Wikimedians of Bulgaria/Reports/2018/CEE Meeting/Vodnokon4e

I participated at CEE meeting 2018 in Lviv, Ukraine as a representative of Wikimedians of Bulgaria UG.

Activities by dates:

• 12 October - participation in Conflict Engagement for Humans and Facilitation Skills Workshop - 2 presentations provided by Asaf Bartof for attracting new editors and creating comfortable conditions for them and increasing the level of cooperation on the level of communities. The direct result for me was planned for my presentation two days later. Indirect result should be the increased knowledge of mine how to help new users with advices, how to facilitate discussions, hoe to encouragement of new editors. There were a lot of interesting ideas, which I will try to practice in discussions and argues in our community.

• 13 October
  • Strategy (presentation) by Kaarel Vlada - I am strongly interested in discussions about movement Strategy and I am following this since the beginning. Several times Vassia and I tried to engage our community, but without success. The only thing we achieved was the feedback for Stage 1. So I participated all the meetings about the Strategy, trying to understand my mistake why I can't involve our community in this discussion. Also I applied for Product & Technology Working Group with hope that I will be able to help in new tools or ideas, not only for my local or CEE community, but global community also.
  • How can we work better together? by Julia, Kirchner. Goal: Increasing the level of cooperation on a community level. This was another approach for how to attract and help new users, to increase collaboration and participation. Together with other presentations (as "How to retain new editors" a day later) it showed me that we can develop our own tools like Wizard or Training modules to help new users and provide them with knowledge how to edit and survive in our wiki community.
  • CEEbots coming - how to run a bot and how bots can help all CEE communities - my presentation, toghether with User:Base.
  • Lightning Talks - participation in a lightning talk about Straegy.

• 14 October
  • Wikimedia 2030 Come & Tell - what needs to change in our movement? by Kaarel Vlada - continuation of previous talks about our movement and Strategy process. As we already have the direction, in the next 2 years there will be working groups working on its implementation. Ideas and opinions are still welcome, but for the future development only, not for the direction. I will try again to raise the topic in our community.
  • After spring comes summer? CEESpring roundtable by Michał Buczyński - An interesting discussion about CEE Spring future, how we can develop our own ideas, how to make this competition more interesting and expand it's idea. There will be discussion about it and I will try to follow and inform our local community. At the same time I will bring the topic on our Village pump, trying to collect new ideas within the local community.
  • Serbia Loves Wikipedians in Residence - listening to our Serbian colleagues, their experience in this topic and how they started this project from a scratch.
  • Targeted projects - an effective tool for attracting new editors. WMROMD experience - an interesting presentation about our Romanian colleagues' experience establishing new user group, but it is not very efficient in our case - we already did this. So there was no need for me to participate in this presentstion. Anyway it was good to see how the others are doing itq to share experience and compare for example with our mistakes.
  • How to retain new editors - very interesting survey done by Wikimedia Deutschland. The results in their community (similar to many others and with very high probability - to our local) are that it is not a problem to attract new users (they did a special banner for this and had a lot of new users only for a month), but how to keep them. Only few of them made more than 10 edits. The survey is still ongoing and I will keep in touch with Christine Domgörgen. Now they are on the discussion level about possible reasons, and they separated 3 main groups - approach to new users (they dont feel welcomed in wiki), technical difficulties (they dont know how to write) and system difficulties (they ant find good explanations, help pages, etc). We had some small tool that we can develop for help for new users and alos to make it more attractive for them. But first I will follow Christine's survey and it's next steps and results.
  • Lexeme editing session by Tobias Schönberg. A new tool for lexicographical data (similar to Wikidata) but for words. It is still in progress and I guess there will be time needed to engage our community to check it and understand it. It was hard even for me to start and I created only 2 or 3 items as a beginning. For this I wil try to read more.

• 15 October
  • PetScan and other modern tools tutorial by Asaf Bartof - very useful for me presentation for data, how to collect it, where to find it. The link for all tools is here, but it is hard to start for a newcomer. There a lot of options and I will be able only to share the links and some initial steps, as there is a lot of information.
  • Organise a prehackaton! by Jan Groh - interesting for the community where I live, as there will be a hackaton in Prague in May 2019. I am planning to participate in it for some tech ideas, that I hope i will be able to share online.

In overall, this meeting wss very intesive, starting from 8:30 in the morning and finishing with light talks about diferrent topics late in the evening. It was very useful from the point to see where we stand now, what are the possibiltiues for us and to recapitulate. I had also a conversation with other representative from our group about how to engage more our group or should we establish a new one - more compact and more involved. Shortly I will bring this topic to our community with the idea to start again, but with less people, much more engaged in our projects.