that participants have sufficient time to request an appointment, gather the necessary documents and, if necessary, appeal in the event of a refusal. This adjustment of the registration timeline has increased the success rate of visa applications in opposition to previous years.
To avoid repeating the 2022 situation where many visas were rejected, we dedicated two part-time staff to visa support and made this a priority. This support included issuing two letters of invitation (one from the host organization, Wikimedia Deutschland, and one from the co-host, the Wikimedia Foundation), providing other necessary documents such as health insurance, contacting embassies when necessary to assist with scheduling, offering legal assistance in case of visa refusal when possible, and intensively monitoring the support chat for over three months. These two elements (early registration and staff support) should be considered good practices to ensure visa support for future international events.
Accommodation
Based on the positive experience of the previous Summit, we decided to separate the accommodation from the conference venue. To make transport as easy as possible, especially for those participants unfamiliar with Berlin (and the national transport network), we made a conscious decision not to use public transport to travel between the hotel and the venue. We organized two shuttle buses to run in the morning and in the evening, and had a staff member escort all the participants from the foyer of the hotel to the buses on the first morning.
Wiki atmosphere
As a result of feedback from 2022, there was a focus on the creation of a wiki atmosphere in the venue, with interactive activities and visuals. For instance:
- We spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted to give everyone as a unique and sustainable gift and decided on a DYI printing station where everyone could print their own souvenir. All on-site participants were asked before the Summit to bring a favorite item, such as a bag or t-shirt.
- In order to connect people by interests and topics they would like to discuss with their peers, we set up pin boards and a Polaroid station and used pre-designed templates as a fact sheet for participants to fill out, then aimed to group them together based on common interests.
What could be improved
We hope that future event organizers can learn from the challenges we faced during the Wikimedia Summit planning and execution, and avoid repeating the same mistakes:
Social Gatherings/ Party
We understand that there are different cultural understandings of social gatherings and parties. Taking into account the feedback from attendees, future organizers may want to change the concept of holding an evening party to more of a social event, with quiet areas to continue conversations from the day and space for networking.
Multilingualism
Multilingualism is still a barrier in the organization of global events (programming, communication and research). To allow participants to contribute in their native language and have them automatically translated into English (or other languages), one option might be to provide not only AI-based subtitling, but also a tool that allows translation from different native languages into different subtitled languages. The tool used for subtitling (Wordly) would have been able to do this. However, the presence of multiple breakout groups per room and the lack of dedicated staff to switch between settings/languages and limited budget for technical equipment were some reasons why we couldn't take full advantage of the tool. It would have also been beneficial to offer more demonstrations of the tool to attendees in multiple languages, as some confusion about the settings were observed. Organizers need to bear in mind the logistical implications of using multiple languages in such events:
- not all languages can be displayed on one screen
- virtual meeting rooms for each breakout group need to be set up beforehand
- specific technical equipment (e.g. microphone, screen to display subtitles) is needed for each breakout group
- technical support is needed to change language settings as the languages spoken change.
Event platform
The event platform was an important component for participant management (travel booking, storage of travel documents, support chat), pre-engagement (onboarding materials) as well as for hosting the virtual event component of the Summit (live stream of the main room, online gallery walk). However, we did receive feedback highlighting the poor usability, the unclear provision of information and, in terms of use during the Summit, a rather mixed assessment from the online audience.
In terms of financial resources, we believe that there are better options available than hosting (and setting up and maintaining) a dedicated event platform. Data storage is definitely something to be considered (if travel support is offered) and a suitable alternative to be found, but there are cheaper options available in terms of hosting the online conference portion.