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[1]
In 2018, the Community Resources team at the Wikimedia Foundation published 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[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 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: