Dear Wikimedians,

Hope all of you are doing well. We are writing this email to restart the conversation to host the next WikiConference India. 

As you may remember, some of our fellow Wikimedians started a conversation regarding the next WCI in 2020 but due to the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic, it couldn't go on stage. However, we are hoping to reinitiate this discussion and for that, we need your involvement, suggestions, and support to help organize a much-needed conference in February-March of 2023. 

As you may remember, we have had two national-level conferences in India — the first one in Mumbai in 2011[1], and the second one in Chandigarh in 2016[2]. Both the conferences had been effective in bringing diverse Indian communities together for a collective effort. The cross-community connections made during these conferences led to many collaborations across the communities and further strengthens our work as a collective movement. 

The Community Resources team at the Wikimedia Foundation published Global Event Strategy[3] which stressed on more and regular regional conferences, in 2022 conferences are being organized in other regions such as WikiIndaba, CEE Meeting, North America, Iberocoop, Francophone convention, Wikiarabia, ESEAP, etc. As a community, it is crucial to have a national inter-community gathering annually or at least bi-annually. However, we only had a single conference in the past six years.

The proposed 2023 conference will bring our energies, ideas, learnings, and hopes together. It will help us in our journey towards better collaborations, and diversified efforts and reinforce our identity as the Indian Wikimedia community. This conference will enable us to have better knowledge about current capacities, and gaps and also to build equitable leadership. Apart from all these, providing a national-level platform for Indian Wikimedians to connect, re-connect, and establish their collaboration itself can be an essential purpose on its own- in the end, it will empower us all to strategize, plan ahead and collaborate- as a movement.

We hope we, the Indian Wikimedia Community members, come together in various capacities and make this a reality. We believe we will take learnings from earlier attempts, improve processes & use best practices in conducting this conference purposefully and fruitfully.

Here is a survey form[4] to get your responses on the same notion. We would like to know if you are interested in participating in a national-level conference where we can meet and plan our next activities, and purposes, learn new skills, come to know new ideas, and so on. We can proceed further only when you respond to us, actively. 

Please note: Unfortunately we are working with short timelines since the final date of proposal submission is 5 September. We request you please fill out the form by 28th August. After your responses, we can decide if we have the communities' needs and support for the conference. We plan to reuse the 2020 proposal[5] and remodel it according to the current needs of the community.

Please note that this organizing is not tied to a single community, we have formed an initial group of volunteers from different language and technical communities. For a national conference, we will of course be needing more volunteers and support. The form linked above has a section to join the organizing team if you are interested. We have created a Meta-Wiki page[6] for initial conversations and endorsements to support if you are happy with the idea of having the next WikiConference India in 2023. Please add your comments and suggestions to the talk page[7] directly which will be constantly monitored and updated once every 48 hours.

Look forward to hearing from you and also taking some collective steps towards having us all together in 2023!

Thanks & Regards,

Nivas, Nitesh, Neechalkaran & Vasanth

Links:

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011

2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2016

3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2018/Reading_material#Global_Event_Strategy

4. https://forms.gle/VMnqcy9Kd9yipGoC8

5. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/WikiConference_India_2020

6. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2023:_Initial_conversations

7. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_India_2023:_Initial_conversations