Summer greetings from Sweden. I can share the following from what I managed to write down from the WikiNEM meetup in Cape Town. The information on the Meta pages for WikiNEM will be updated after the summer holidays.

There is a slide deck with some basics https://wikimania2018.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WikiNEM_Meetup_Wikimania_2018.pdf.

Scholarships

We discussed that the maximum number of participants that each chapter can send is 5 and that there are scholarships to get for travel and accommodation in Stockholm of up to 3 000 SEK for 15 participants. WMSE, WMNO and Wikimedia Eesti do not need the scholarships.

Confirm start and end of meeting

It is ideal if all participants can travel so that a social event on Friday night is possible for all and also to finish the program at 16.00 on Sunday without people having to leave earlier than that.

Participants

We discussed who should participate in the meeting. Participants should be able to take on commitments after the conference, and understand that the meeting is a working conference which relies on the active participation of every one. We will reach out to invite the Sàpmi, Lithuanian and Icelandic communities to join the meeting.

Program

The proposal (see outline in slide deck from WMSE) for the program is to have it organised as an open space meeting, facilitated by Ulrike Eklund. Because it's the first meeting of it's kind, time need to be spent on getting to know each other and what the purpose of meeting in the region is. This also needs to be documented and form some kind of shared understanding to fall back on for future work and regional meetings/conferences. This we propose should be the first part of the meeting (Saturday until lunch). The WikiNEM open space can then open up and discussions will form around the topics central to participants.

There is a need to communicate to all participants what to expect from an open space meeting, which should go on the WikiNEM portal on meta. This page has some explanations of "What does an Open Space Technology event look like?" https://www.mentimeter.com/blog/great-leadership/how-to-transform-your-meetings-with-open-space-technology.

Once the list of participants is final there can be a few preparations to do as teams; fill out an organisational profile, choose someone from the team to do a short Lightning talk and some kind of prompt to think about topics to discuss. These preparations will be properly described and communicated after August.

Communication

Information will be shared on the meta portal for the meeting, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Northern_Europe_Meeting_2018/Participants (make sure to put those pages on your watch list!), and on the mailing list with organizers involved added to those emails.