June was busy and fun! Just check all the things that happened.
Vodcast
WikiAfrica Hour had the theme: #36: Does the Wikimedia movement contribute to the SDGs? and I was a guest representing the user group. It went well in my opinion and I think it might be an inspiring episode for people who see it.
User group meeting
We had a good and productive meeting, and another member of the user group organized it. That was a lovely feeling. Minutes are published.
Affiliate health
The Affiliations Committee published new criteria for judging the health of the affiliates, and based on that I made a table to see how well Wikimedians for Sustainable Development meet them. The table makes it clear that we have some room for improvement, and makes it very actionable what we need to do.
Goals and strategy
One very concrete thing we are missing are measurable goals. So I started a page for us to collect them. When doing that, I thought it would be necessary to connect them to the movement strategy, and set up a strategy page for the user group to do that connection. Of course, both of these are just empty placeholders for now, but at least we have some concrete things for the agenda for our upcoming meetings.
Voting on the Movement Charter
The user group may vote on the adoption of the Movement Charter, so I started a page for our vote and got nominated as the person to submit it on the behalf of the user group.
Newsletter
I sent another monthly newsletter, and this one was full of stuff, both from the user group and from around the movement.
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.
User group meeting
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.
Newsletter
There were also plenty of cool things happening in the community, and the newsletter for May was fun to write.
Grant
Last month, I reported I submitted a grant for starting a secretariat. Unfortunately, it was declined.
I have been podcasting for Wikipediapodden for almost five years now. The show is a weekly news run down with recurring segments. However, often when I go to Wikimedia events, I bring my gear and record special episodes, interviews with some of the attendees of the event. I did this again for the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin this year too, when I participated as the representative for Wikimedians for Sustainable Development.
After I recorded the interview with Eva Martin, from the organizing team in Wikimedia Deutschland, she asked if she could interview me with the same questions I was using. I accepted, and we recorded straight away. The result was published today.
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.
Wikimedia Summit 2024
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.
Grant writing
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 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.
User group meeting about roles and responsibilities
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 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.
Annual report 2023
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.
Plan a user group meeting
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.
January newsletter
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.
A few years back, I got inspired by Daniel Mietchen for New Year’s resolutions. While inspiring and important, the way I did it was not really what I imagined, and I did not continue in 2022. Basically, I hadn’t thought through how I wanted to document it, and it all became a bit too ad hoc to feel like I was doing it with purpose.
Themes
Now I have given it quite some thought and have two new themes that I am inspired about. The themes are Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and Fediverse. To read about my ambitions in detail and see the progress overview, check this dashboard for my 2024 New Year’s Resolutions.
Documentation
I have also figured out that the way I want to document my progress is by monthly blog posts here, one for each theme. I’ll create a tag for each of them so that they all can be found easily later (fediverse 2024 and sustainability 2024).
Running
While not really a resolution as such this year, with the results from the last two years, I will keep my ambition of running 5 km every second day.
EDIT (2024-01-19): As I am also planning to do a lot more hiking this year, and that usually “eats up” running days even though it is also beneficial for general health, I will allow for those to be counted as a third of the distance. For example, a hike of 15 km would be counted as a 5 km run.
I was recently a guest on the podcast Between the brackets. The podcast usually covers MediaWiki related topics, but from time to time, also have Wikimedians as guests. It was a lot of fun, since we talked about almost all the things I am currently involved in. We mostly talked about the Foundation for Public Code, Wikidata, Govdirectory, Wikimedians for Sustainable Development but also a bit about AI and Abstract Wikipedia.
Last week, the yearly Wikimedia conference Wikimania took place, and while I was not there in person, I was very much participating in the hybrid components of it. In general, it went quite smoothly, and I hope that all future Wikimanias will learn from this to enable more remote participation. This has two advantages. First, people who would otherwise not been able to join at all can join and second, people who would otherwise have needed to fly to go to the conference can enjoy it from their home.
