Hi,
A different angle for looking at the question of WMF staff attending community events which may help this conversation:
As a staff member (and acknowledging that my position is none of the ones Thierry called out in their first email on this thread), with the exception of a few community events, I very much hesitate to attend a local community-run event unless the specific community, or at least one person from that community, has specifically invited me or told me I should consider attending. There is definitely some feeling of fear/self-consciousness on my end about entering in a place where I may not be welcome, where I impose my presence to others, or entering conversations where my expertise may not be valued/considered because I'm carrying a history which may or may not even be really mine.
I'm sharing my feelings and the way I think about whether to attend a local event or not here not to ask for empathy in my specific case (which is btw, always welcomed:) but to say that there may be other staff members like me, especially those who have joined WMF more recently, who may be in the same boat. My recommendation would be for the local communities to signal to the specific people which they want in their meetings that they're welcome to attend. At least this way you will know the person has felt invited/welcomed and will have a higher chance to decide to attend.
To be clear: I'm not saying WMF not attending this specific event would have been addressed by the above. I don't know. I'm just explaining one of the reasons this may have happened, and providing a suggestion to address this specific reason.
Best, Leila -- Leila Zia Principal Research Scientist, Head of Research Wikimedia Foundation
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 4:20 AM Philip Kopetzky philip.kopetzky@gmail.com wrote:
Gereon, you clearly forget the whole Mediaviewer saga and attendance of WMF staff at the following WikiCon in Cologne ;-) But that was a long time ago :-)
On Mon, 16 Sep 2019 at 01:53, Gereon Kalkuhl gkalkuhl@freenet.de wrote:
Since 2010 we have the WikiCon for the German language communities with more than 300 attendants. I don't remember that the WMF has sent anyone to these conventions. And why should they? It's all in German, the communities are established and have strong chapters. I suppose the same applies to the French language communites. The WMF visits emerging communities, to learn about them and to help them by transfering knowlege. They visit the CEE meetings, they visit Wiki Indabas. I don't think that the WMF is neglecting big communities, it rather makes sense that when sending employes across half the planet they check before, what benefits the conferences have from their attendance and what benefits their attendance bring to the particpants of the conference. Cheers, Gereon
Am 15.09.2019 um 20:02 schrieb Thierry Coudray:
"*The Foundation does not care so much of the French-speaking
contributors*".
This harsh sentence is the translation of a statement in French, I've
just
said in a conversation a week ago at the Francophone Wikiconvention held last weekend in Brussels. The statement may seem excessive, because the Foundation does things for the Francophone community as well as for other communities (and its website is fairly well translated into French). But
it
reflected my feeling, shared by my three interlocutors, all non-French, facing that no Foundation high-level members were present to this Wikiconvention: no executive director, nor members of the Board, nor any level-C staff. In an another conversation, where the subject came up over again, someone said this absence was offensive. I do not know if it reflects the majority of attendees feelings but with varying degrees, I would said it was widely shared.
In 2017, for the Francophone Wikiconvention in Strasbourg we had a very quick visit of Katherine Maher, in 2018, a simple video message and in
2019
... nothing. At the same time, the Francophone Wikiconvention has stepped up with ever more participants, always more countries represented. This year, it brought together more than 220 Francophones, Algerian, Belgian, Beninese, Cameroonian, Canadian, French, Guinean, Ivorian, Swiss and Tunisian contributors, and I may forget some, with varied and enriching conferences and meetings. A huge success, very well organized by
employees
but also by several volunteers, who dedicated time and energy. This Wikiconvention and the projects and achievements submitted have shown the French-speaking Wikimedia community vitality, which will continue to
grow.
FYI, French is foreseen, thanks to Africa, to be the most rapidly growing languages in the next twenty years and will be the mother tongue or the language used for communication for more than 8% of the world's
population
in thirty years' time. But my reaction would have been the same if I had attended an Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Swahili-speaking or any other important languages Wikiconvention.
So yes, this Wikiconvention is not in English. Fortunately, not all Wikimedia meetings are in English. In a previous discussion on this
mailing
list about the question of whether or not it is appropriate to continue Wimania, one of the participants argued that unlike other Wikimedia meetings, anyone could attend Wikmania. It may be obvious for those who have English as a mother tongue or for Northern Europeans for whom
English
is almost a second mother tongue but this is false: English is spoken
only
by a small minority in the world, less than one human in six. So only one human in six or seven could attend Wikimania or any other
english-speaking
conferences or meetings (the case of the vast majority of global
Wikimedia
conferences). I do not deny a common working language usefulness but a Wikiconvention in French, as I hope other languages ones will be more to come soon, allows all non-English speaking Francophones to participate in the Wikimedia movement and above all, help them to meet our common goal
of
spread freeknowledge.The movement talks a lot about its efforts to
overcome
differents gaps (gender, LGBT,...) and it's rightly pointed, these topics are important. But it simply forget the language gap and the almost exclusive use of English excludes a very large majority.
So why no high level Foundation members in Brussels ? I was told that Valerie D'Costa, the new Chief of Community Engagement, should initially be there but finally told she will not. But then, no
other
member could then replace her and why only one Foundation representant given the part of French language in the WM projects ? Perhaps no
Foundation
Board or high level member speaks French or feels she/he speaks good
enough.
But with more than 220 attendants at the FWC, it would have been easy to find volonteers with a good level of English to provide simultaneous translation in discussions with other non-English speaking participants
or to
translate conferences.A higher-level representation would have helped the Foundation top level to gain more insight into Wikimedian French-speaking community and enabled this community to have a direct access to the Foundation, like in Wikimania. That would have helped bridging the gap between these "two worlds". Because this gap is real. In the 2011 Finance Meeting in Paris, during workshops where a Board member was in each group (Jan-Bart de Vreede for mine), me and another non english-speaking chapter head
(she/he
will recognize her/himself) had made the comment that we had the
impression
in our relation with the Foundation of "*colliding with an Anglo-Saxon
wall*".
I notice that despite more Foundation staff diversity in recent years, French speaking organizations would probably still have the same feeling and clearly many French-speaking wikimedians feel that gap.
It is sad that the Foundation, which is very demanding with Francophone chapters, does not apply itself to these demands with the Francophone community. FYI the next French-speaking Wikconvention will be held on WE
31
october/1 November 2019 in Tunis. Save the date.
Regards
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