Thanks, Luis. It was a bit hard to tell from the promotion of the event if there would be 10 or 100 participants, so I wasn't sure if it was just that I hadn't run into anyone or if...well, you know...like Fight Club...

In any case, one of the participants, who wishes to remain unnamed, sent me an email and gave permission to share his thoughts, as follows:

There were about two dozen attendees in cafe style seating, probably a male majority but at least a third female.

There were several WMF staff, enough at least to show that they are interested in the topic.

Attendees were skewed towards the English speaking world as compared to wikimania generally and included some admins.

There were some strict confidentiality rules about the event including a ban on photographs and I'm being careful not to say who was there. But it was thought provoking and to my knowledge provoked several subsequent discussions among participants.

The meat of the workshop was a series of example scenarios that were first discussed in the table groups and the summated results were then fed back to the room. Some got a fairly limited range of responses from the different tables, others less so. For a workshop from an outside organisation the scenarios showed they had done their homework, though some could do with a little further tailoring for Wikipedia.

I wouldn't say that I came out of it with a new skill set, but some of the scenarios garnered female reactions that hasn't occurred to me, and I suspect we all came out of it having learned better ways to handle some of the scenarios.

It would be possible to repeat the event and roll it out in the movement either in major metropolitan areas or at future conferences, but it requires a culture specific workshop leader and in person attendance.

There was a post event survey of participants so there may be some publicity as to what the participants thought of it.

Another correspondent was kind enough to link me to the "basic" materials for the workshop, which of course the Ada Initiative has given in other settings. 

Risker/Anne

On 24 July 2015 at 18:12, Luis Villa <lvilla@wikimedia.org> wrote:

I suspect it was just time pressures rather than a conspiracy of silence, Risker :) I certainly thought it was worthwhile and useful, and would have been happy to chat about it if you'd asked.

Obviously we need to think about scaling and impact if we want to do more of it, but I think that's certainly doable (especially if it is part of a larger strategy for cultural change).

Luis

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 2:53 PM, Risker <risker.wp@gmail.com> wrote:

What it says on the tin.

 

Even though I was present at Wikimania, I heard very, very little about the Ally Skills workshop, even when I asked participants about it.  (In fact I don't think I got a straight answer to a single question about it.)

 

Given the interest about this workshop on this list, and the fact that several of us would have liked to attend but had other commitments (whether or not at Wikimania), I think many of us would like to hear at least some bare-bones feedback about the session.

 

How many attendees?  Male/female ratio? Key themes? Are any of the participants comfortable in saying whether they felt they came away from the session with new tools or skills that they feel will be useful? 

 

I'm going to be honest, the silence about this well-supported experiment has me very curious. 

 

Risker/Anne

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--

Luis Villa
Sr. Director of Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation

Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

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