Overview
Following the learning pattern Documenting your event experience, I continuously documented what I was doing, watching and participating in, along with notes of thoughts those brought me. In total, I partook in 77 sessions and organized another 3 myself during the conference. I have later watched another 12 sessions and have 22 still on my backlog, so the conference will stay in my mind for quite some time. I will delve deeper into the different aspects of my Wikimania experience below.
This session, about making a climate related edit on the Wikimedia projects every day for 365 days in a row, was a prerecorded lightning talk, which made it possible for me to be very active in the chat. However, no complex questions there, but at least a few cheers. Hopefully, more people will join in on the campaign as they come back to normal routines after Wikimania.
The talk and slides are available on Wikimedia Commons.
Add your country to the Wikidata Govdirectory
Here we presented the workflow of adding a new country on the Wikidata side of Govdirectory. It turned a bit chaotic due to no moderation in the physical room and odd use of Zoom rooms, but I think at least it shows the steps in a helpful way. It was pleasing to see both Bulgaria and Morocco being worked on in the day after the talk.
The talk.
Livestreaming editing
Perhaps the most fun session of these for me, as it went very smooth, and my panelists were all lovely and professional. We were discussing why we were livestreaming ourselves editing, what we think is the value in it, and gave a few tips. Very meta, and triply so, as this session in itself was livestreamed.
The talk.
Wikiproject Govdirectory
Differently from the other Govdirectory session, this was a poster session. It was based on the one I used at WikiCon NL last fall. I’ll include a version below, but you can also view the full pdf. This one was printed in A2 size and displayed in the expo session in the main hall. So far, I haven’t got any feedback from it yet, which I choose to interpret as the information was clear.
I had hoped to be a bit more productive in the Hackathon, but I mostly got stuck hacking on one function for the new Wikifunctions project. Not that it was that much hacking that I did, but rather since it was a non-trivial, I learned a lot about how the system will work in practice. This feels very valuable, as now I can speak about it with some hands-on experience.
Other sessions
There were far too many sessions for me to get a comprehensive overview of them all. But I did like the high amount. It feels like a very healthy community when there are over 300 sessions of high quality. In hindsight, I also appreciate the many different tracks, as it allowed for many aspects to shine. Of course, I too experienced Fear Of Missing Out, when there were several interesting sessions happening at the same time. It was somewhat mitigated by the knowledge that all the sessions also will be available for eternity, so it boiled down to selecting which sessions I was most likely to interact in. I ordered them for my own overview on my user page. Unfortunately, even though there was a separate chat for each virtual room, there wasn’t always someone available to bridge questions in the chat to the speaker.
Wikimania Challenge
New for this year was a concurrent editing challenge during the conference – Wikimania Challenge. It was a bit of a scavenger hunt style competition with different tasks to complete during the days. A fun way to edit with a wide spread of tasks over the different projects. I was one of the few that completed enough tasks in time to get my name on the big screen during the closing ceremony, and I also received this nice certificate.
Wikimania editing challenge certificate.
Eventyay – the conference platform
It was great to see Wikimania being run on a free and open source platform, Eventyay (and also using Pretalx for the submission process). I am also happy that the event is still available there. It was also great to see developers from the Eventyay project hanging around answering questions and documenting bugs as they were discovered. I found one that they also fixed during the event and made another feature request.
While a huge step forward, there were still some serious issues with selected components. In particular, speakers were connected using Zoom. Not only is it proprietary, but their recent changes in Terms of Service make me, and others, hesitant to use it. I understand that it has a feature for using live translators, but this is an issue we should help solve as it is so important for our movement.
What’s next?
As usual, a Wikimania leaves you with loads of inspiration and ideas. So what will I try to do next?
The talk Intensive Wikidata usage in Wikivoyage – problems, experiences, wishes (video) showed of an interesting script that can make it possible for users to easily compare the values in an infobox with the values on Wikidata. I will investigate if this is something we can use on Swedish Wikipedia as we have several infoboxes that are able to get data from Wikidata.
The entire track about the different Wiki Loves campaigns was inspiring, particularly the talk Wiki Loves in Numbers (video), and I will contact Wikimedia Nederland to see how we can get a Wiki Loves Earth going here in 2024.
