Wikimedians for Sustainable Development/Meeting minutes 20200209

Notes

Originally taken in Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WfSD-20200209

Attending

• Lane Rasberry (notes) - encourages everyone to participate in taking notes; member of Wiki Loves Vegan
• Isaac Olorunti
• Daniel Mietchen - user:Daniel Mietchen - focus is on the interaction between Wiki ecosystem and science education. Wishes for Wiki community to systematically respond to and act upon the Sustainable Development Goal
• Jan Ainali - mostly active on Commons but also Wikidata and Swedish Wikipedia. In the past I have been an organizer for Wikimedia Sweden. I have been advocating for sustainability in Wikipedia since 2014.
• John Cummings - Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO -
• Wil540 Art - Hi all - I prefer to type, in a cafe at the moment. I’m user Wil540_art - I’m in the early stages of planning an edit-a-thon at a Sure We Can. A redemption center in Brooklyn. NY. I focus on Skateboarding and Art on wikipedia. I’m involved in a community organizing project that involves sustainability and skateboarding. This will be the second edit-a-thon I host.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sure_We_Can
https://www.instagram.com/brooklynskategarden/
• Rajeeb - advocating for diversity in Wikimedia projects
• Mervat
• Stuart - organizer for the European Water Project, mapped over 2000 water fountains globally where people can refill water bottles. Idea is to reduce single use plastic
• J N Squire fr:Utilisateur:J._N._Squire - I am a contributor on the Wikipedia in French. I attended the meeting last month. Has contributed ot the strategy discussion for Wikimedia 2030.

Regrets

• EllenCT -- scheduling conflict with a prior commitment

Pre agenda talks

Remote participation

Various people commented on the use of zoom for video conferencing. Some people said that they had past good experiences with using this service.

Mervat: I found that other services than Zoom work better for my connection and computer. Jan: We used Jitsi last time. Google Hangouts is also an option.

Daniel and Jan shared their wish that more wiki events would include remote participation options. Daniel further shared a petition to ask for more remote participation options. https://www.change.org/p/organizers-of-data-science-and-machine-learning-conferences-neurips-icml-aistats-iclr-uai-allow-remote-paper-poster-presentations-at-conferences

Introductions

Everyone introduced themselves.

Approval of the user group agreement (Daniel, Jan)

The proposed agreement is available at - https://docs.google.com/document/d/11gBs1d7eiALp52SVAI0L3lGgUBOfrWysbb594KO0Co0/edit

• Basics of naming and administration
  • What should the name be?
    • "Wikimedians for Sustainable Development" or "Wikimedians for Sustainable Development User Group"?
    • several people supported the one without "user group" in the name
    • If the WMF suggests using the name with "user group", then should we appeal?
      • Yes, it is preferable that we should ask to not have the longer name.
  • Question: Can we have a cool logo?
    • Answer: OMG, we just had a big design competition and vote in December, check it out, comment on that
  • Application process
    • The WMF requested that the representatives of the organization seek participant approval for the application, sign, and return it
    • Challenge: there is no way to sign this document, it is just a Google Doc, why did they ask for signatures?
    • Planned response: Jan will send it back by email, and that is equivalent to signed document
• Besides the name question, there were no other comments on the agreement.

Commenting as a group on the Wikimedia 2030 strategy recommendations (SDG-all) (Jan)

Focus on Promote Sustainability and Resilience and Prioritize Topics for Impact:

• #1 is https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Promote_Sustainability_and_Resilience
• #10 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Prioritize_Topics_for_Impact

• John shared that the Wikimedians in Residence group is preparing a coordinated response
• Lane shared that there is a virtual meeting to discuss strategy next weekend.
  • https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Caf%C3%A9
• JN shared that he went to WMFR strategy meeting.
  • JN said that he reviewed recommendation #12, "evaluate, iterate, and adapt"
  • https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Community_input/Evaluate,_Iterate_and_Adapt
  • JN described that he with other reviewers agreed that there needs to be more monitoring and data collection in the Wikimedia movement to inform decisions. However, a difficulty with this is that by taking measurements, that will create various biases from Western World values that separate Human and Nature.
• Mervat expressed a wish that this group should post a collective statement, Perhaps we could invite any individual to post comments on meta, then end the end, we compile the summary and post it as an organization. Mervat said that we should post something but first gathering ideas is necessary.
• John: suggestion: we vote before the meeting using doodle poll or something to chose the first priority strategic recommendations

scope of group

I thought that the group was mostly about improving articles?
 What do others think? Stuart: I am interested on finding Wikimedians who want to combat single-use plastic and clean water issues .. J.N. think we might be less focused on the "think tank thing" and more on articles once the collect for comments about Wikimedia Movement Strategy 2030 are done.

John: something taken out of these recommendations which was very strong in previous recommendations was the theme of decentralization. Many previous working groups talked about this but it is mostly omitted now from this summary of recommendations.

Action: Daniel will lead the work for feedback on recommendation # 1, Jan #10. We will start pages to collect our thoughts and then have a meeting to finalize. Jan will setup Doodle polls for both meetings.

Strategy process link

URL for feedback for strategy process https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oqCm5RV61ibsbHNH6NVzBiNhKYAaEDCIu2yKKQyAZZU/edit?usp=sharing

Events

6 March - Keynote talk at Open Belgium 2020 (SDG 17) (Jan)

Jan shared that he will be giving a keynote.

Q2 of 2020 - Sustainability-themed WikiCite editathon (SDG-all) (Daniel)

Daniel said that would support a Wikicite presentation at this event. The advantage of Wikicite could be to document the academic literature which support sustainability. We could apply that to this group's wiki engagement or to the strategic recommendations.

OER Recommendation https://creativecommons.org/2019/11/28/coalition-to-support-unesco-oer-recommendation/ Open Data recommmendarion coming soon

Water fountains

Stuart: our group maps fountains in OpenStreetMap and collaborates with Wikimedia Switzerland. The current goal is to photograph all images of fountains in Wikimedia Commons then link them back to Wikidata.

===

• SDGs

-template (Jan) ===

Jan requested help to make the template useable inline.

Becoming a thematic organization - continued discussion (Daniel, Jan)

Daniel feel we should start aiming for becoming a thematic organization. We could help all affiliates do stuff around the SDGs. We can already start figuring out which country would make sense to start an association in.

Switched on Conference

John is going to this conference and asked for ideas for both a workshop and a booth. Message him directly.