Final report on the conference
WikiConference North America was held on Thursday-Sunday, October 3-6, 2024.
Objectives
WikiConference North America (WCNA) is the annual conference for Wikimedians in North America, including Canada, the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean. WCNA 2024 was the 11th such conference. Attendees of WCNA include new and experienced Wikimedians editing all Wikimedia sister projects in several languages (especially English, Spanish and French) as well as GLAM and cultural institution professionals, educators, and technologists. The program for the conference was designed to share information, educate and inspire these varied attendees. For many participants, WCNA is the only large Wikimedia conference they attend.
The conference organizers committed early to certain goals for the conference:
- (a) welcoming attendees from the U.S. midwest, who do not often have a nearby Wikimedia conference, and specifically to Indianapolis
- (b) improving our inclusivity to Spanish speakers, by arranging captions or audio interpretation across languages
- (c) being able to sponsor attendees to add through scholarships and travel aid, and making the overall experience affordable
- (d) offering workshops and training for both new and experienced editors, not just one-to-many broadcasts of presentations
Overall outcomes
Update from 2021: Over the course of October 8-10, 2021, over 65 sessions were streamed across two presentation tracks and a breakout track, plus edit-a-thons. Two of the presentation tracks were also provided with live translation in English and Spanish, and these tracks were livestreamed on YouTube along with a livestream of their audio interpretation into the other language. There were three invited plenary talks, two in English and one in Spanish. In addition, there was a special Friday night trivia broadcast with social media star Annie Rauwerda, creator of the popular Twitter, Instagram and TikTok feeds @depthsofwikipedia.
Of our 324 registrants, 266 people logged into the conference platform over the course of the weekend—an 82% turnout. Additional members of the public watched our videos on YouTube. The attendee experience was positive, as reflected in evaluations and anecdotal comments. The technology for the conference was a combination of a paid platform (Hopin) plus volunteer efforts to run the streams to YouTube and moderate sessions behind the scenes. Learning from and building on the lessons of 2020 WCNA and the 2021 virtual Wikimania conference, the program and technology ran smoothly all weekend, with no major technical problems and a smooth presenter and attendee experience.
Keynote speakers? Here or below
Add charts where possible
Organization team
The core organizers had attended the conference in the past and had compatible visions and goals. In addition to past WCNA organizers, new organizers were recruited and joined the team. Organizers met weekly, and a few volunteers joined for the conference itself to help moderate sessions. WMF staff participated actively in the organizing this year which was a big plus. The many volunteers and other participants for this year's conference are listed 2024/Organizing_teams|here. Update
Technologies, platforms, suppliers
We learned from other online conference events, and used many software platforms and services to plan and run the conference. The table lists them.
Need to update from 2021 list
| Technology | Purpose | Notes | free/paid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hopin | A virtual conference hosting platform that uses Streamyard to stream presentations, with logged in attendees able to chat during talks and go to breakout rooms | Used as the main attendee platform | paid |
| Kudo | Software that creates a virtual translation room that the translators could log into to control input/output | Used for translation. Kudo had a prebuilt connection to Hopin so it was not difficult to integrate | paid |
| YouTube | Showed live talks in English and Spanish | Two streams from the Stages, plus the translations of those streams | free (WCNA account) |
| OBS | Free/libre software for live streaming to YouTube | Streams from Hopin were recorded in OBS by distributed volunteers on their laptops, and then sent to YouTube, which enabled streaming post-translation | free |
| Zoom | Video meeting platform | Used for participatory edit-a-thons (editona, vaccine workshop, and training workshops) | free (individual accounts) |
| Tlatolli | Live translators | This is the translation collective that was used by Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City;
in addition to translation they were very helpful in being involved in organizational meetings |
paid |
| Etherpad | easily editable documents | Used for participatory notes during sessions | free |
| Telegram | chat platform | Used for general and attendee chat | free |
| Pretix | registration / ticketing platform | Used for registration | free |
| MailChimp | mass mailing system | Used for attendee communication and advertisement to previous attendees | paid |
Many videos of talks are on YouTube; final processing of videos and making them available on YouTube and on Commons is still unfinished.
Sessions and spaces
Update from 2021 We had over 65 ?? scheduled items on our Program.
- Auditorium -- recorded and translated, including three keynote talks
- Pre-scheduled sessions: ...
- Edit-a-thons, lightning talks, and unconference sessions: ...
