Chris,
Just to followup on two points in your last communication:
We are doing a post-conference feedback survey and report this year with
the Learning & Eval
people here so that we can measure impact and also have more data year to
year going forward.
Stay tuned for that later this year.
The Steering committee has also expressed preference for moving the
conference around as
you indicated below but it isn't a hard and fast 'rule'. For 2020 there
is a preference stated in
the call for proposals to get proposals from Asia/Pacific. Of course the
final recommendation will be based on
the strongest proposal per the criteria. The committee is advisory and
makes a recommendation to
the WMF, who is responsible then for further vetting and funding. We
will be revamping the
Wikimania Handbook in the future and will try to clarify issues like this a
bit more.
Great discussion/points Andrew and Chris... thanks
Ellie
WMF Event Manager
On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 1:44 PM, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Andrew,
I think your conclusions are largely the same as the points I'm trying
to make, so all is good! Don't get me wrong, I do think Wikimania has
an important impact, and don't actually want to stop having it every
year, I'm just curious about the silence that has followed that WMF
consultation.
I do think though that of everything that happens in the movement,
Wikimania is (usually, largely) the thing where there is the least
clarity about goals and the least thinking about impact. There are
grant proposals to the WMF for much less expensive (and indeed, less
*important*) things that have gone into significantly more detail
about expected impact and ways of measuring it than Wikimania ever
has. In this way, Wikimania is usually very much an outlier from the
process of learning and evaluation that the rest of the 'organised
part' of the movement is taking part in. So far as I can tell, there
are some good reasons contributing to this (the desire to keep things
flexible for whoever is volunteering to organise it in the host
country, and the relatively short planning cycle for such a massive
event) as well as some not so good.
I was very pleased to see David talking about the impact of Wikimania
at the metrics meeting, and hear about some interesting ideas about
looking at its impact on South Africa - which is great, and
significantly more than Wikimedia UK managed after Wikimania 2014
(another story there) - and it would be wonderful to see some kind of
reflection about how we can measure the impact of Wikimania on the
global Wikimedia community.
Equally, I can't say that I have a clear understanding of who is
responsible for what regarding Wikimania. The last thing I heard from
the Wikimania Committee was the idea of a three-year rotation between
North America, Europe and Everywhere Else, which now seems to have
been quietly abandoned (like... has it?)
Thank you for engaging in this conversation,
Chris
On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 4:28 PM Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 4:31 AM Chris Keating <
chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Lodewijk,
If Wikimania was an entity rather than an event, it would be in the
top 5 entities in the movement - a smaller budget than WMF, Wikimedia
Deutschland and the Wiki Education Foundation but larger than anything
else...
Chris, you seem to have a particular angle determined through fitting
particular data to your conclusion. A point by point breakdown will be
mired down in bickering, so let me address some misconceptions while also
embracing and agreeing with some of your feedback.
Since I've been to every single Wikimania and serve on the steering
committee, obviously I don't share your existential doubt about
Wikimania's
role in our movement. But read on for things I do
agree with you on
regarding the future of the conference. Again: I'm not speaking on behalf
of the commitee. This is just me.
- "If Wikimania was an entity rather than an event" - But it's not. The
goals, format and audience is completely different and makes for a
problematic financial comparison. But even if you get past that, I would
argue that annual Wikimania is indeed one of the "top 5" occurrences in
our
community each year, even if it's not
universally accessible to all
volunteers. It's where ideas and experiences are exchanged and the only
systematic way WMF openly interacts with the community in a face to face
format. Recall - WMCON/Wikimedia Summit is casting off the "learning and
capacity-building" and will be capped at 200 participants. This makes
Wikimania even more crucial in this role.
