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 4-6, 2021, about 85 sessions were held. Many were open to remote registrants by zoom, and some were viewable on YouTube. The ones in the Auditorium had Spanish audio interpretation, or English if the presentation was in Spanish. The others had AI-provided captions on the attendee's smartphone.
There were three invited plenary talks. 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.
Our <267?> registrants ... 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.
The mayor of Indianapolis proclaimed October 4, 2024 as "Wikipedia Day".
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.
Partway done updating from 2021 list
| Technology | Purpose | Notes | free/paid |
|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube | Showed live talks in English and Spanish | Two streams from the Stages, plus the translations of those streams | free (WCNA account) |
| Interprefy | Smartphone app to show captions or play audio interpretation | .... | (cost) |
| Zoom | Video meeting platform | Used for participatory edit-a-thons (editona, vaccine workshop, and training workshops) | free (individual accounts) |
| Tlatolli Ollin | 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 | For participatory notes by attendees during sessions, visible afterward | free |
| Telegram | Chat platform | Used for general and attendee chat, with special sub-channels for organizers, program committee, friendly-space team, etc. | free |
| Pretix | registration / ticketing platform | Used for registration | free |
| MailChimp | mass mailing system -- did we use it this year? | Used for attendee communication and advertisement to previous attendees | paid |
| EventBrite | Did we use it this year? |
At least half of the sessions were video-recorded. Volunteer experts are managing the recordings from Zoom. We believe they can be made available on Commons by the end of 2024. For a few we have Spanish-language audio.
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 ... "Welcoming Keynote" (Maryana Pinchuk)", "Inaugural GLAM Keynote honoring Effie Kapsalis (Andrew Lih, Sara Snyder)" and "Keynote with Wikimedian of the Year with User:Clovermoss (Hannah Clover)".
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: We had 13 participants participating in the Editing Challenge to improve Indiana and local Indianapolis contents across different sister projects (Wikipedia, Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wikivoyage and Wikispecies).
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. We had multiple time slots at several local destinations: the Ray Bradbury museum, the Indiana State Library, the Indiana Supreme Court and Law Library, the Indiana State Museum the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, the Lucas Oil Stadium where the Indianapolis Colts play, the Indiana War Memorial Museum, the Indianapolis Central Public Library, the Indiana Statehouse, and the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site. There were also walking tours of the Downtown Canal district, the Monument Circle Historic District, White River State Park, and an tour of independent bookstores. This is the largest number of GLAM tours offered at WCNA so far.
Attendee photo in the auditorium
Keynote presentation in honor of Effie Kapsalis
The Canal downtown
BIPOC Pioneers of the Americas editathon participants; Foto grupal del editatón latino de la Wikiconferencia de Norteamérica 2024
Maryana Pinchuk delivering WikiConference North America 2024 Friday keynote
Conference chair Dominic McDevitt-Parks
Sockpuppets crafted at WCNA 2024
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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).
Figures are from 2021, all wrong for 2024.
| 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 |
| Total | $130K ? |
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.