The keynotes for the conference included ... "Breaking the gender gap on Wikipedia / Rompiendo la brecha de género en Wikipedia" (Carmen Alcázar, from Wikimedia México); "Trust and Knowledge on the Global | Local | Glocal Level" (Connie Moon Sehat, from the Credibility Coalition); and "New Maps for an Inclusive Wikipedia: Strategies to Counter Systemic Bias" (Carwil Bjork-James, English Wikipedia and Vanderbilt University).
Attendance
Update from 2021: Overall, 324 people registered, and 266 logged in to our Hopin event at some point—an 82% turnout. The peak attendance at one time was 92 people, early on Friday afternoon, possibly when Carmen Alcázar was giving her invited talk. In the first chart, attendance never drops near zero even at night because there was no need to log out. On Thursday evening we invited attendees for a social/test time on the platform.
- English/Spanish interpretation: ....
... The oral interpreters were near Mexico City on their own computers mostly working from home.
- Friendly/safe space matters: We had prepared a safe space policy in advance, and we did not hear of any safe space issues during the conference. A team went over training materials in advance and wrote up a document of what our practices would be during the conference. We edited the safe space policy from Wikimania 2021 for this conference. We think the resulting policy document is worth reusing and sharing. Volunteers signed up for shifts and sessions. Every session had a safe space monitor who listened and watched the chat, and if the presentation was in Spanish we made sure to have a Spanish speaker in the role. Members of this team stayed in touch with one another by direct messages.
- Editing challenge: ...
Evaluations by attendees
Update from 2021: We distributed survey questions to attendees, and got 35 responses between Oct 11th and Oct 19th. We invited ratings from 0-10 on their overall conference experience and 28 of the responses were high, in the 8-10 range. The main platform, Hopin, got 25 responses that high, but a few attendees had difficulty and expressed frustration with it. We asked about their experience with the live audio interpretation, and 14 said they used it, and of these 12 said it worked well. We invited specific comments about difficulties or matters of special interest, and there were a variety of interesting answers. They are hard to summarize, but generally positive and informative, and worth reflecting on for next time.
Local events
Culture crawl! Fill in. More than ever before.
Update gallery of pix:
New York City picnic
New York City picnic
New York City picnic
Plans not achieved
We meant to give scholarships for attendees to cover child care or other needs to enable them to attend, but we could not manage an application process. It was not clear that there would be much interest; people seemed to take the time to attend some sessions and just skip others. We were willing to hold more in-person wiknics, but partly because the main event was online, and partly because of COVID-19 concerns, there were only two major proposals. We made major platform decisions late which was stressful and meant we could not fully plan and train ourselves. We have not uploaded most of our videos yet, but we can link to the YouTube streams for several sessions.
Budget
Update from 2021: Our original budget was set by a grant from WMF, totaling $US 24,508. Our actual expenses exceeded this by 13%. Savings from previous years, donations, and t-shirt sales ($121.93) made up the difference.
The effort to scale up for over 200 registrants and English/Spanish interpretation raised our costs over other conferences. We talked with several vendors of the software and got advice from experienced translators who had supported Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City. We practiced by supporting the Wikimedians of the Caribbean's WikiCari festival with interpretation in September before our conference, with English-to-Spanish only, using different software and translators than we eventually chose for the conference.
We decided late in the process to scale up to relatively high end plans, getting Hopin's "business plan" (which lasts a year and includes some support), and the Kudo software service to integrate interpreters. These raised costs but we found it necessary to have a solid platform for interpretation, and it did work. It left us with a year-long subscription to Hopin which our component organizations can use again, and which we have used twice since the conference (for Meta Day and EMWCon).
| Expense | Cost in USD | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hopin | $10,000 | Main conference software platform |
| Kudo | $9,047 | Live interpretation software platform |
| Tlatolli Ollinmos | $6,635 | Interpreters at conference (en ⇔ es) (Amount was originally in MX pesos) |
| Amtrad | $931.75 | Interpreters at WikiCari, (en ⇒ es), a practice event (Amount was originally in MX pesos) |
| Clevercast | $304.72 | Live interpretation software platform used for WikiCari, as practice |
| Zoom | $121.51 | Experimental conference platform |
| Mailchimp | $21.30 | Publicity communication |
| WMMX picnic | $294.73 | Picnic in Mexico City (Amount was originally in MX pesos) |
| WMNY picnic | $371.73 | Picnic in New York City |
| Total | $27,727.74 |
For the future
We got many comments at the closing session and in writing.
- Comment from 2021: It would help us to hold future events if WMF Events could scale up the services it offers, so as to offer some prearranged subscriptions to platforms and services, more of which would have open-source commitments. We were short on time and skills to evaluate these platforms and did not have bargaining power to negotiate for our one event -- but WMF affiliates hold events every week around the world.