WikiWomenCamp was a very valuable experience for those of us that attended. We all learned a great deal, had the opportunity to network with other women and, by and large had our participation with the movement validated as a positive thing. I also believe, having talked to several participants and the granting bodies that helped make this conference possible, that these outcomes validate the money spent bringing these women together and the time we took out of our every day lives to attend.
Looking forward, there are several positive outcomes from this conference and things participants plan to do going forward that can use community support and that will support the community. These include:
*Conference specific outcomes:* * Sue Gardner attending the conference means those of us who attended can go back to our communities, especially those of us outside Europe and the USA, and affirm that Sue Gardner supports women working on issues brought up at the conference and working on a global local solution to the gendergap, and that this is not just a problem for English Wikipedia in the United States. * We are planning to have this event again and believe we can get additional support from inside the Chapters to help fund this important event. * Organisers have gained experience in organising international events that they can use to host future events. A session on project management was held and participants who were not key organisers gained insight into how to run events that they could take back to their own communities to run events like the one we did on a local level. * Participants learned about different chapters, how they worked, some general internal challenges and how this impacts how they function. This knowledge means participants can more easily understand why some things appear like they do on mailing lists and how this relates to them (or doesn't). It will aid in the ability for chapters to work together. * A list of reasons why women do not contribute to Wikipedia was created and actively discussed. The list is valuable because it approaches the issue from an international perspective that explains some local issues about resolving the gender gap.
*Wikimedia specific outcomes:* * A mailing list will be created for support in English and Spanish where women can ask for help with harassment they are dealing with on Wikipedia and offered solutions. A private mailing list where several people can be on call was selected because the problems would not be made public and aggravate problems. * A discussion was launched about investigating the creation of an OTRS women's specific help service. * Learning/Training materials specific to women will be created and shared with the community. These materials will make it easier to do outreach to women's communities. * The research on women in the movement will be continued to work on, with a standardised format and a process for determining what gets included resolved during a session. A committment was made that once this was completed in English (a goal for the end of September of this year), it would be translated into Spanish. This research may assist chapters in recruiting female volunteers, provide benchmarks for researchers, and giving chapters and the Foundation a very clear idea of where the movement needs to improve. * Methodologies were discussed and developed for measuring the impact of women on Wikimedia related projects that can be used by participants to conduct future research. * Translation of materials between languages will be worked on. Materials created in one place may be very useful to others but people do not know about them and cannot use them because of the language issues. * Some of the discussion will focus on why women should edit Wikipedia instead of why they do not, as this question allows for pro-active solutions that sound less demeaning to women and require less capital to improve things like the technology back end if participants can be motivated to contribute despite these issues. * Participants will go back to their local communities and continue the good work they have already been engaged in. Participants have a support network they can now more effectively utilize in doing this work and there is the potential for future projects as a result. Example: There was a discussion about possibily trying to do something between Australia and Russia for the 2014 Winter Paralympics. * A line of reasoning was created to respond to questions of "Why women only events inside the movement?" that make the need obvious: Most local WMF events are men only, and when they are not, the one or two women who registered to attend could easily be asked to leave to make the event men only. This is almost never the case for women in the movement. Other arguements and lines of reasoning were also developed.
*Broad community outcomes:* * WikiChix wiki will be re-launched as a wikis in general organisational space. The wiki will be hosted by Wikimedia Australia. Plans are under way to work on this following the Ibercoop meeting in Santiago, Chile. * Efforts will be made to increase work with female in technology groups to help increase women's participation. * In organising events in the future related to the gender gap and women in technology in general, Open Space will be seriously considered as a facilitation method given the general success of it at this event.
If you are interested in seeing the conference in action, some videos are available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_from_WikiWomenCamp_2012 . Parts of Sue's presentation are available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Audio_from_WikiWomenCamp_2012 . A list of blog posts and media reports for the conference can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomenCamp/Agenda#Other_publication .
Thanks again to everyone who attended and others who assisted in making this event possible.
Sincerely, Laura Hale VP of Wikimedia Australia and (one of the) conference organiser(s)
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
*Wikimedia specific outcomes:*
- A mailing list will be created for support in English and Spanish where
women can ask for help with harassment they are dealing with on Wikipedia and offered solutions. A private mailing list where several people can be on call was selected because the problems would not be made public and aggravate problems.
It's worth noting that this has existed before, and became extremely controversial before it was shut down. Sarah (SlimVirgin) could probably fill you in on the details. It might be a good idea to investigate the pitfalls of that attempt to avoid running into similar issues.
~Nathan
Thank you for the report, Laura. It sounds like there were some very productive discussions.
I look forward to seeing the list of reasons women don't participate on Wiki(p)(m)edia projects.
I would encourage caution about the mailing list, for the same reasons as Nathan indicated, and would indeed encourage further discussion with SlimVirgin and perhaps a few other people who were involved (pro and con) in the prior private mailing list.
Speaking as someone who moderates several non-public WMF-based mailing lists, I'm familiar with the very significant level of distrust within various communities with respect to even those lists that discuss private information (with "private" defined the same way as the WMF privacy policy). I'd encourage those participating on such a mailing list to consider a few points, such as how to persuade those excluded from the list that it is a net positive for the projects involved; how to determine who does and does not get access to the list; and how to ensure that there are always people available to respond to requests in a timely manner. I note that this list, despite all its subscribers, often has posts that receive no responses for days, even if they are bringing a substantive issue to the table.
I like the idea of Wikimedians supporting each other, in many different ways, so I hope that good planning will help this list become a reality in a form that helps women to participate in one or more of our projects.
Risker/Anne
On May 30, 2012, at 10:41 AM, Risker wrote:
I like the idea of Wikimedians supporting each other, in many different ways, so I hope that good planning will help this list become a reality in a form that helps women to participate in one or more of our projects.
It's also worth noting, when this was brought up on the OTRS list, I believe the final outcome was that the OTRS support community would be open to staffing such a list, or referring inbound inquiries to it.
(That did follow a bunch of contentious emails, but in the final analysis all the tension resulted from a simple misunderstanding early in the discussion.)
-Pete
-- Pete Forsyth [[User:Peteforsyth]]
On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 3:41 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Thank you for the report, Laura. It sounds like there were some very productive discussions.
I look forward to seeing the list of reasons women don't participate on Wiki(p)(m)edia projects.
I would encourage caution about the mailing list, for the same reasons as Nathan indicated, and would indeed encourage further discussion with SlimVirgin and perhaps a few other people who were involved (pro and con) in the prior private mailing list.
Most of the women involved with working on this were from the Spanish speaking community and my impression was English language participation would be secondary. They were also working on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomenCamp/Agenda/Gender_and_Edit_War . I wish I could find the documentation for that particular outcome session at the end as we had a sheet go around for people to volunteer to sign up. Thus, I'm short on details. I think there may be some on http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiproyecto:Ciencia,_Tecnolog%C3%ADa_y_G%C3%A9.... I'll pass along the e-mails to those I know were involved in that planning.
Sincerely, Laura Hale