Dear Fellow Wikimedians, Happy Gandhi Jayanti!
Hope all of you are doing well. I am writing this email to start an initial
conversation to host WikiConference India 2020 in Hyderabad.
Many of us know that we had two national conferences in India till date -
the first one in 2011 in Mumbai, and the second one in 2016 in Chandigarh.
Both the conferences had been effective in bringing the diverse and massive
Indian community together for a collective effort. The cross-community
connections made during these conferences led many future collaborations
across the country.
I was one of the participants in 2016, and as I clearly remember, during
the closing note, it was stressed upon that WCI should ideally happy
annually, at least bi-annually, and we shouldn’t be waiting years all
together for the next conference. But it has been more than three years
since the last conference, and we are yet to have one. With this as a
background, we have been discussing this for quite some time, and we
decided recently to take the baton forward and host the WCI in Hyderabad in
2020. We are willing to invest the required time and energy to make this
happen. Also we have had an initial conversation about this on Telugu
Wikipedia Village Pump, and the local community is in support of this. The
discussion can be seen here
<https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%AA%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%A1%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%AF%E0%B0%BE:%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%9A%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%9A%E0%B0%AC%E0%B0%82%E0%B0%A1#2020_%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%AE%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%A1%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%AF%E0%B0%BE_%E0%B0%9C%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%A4%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%AF_%E0%B0%B8%E0%B0%AE%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%B5%E0%B1%87%E0%B0%B6%E0%B0%82_(%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80_%E0%B0%95%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%A8%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%AB%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%86%E0%B0%A8%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B8%E0%B1%8D_%E0%B0%87%E0%B0%82%E0%B0%A1%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%AF%E0%B0%BE)_%E0%B0%B9%E0%B1%88%E0%B0%A6%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%AC%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%A6%E0%B1%81%E0%B0%B2%E0%B1%8B>
[1]
In 2018, the Community Resources team at the Wikimedia Foundation
published Global
Event Strategy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2018/Reading_material#Global_Event_Strategy>[2]
which stressed on more and regular regional conferences. Such conferences
are being organized in other parts of the world such as WikiIndaba, CEE
Meeting, North America, Iberocoop, Francophone convention, Wikiarabia,
ESEAP etc. Even next year’s Wikimania is being organized by a group of
affiliates and that journey started with them organizing ESEAP conference
in 2018.
This conference can and will bring our energies, ideas, learnings, and
hopes together. It will help us in our journey towards better
collaborations, diverse efforts and reinforce our identity as the Indian
Wikimedia community. This conference will enable us to have better
knowledge about current capacities, the gaps and also to build leadership.
Exploring opportunities, bringing out leadership, empowering communities,
providing a strategic understanding are some of which this conference can
bring out. Apart from all these, providing a national-level platform for
Indian Wikimedians to connect, re-connect, and establish their
collaboration itself can be a very important purpose on it’s own.
I hope we, the Indian Wikimedia Community members, come together in our
various capacities and make this a reality by 2020. I believe we all will
take learnings from earlier attempts and improve processes & use best
practices in conducting this conference purposefully and fruitfully.
Our entire thought has been put into this Meta-Wiki page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2020:_Initial_conversations>[3],
which has a more detailed explanation of what is what, and why. Since this
tends to large and an important discussion, please keep all the
conversations to talk page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_India_2020:_Initial_conversations>
of above link[4]. We can’t comfortably converse about multiple issues on
one email thread (unlike sections on a page), and multiply emails can be
annoying by spamming inboxes and tough to keep a track. So we would kindly
urge all the conversations to be kept on the above-mentioned talk page.
Thanks & regards,
Pavan Santhosh and Krishna Chaitanya
Links:
1.
https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/వికీపీడియా:రచ్చబండ#2020_వికీమీడియా_జాతీయ_సమావ…
<https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/>
2.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2018/Reading_material#…
3.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2020:_Initial_conversa…
4.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_India_2020:_Initial_con…