Important initiatives of our movement started at Wikimania. You state in
your user page you took part in one of the first GLAM engagement with the
British Museum in 2010 with the Hoxne Challenge. Did you know that the
GLAM
movement had its genesis with Wikimania 2008 in
Alexandria, Egypt, when
Liam Wyatt and the Wikimania organizers had the first "backstage pass"
and
meeting with their staff? [1] [2]
- "it doesn't have any objectives" - But it does if you read the
Wikimania
page, even if it is not down to the level of
detail of an academic
conference or a board retreat. Wikimania is intentionally wiki-like in
this
aspect, which may be what is perceived as a lack
of objective. By design,
the ability of each team to run with a new concept is part of dynamic.
One
of Wikipedia's pillars is "we're
here to build an encyclopedia," and
people
fill it with meaning. Similarly, the goal of
Wikimania as "an annual
gathering of the Wikimedia community" is filled differently with meaning
from year to year with a BE BOLD ethos with different visions and
parameters of the organizing team. Some years there is an experimental
idea
like 2016 Esino Lario.[3] Sometimes there is a
button-downed public
sector
co-conference like 2012 Tech@State. [4]
- "online discussion that reached a conclusion that no-one appears
willing
to support" - As Lodewijk mentioned
previously, there were significant
issues with the way the consultation was run so that the conclusion was
dubious. If you asked me to find the least desirable time period to do a
consultation, it would be exactly the one chosen – "15 December 2015 to
19
January 2016" when globally, most folks in
the professional world and
academia are disengaged or removed from a computer screen. Additionally,
it
is hard to produce useful dialogue around strict
voting for three rigid
options. [5] Chris Schilling of the Foundation who oversaw the process
was
clear in Esino Lario's meeting that the
consultation was not binding as
was
but one part of the discussion.
- Here's what I agree with you on:
-- Better reporting on results and evaluation of effectiveness - We do
have
reporting on the outcomes on meta wiki, including
detailed stats and
figures for each conference, as they need to be compared with the
original
bid. But the long term analysis is often lacking,
with folk knowledge
being
more influential in decisions than explicit
reporting and strategy. This
year's Wikimania evaluation by Douglas Scott was presented at the
September
activities meeting and can be seen on the Youtube
video. [6] But we
rarely
get a chance to evaluate long term trends or
effectiveness.
-- Diversity in the Wikimania Committee - We should go beyond the
existing
practice of tapping previous Wikimania leads to
be members. I was brought
on as part of that trend, but it should be continued to expand the size
and
diversity of backgrounds of the committee. To be
fair, it's a rather
thankless job that was cobbled together over the years out of necessity
rather than by design. But we should do better here.
- My overall view - Wikimedia/Wikipedia is a multibillion dollar brand
that
is consistently in the top 10 most visited web
sites in the world. It
shares that rarified air with companies in the hundreds of billions of
dollars in valuation. Wikipedia is built on the efforts of volunteers,
and
it is vitally important we nurture that community
or we die. Think about
it
– spending in the area of $1 million is a paltry
sum compared to the
value
to our community and to the world. In fact,
I'd argue we are very much
underspending in this area, and way too insular in how we work. We are
not
systematically embracing our partners in open
culture such as Internet
Archive, Creative Commons, Mozilla Foundation and GLAM institutions,
while
they are running broad-based inclusive
international conferences with a
big
tent. We are consistently seen in the public eye
as the hallmark of open
knowledge and the power of volunteerism, yet we do not lead with this
conference nor do we readily open our doors to collaborators.
Thanks for your feedback. I don't want a debate on this issue to be seen
as
a silencing tactic. Far from it. It should be a
way to sharpen existing
practices and encourage new ideas.
As the Wikimania Committee liaison with the Sweden 2019 team, I've
encouraged them to take on some of the things discussed above, such as
working more closely with like-minded institutions and to not necessarily
repeat all aspects of previous conferences. Discussions like these help
bring these issues to the fore and make the whole process more
transparent,
_Wikimedia_delegation_(2689602220).jpg
_Wikimania/Outcomes
[6] -
https://youtu.be/TTtb4dEypQk?t=3m24s
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