Hello everyone,
We have a few updates regarding the WikiConference India 2020 proposal for Hyderabad. Firstly, we are happy to share the news that there has been a very good positive response from individual Wikimedians[1]. Also there have community-wide discussions on local Village Pumps on various languages. Several of these discussions have reached consensus[2], and are supporting this idea.
We will be engaging with more communities this week, and clear any concerns/doubts people may have during this week. Also to wrap up these discussions and conclude, we would like to call for IRC.
Details of IRC:
Timings and Date: 6:00 pm on 20 August 2019
Website: https://webchat.freenode.net/
Channel: #wci
Looking forward for all your active participation. Hope you all have a great week ahead.
Thanks & Rewards,
Pavan.
On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 11:45 PM pavan santhosh <pavansanthosh.s@gmail.com> wrote:Hello all,
We would like to thank everyone who have shown their interest by providing support or initiating discussions on the Meta-Wiki page, or in this thread.
It is indeed thrilling to see a lot of support, interest and enthusiasm in Indian Wikimedians about this proposal for Wiki Conference India 2020. We will continue to engage in the talk page with the ideas and issues floated about this proposal as we have already mentioned in initial mail: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_India_2020:_Initial_conversations.
If any of the communities would like to endorse the proposal as a community, it would be great to see such a support. Please do it at the earliest possible, latest by 18th. This will help us to speed up the process, if there are any other comments, please direct them to the talk page[1]
Thanks & Regards,
Pavan Santhosh & Krishna Chaitanya
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_India_2020:_Initial_conversations
On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 5:09 PM Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur@gmail.com> wrote:This is with regards to the suggestion that the proposed forthcoming WikiConference, be a SAARC event, which was given by Abhinav Shrivastava.That is definitely a good idea, but not now in place of a national level conference pertaining to and focussing primarily on our country.The foci of a national conference and an international conference are completely different. So, that conference definitely needs to be arranged but not here, not now.A second reason is that due to the geopolitics being such, there have been cases of candidates being invited to participate in the conferences in India and visas not being granted. There seems to be no way around this at present.Thirdly, Indian issues, by virtue of our numbers of communities, size and complexities, would totally drown out the regional combined interests and the individual interests of foreign communities. So, the SAARC Conference should have Indian representation but as a participant proportionally the same as each other SAARC country, not dominating vide our size, sophistication and reach.For that and other reasons, it may be appropriate for SAARC WikiConference to be held in another country or if it is to be held in India, then a year or two down the line after WikiConference India.Of course, Wikimedian representatives of SAARC communities are welcome to attend our proposed national conference as usual.Let that SAARC Conference be planned and worked on by Abhinav for subsequent implementation, since he has mooted this on behalf of Chapter.However, that idea needs to be sounded out first on the international list to give notice to the communities of those countries._______________________________________________On Wed, Oct 2, 2019, 2:39 PM Dhaval S. Vyas <dsvyas@gmail.com> wrote:Happy Gandhi Jayanti to you and all!Very pleased to see WCI being organised again, as they say, better late than never. Thanks Telugu wiki community for taking lead. I will love to help remotely as much as I can and will hope to be able to attend it as well.Kind Regards,Dhaval_______________________________________________On Wed, 2 Oct 2019, 05:06 pavan santhosh, <pavansanthosh.s@gmail.com> wrote: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[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:
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--Pavan Santhosh.
--Pavan Santhosh.