On 23 May 2012 18:48, Laura Hale <laura@fanhistory.com> wrote:

Hi,

WikiWomenCamp got underway today in Buenos Aires. :D  We took a lot of pictures and videos; when we get home, many of them will be shared on Commons.  We started around 10am with an opening circle led by our lovely and wonderful facilitator Anne Goldenberg from Montreal.  The conference was facilitated using open space, so we started out with introductions and why we were here.  After the hour long happy introduction fest, we broke into two groups. The first group discussed statistics for Wikipedia and how to measure success.  The other group involved a discussion about our personal experiences editing Wikipedia as women and transgendered people.   In both session, an obvious theme emerged that there are many regional and cultural issues that make doing global projects difficult because these conditions have to be taken into consideration when doing a project. The second time period became a single group that went into three session periods.  We discussed why women did not edit Wikipedia on a personal, regional and global level.  At the end of the day, we had a closing session and one of the major themes of this was how motivated and encouraged we felt about the situation going forward, that we could go back to our local communities with a real concept of what the gender gap means both locally and globally, and have the contacts to enact change.  The Argentine catering was also fantastic (yummy!) and it enabled us to continue our seriously awesome conversations and all important networking.  Tomorrow and Friday, we're hoping to progress from a problem identification to a more solution oriented form of thinking.


Session notes can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomenCamp .


Sincerely,
Laura Hale

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