Have not been posting much because the Internet access has been problematic at times..,
... But WikiWomenCamp ended yesterday and today we have been having WikiGenero.
The past few days have been fabulous and for the most part, drama free. If you didn't get the chance to attend this year, I highly suggest trying to make the next one.
We had women and transgendered people representing 15 countries. There was, Not counting Sue Gardner , only one native English speaker. The conference was facilitated in two languages, with all women no matter the language feeling they could speak, others often stepped in to make sure they could. We had younger women in university and others who were retired.
At WikiWomenCamp, We discussed a wide variety of topics from Wiki Loves Monuments to Chapters to why women do not edit to project management to working on research related to the gender gap to discussing research methods related to Wikipedia to the challenges of the open source communicty versus the esiting wikimedia community to to issues in South East Asia to journalism to issues related to LGBT articles and dealing with the harrassment. We also worked on solutions to some problems identified at the conference including creating translations of materials and conference notes, to creating a new mailing list in English and Spanish where women could privately go to get support when dealing with harrassment that will be supported by active experienced members of the community to starting to take steps to relaunch the WikiChix wiki to starting to plan for the next WikiWomenCamp. (hopefully, the last point can have an announcement at the end of June.)
Many of the participants had never participated in an Open Space event before. There was a tremendous leap of faith required for many to show up to an all women's conference, which in some case involved airfare around $2100 USD and required over 36 hours in transit, where the the schedule was a bit fluid and where the agenda was not developed until about 20 minutes into the conference, and where the purpose was vague beyond provide a space and time for all these different women in the movement to get together and talk and collaborate together so they could go home and be more effective leaders. Those who attended all appeared to have gotten something out of it and the ones I have talked to are glad they came.
Thanks are again owed to Wikimedia Argentina for hosting the event. I'm not sure how my chapter would respond if some one e-mailed us out of the blue and said we will / should host a completely new conference with a very different format that was bound to (and did) cause some controversy. The accommodation was close to the venue and safe. The food was nice. The local wikimedian community opened their arms to us. Thanks are also owed to Wikimedia Australia who were the first chapter on board to financially support this conference. Thanks are also owed to Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia Osterich who also supported WikiWomenCamp and helped being women from around the globe to attend. As women, we managed to pull together the money from chapters and elsewhere to make this happen. Thanks are also to Sue Gardner who joined us for the last day of WikiWomenCamp and was a speaker at WikiGenero. Thanks also the the Foundation for bringing in a male speaker for WikiGenero (and Wm-AR for handling visa issues for him). Lots and lots of people and organizations made a leap of faith and I hope they feel rewarded for it. :)
Many many pictures are available on Commons. Notes are available on Meta. Tweets can be found with #wikiwomen . We were mentioned in a local newspaper if you want to better follow what we were up to.
Sincerely, Laura Hale