funderingar från mig
This month has been my least active so far this year. Even so, I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. But besides that, I have not much to report.
What I am currently hesitating on, is setting up a PeerTube place to stream to. I am still not sure if I should host one myself, or just join an existing instance. A bit more research is needed.
This is the second half of my fifth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.
Surprisingly, the tables were turned when after an interview at the Wikimedia summit in April, Eva Martin offered to interview me. I agreed, and here is the episode where I elaborate on the experience of the summit with the perspective of being there as a representative for the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development. While it is a bit specific for the summit, it still is a good introduction to the user group.
I announced a user group meeting, but it was not many attendees. I still took some notes and published the minutes.
On a more positive note, another user group member offered to help announce the meetings and already scheduled one for 16 June after a bit of coaching. This is precisely what I hoped for, and with just three or four more members taking on small tasks like this, it will turn into a lively group quickly.
There were also plenty of cool things happening in the community, and the newsletter for May was fun to write.
Last month, I reported I submitted a grant for starting a secretariat. Unfortunately, it was declined.
This is the first half of my fifth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.
April didn’t see much on-wiki activity for the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development user group, but I did do two large activities. Plus, I got my act together and sent a newsletter for March and April.
First, I went to the Wikimedia Summit as a representative for the user group. It was a lot of work, but really focused on the Wikimedia Movement Charter, which is so generic it won’t have much direct impact on the user group activities (but possible on the governance). I was interviewed for a podcast in my role as a user group representative, but that episode will be published in early May.
Second, I wrote an application to the O’Shaughnessy Fellowships to work on setting up a secretariat for the user group. While the likelihood it is approved is fairly low, if successful, it would give me the opportunity to work full-time in it, so keep your fingers crossed.
As it was a fellowship, much of the application is focused on me, and not relevant to share, but I also made an action plan that might be useful for someone thinking about similar progress for their affiliate. I posted that in my own Ideas repository, along with the video pitch I recorded.
This is the second half of my fourth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.
As previous months, I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. This month, I am particularly excited about the ongoing work of combining OpenBadges with ActivityPub. I saw it on this Mastodon-post, which mentioned ActivityBadges. Fingers crossed something useful comes out of this.
Also, like last month, I continued to update online profiles when I found some still referring to Twitter. I did a sweeping update on all Stack Overflow sites.
I mentioned last month about two motions I submitted for the Annual General Assembly of Wikimedia Sverige. Unfortunately, they were both rejected. However, some of the discussion was about it not being appropriate for the assembly to make this small-scale decision. Perhaps it can still be a strong enough signal to the staff to take action. Time will tell.
This is the first half of my fourth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.
This month was a slow month. While we had planned a user group meeting, the shift to daylight savings time caused confusion, and we didn’t manage to get together.
On a positive note, I managed to get a proposal for Wikimania submitted. Now, let’s hope that the program committee finds it worthy.
This is the second half of my third monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.
This month too, I continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. It is encouraging to see that there is a lot going on in this field and that it does not seem to slow down.
For myself, I have gone through my online profiles and where I previously linked to my profile on X, i have now changed them to link to Mastodon. I could make this change on GitHub, YouTube, Twitch and Facebook.
I also wrote two motions for the annual gathering of Wikimedia Sverige, one to leave X, and one to join the Fediverse. We’ll see at the end of April if the other members agree.
This is the first half of my third monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.
This is the second half of my second monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.
I organized a user group meeting and got some great help from Alex Stinson to facilitate it. We wanted to explore what further roles could be created in the user group to get more people to feel there was space for them to be more deeply involved. We go some ideas, but there is more work to be done. Minutes from the meeting.
This is the first half of my second monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.
This month was slower than January, but I did continue with similar positive reinforcements, namely boosting information about Fediverse. That activity was mainly on Mastodon, but I am aiming to widen that scope in the future.
I had planned to watch Fediverse related sessions on FOSDEM and State of Open Con, but could to my surprise not find anything else than very technical talks about integration on specific platforms. If you watched something good, please let me know!
In bigger news, I was influential in one substantial task, moving the podcast Let’s talk about public code to a Funkwhale instance: open.audio. The move itself was manual, but fairly easy due to the low number of episodes. Mostly, it was simple copy-and-paste work, and nothing really tricky at all.
One deciding factor for choosing this instance was that rather than open registration, all accounts are manually screened and all content need to have a Creative Commons license. Hopefully, this will be enough to keep the platform full of only properly licensed and sharable material.
This is the second half of my first monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.
In contrast to the other resolution, this has seen less progress, and it is still brewing a lot in my mind. What has come to change in my behavior on Mastodon, though, is that I this month has been actively boosting toots related to different Fediverse news, tools and platforms.
I watched this excellent conversation with Evan Prodromou and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue:
I was also experimenting with getting the MP3 into the toot on Wikipediapodden, a WordPress site with the ActivityPub plugin enabled, but to no success yet. It would be nice if it could be playable from inside Mastodon, just like an attached MP3 is.
I started translating PeerTube to Swedish. Not in bulk, but at least I found where to do it and got my account going.
I started a larger document with ideas of things to do during this year. Many small ideas that I need to think more about.
In particular, though, I am planning to transfer some of the Wikipedia bot accounts I set up on Twitter to Mastodon, but haven’t found frameworks that are simple enough yet. Any tips, especially guides rather than empty git repositories, for how to run that would be appreciated.
This is the first half of my monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions. I am not sure exactly how I want these monthly reports to be like yet, so I am just going to make a simple one to start with, and I’ll see how it evolves in the coming reflections.
I created the base for the annual report, basically by copying the format from last year and then adding what had been listed in the activities section over the year. With a bit of nudging in the Telegram channel, a few others added some more detail too, which was appreciated. Together with Daniel Mietchen, we added some images from the events and that was basically it.
It is thin, but it is also a fair description of our activities over the year, and I can only hope that it could also light a fire for us to do better.
As a result of my nudging, there was also a request to figure out more things people could help with. I was delighted by that and encouraged it. This led to Alex Stinson offering to help coordinate a workshop to find some activities for the user group and roles that people could take on for that. We have scheduled the workshop for February 9.
With those two points in the works, I felt inspired to start a newsletter to get this out. Luckily, there are some other activities happening too, that fit in there. Even if it is one of the shortest newsletters, I still feel good about it, as the news it carries might be one of the most important so far.
The newsletter has evolved through a couple of phases over the years, and I still don’t think it has found its final form. All ideas are welcome.