2021/Organizing teams/archive

Early tentative decisions by program committee (April 26 2021)

• We'll model our call for presenters on this 2019 one: https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2019/Submissions -- that way all forms and submissions are simply on-wiki. That worked well for academic submissions too -- they'll go through a different evaluation process
• We'll want to have Spanish and French versions.
• Theme? We tentatively pick "glocal," with near alternatives: localize, decentralization, glocal, connections. (Yes, it's a word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glocal). Let's sound out these possibilities over Telegram, and make sure they are translatable. glocal is apparently a plausible word in Spanish and French too.
• Rosie: Let's prepare categories of programming, notably an academic track which we didn't have in 2020.
• In 2020 we had panels, training, individual sessions, plenaries, Coolest tool, video. Day 1 was mostly broadcast, day 2 was mostly zoom presentations and day 3 was mostly small groups and more interactive. Social time online was on Wonder. Overall the design worked and we could replicate that
• We'll figure out later when we see the submissions how many sessions and tracks we'll have
• We can plan time slots for lightning talks, perhaps an hour a day. People can sign up early or late.
• We'll plan to have a plenary session for presentations by affiliates, including pre-recorded presentations if they wish
• Before we can make available a submission form, we'll upgrade the MediaWiki on wikiconference.org. (Done by Kevin and Kunal in June, Y)
• Submissions can be classified as academic-track, lightning-talk, panel, training, perhaps duration (long, short, or other time choices); adn by topic: Tech, Safety, Editing, Academic, etc
• Tentatively we'll announce our conference and launch of our call-for-presenters on June 1 (or thereabouts)
• Academic submissions can be due through August; they need extra time to consider and for the submitter to respond. Other submissions can perhaps be considered into September. We might have rolling acceptances, not one hard date.
• Are we a real organization? Or unreal? Or surreal?

May 3 2021 Logistics committee meeting

• Last year, every session had a different zoom link; an alternative design is breakout rooms
• Wonder was open 24 hours a day. We can consider spatial.chat, gather, or other social spaces this year.
• an alternative design: breakout rooms
• like Streamyard/youtube; must choose and test these, and how to degrade/backup
• Also real-world logistics for the picnics
• We note that the captioning by google meet runs smoothly. That kind of feature would help our conference.
• Might have social time on Clubhouse, before the conference or during

May 10 2021 Communications committee meeting

• For more see their page on meta.

May 17 Program team meeting

• Shall we ask for Beginners track category of presentations, or a Training track?
• Can we offer a session ahead of time, a week or a day before the conference starts, to show the platforms we'll use? Also a good time to accept questions and requests about accessibility and accommodations -- language, disability, transcription -- Peter consider outreach to deaf user of transcription -- how's Otter.ai work for him?

May 24 Logistics team meeting

• Likely platforms: ti.to?

Sun May 30 Program+Comms teams meeting

• We want to get our call-for-presentations ready now
• To do before we launch it: translation tool, finalizing the theme, focus areas, translations; we may want to offer presentation types, including recorded vs live, lighting talk, panel, workshop; reach to Bob and prep for academic submissions; watch Wikimania
• training or beginners-oriented sessions should be invited ; we might use the ten focus areas -- Rosie suggests letting people tag or classify into these, from the strategy recommendations: sustainability; user experience; safety and inclusion; equity in decision-making; coordinate among stakeholders; develop skills and leadership; manage internal knowledge; identify topics for impact; innovations in free knowledge; and evaluation/iteration/adaptation.
• Let's invite submitters who have to write an abstract anyway to also click/tag some of these themes ; and orthogonally to choose to offer something for a beginner's track

• Mon May 31: Wikimedia Canada Annual meeting Y Lea-Kim C would be willing to evaluate GLAM submissions (and hopefully help with French)

Tue June 1

Planned announcement of call for presentations

• soft launch occurred ; we will wait to announce in a big way until Wikimania submissions are done circa June 18

Logistics agenda

• Let's make a list of platforms to evaluate and compare for the conference itself:
• interpretation, transcription, and translation: otter.ai, ava.me, zoom? google meet/translate?
• registration: ti.to, ...
• main conference sessions -- our biggest issue. 4 possibilities:
  • 1 ti.to
  • 2 techchange which rightscon.summit.tc is using, (note .tc=Turks & Caicos, .to is Tonga)
  • 3 phill?
  • 4 interact.io? used by WMF, suggested by Chen
  • Peter to follow up on these
  • also check out techchange.org -- Peter to study
• for social time: spatial.chat, wonder, hubble, ..., Pharos may be looking at other options
• for text messaging: Telegram -- we've settled on that
• related services for interpretation/transcription/translation: https://vitac.com/multi-language-captioning/, otter.ai, meet.google

• Per Chen Almog, a rubric for after-the-event evaluation: meta:Events_Team_Portal/Community_space/Event_Evaluation_Toolkit
• Advice from Victor Grigas on video: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/01/11/how-to-video-newsreel/