Wikimania 2014 London plans presented at WikiConference 2013: transcript

Key points

• Wikimania 2014 is a three-day conference at the Barbican Centre in August, expecting about 2,000 Wikimedians plus around 2,000 public visitors each day on two outreach tracks.
• The team chose outreach as the theme to address worries about editor decline and diversity, aiming for awareness and participation, with a focus on EduWiki.
• They plan to invite politicians and partner with free culture groups, and to promote open data alongside the wiki projects.
• The team is raising funds and recruiting community liaisons to reach groups who may become volunteers but do not call themselves Wikimedians.
• The Barbican has suggested many ideas, including opening its archive, a Wikimedia residency and a touring exhibition of Wikimedia-based art.
• In answer to questions, they said London Partners will help with hotels, travel and visas, and the venue is split into community and public areas.

Chapters

1. 0:01Overview of Wikimania 2014 in London
2. 1:54Why the conference focuses on outreach
3. 5:48Politicians and free culture partners
4. 6:59Fundraising and community liaisons
5. 9:58Barbican partnership ideas and legacy
6. 13:21How volunteers can get involved
7. 15:44Travel costs and London Partners
8. 18:03Publicity, attendance and venue layout

Full transcript

0:01We won! After two years of writing BID documents, we've finally been given the chance to do a load of work. Right, but, yes, it was. For those of you who haven't been following, this is what Wikimania is, and what we're trying to run. It's a three-day conference with two days for proceeding in the summer. It's August next year. and in a check departure from previous years we are adding two public outreach tracks which will be designed for people who don't know very much about Wikipedia we expect to get 2,000 Wikimedians over the over the three days and then probably another 2,000 people coming each day to for these for these public tracks and it'll be the Barbican Center which is who's been who's been to It's pretty big, and it's a nice place, with lots and lots of facilities, and to attract

1:08the public will have some relatively famous people, but most of them will be considered Wikimedias anyway. So, you know, I think in some sense sometimes we worry about that. And finally, yeah, we'll have a whole bunch of events afterwards. In the evenings, we'll be looking at doing a big event on the modern, a big event on the bar weekend. Thanks to Saad, who put that together. Possibly something else. Saad should be up here as well. He's really been part of the team. And possibly something in the Saad's museum. Yeah, sure. So, this microphone isn't working. Why are we doing regular Wikimania?

1:54something that we've seen over and over again at events and just a general discussion in the time that we've been involved in this movement is people are worried about editors and people are worried about diversity and outreach in general there's this sort of constant scratching of heads and thinking oh you know where all editors is going to come from it's gradually declining people are getting older and when they're not being replaced so we thought let's let's face this head on with the event we're running you know an event is a great place to do outreach yeah yes this is a this is a key strategic goals identified identified by WMF and broadly speaking we see falls into two parts. One is simply awareness.

2:28A lot of people don't know that editors exist and they don't know that there's a community and they don't know that actually people make this magic website. They're just happy to use it. And organizing this big event will help show that there are really people doing this. And the second part is participation. So a lot of people vaguely know about it but haven't really been involved or, you know, haven't really taken the time when, you know, just need a little push to get properly involved. And, you know, realizing that there's a lot more to do than just writing down facts on a web page. And until you, you know, until you see the people, it can be hard to realize that.

3:01I think also one of the biggest things that, you know, we have to leverage some of the strengths of London. And the great sense about London is that it's a media hub, it's a financial hub, and we have the opportunity to do some fantastic levels of fundraising here for substantially larger events than what we've managed to do in previous years. And because of the outreach and the PR element that London brings, this can be a substantially bigger conference, and we have to leverage that. Are you saying that existing Wikimanias, which I've never been to, that they don't do anything like that, this outreach stuff?

3:35No, traditionally it's been quite an internal focus. Well, I mean, always in any local area, you know, you get a full spectrum of people who know more and less about Wikimedia. But, yeah, traditionally the focus hasn't specifically been on outreach, whereas we chose to literally say the theme of this conference is outreach, and see where that takes us. And we'll talk about that. Specifically, what are we trying to do here? Get a lot of new editors. Get a lot of new volunteers. Get a lot of new members. Us personally, we're particularly interested in EduWiki and see what we can get to happen with that in terms of raising the agenda of that in the wider consciousness through this conference.

4:22And then, yeah, not just locally, but just nationally, you know, which we're working a big part on legacy, we're going to try and have really nicely produced videos, and again, a whole bunch of them which specifically have an outreach component. And what we'll be doing is, you know, programming these outreach tracks by saying specifically, you know, come and present a submission which is designed for outreach. Come and tell people, you know, who don't know anything about PMI, about the things that you're doing and explain it to them in a way that, you know, they can understand. And then we'll produce good videos of these and put them out and use, you know, the reach organizations like the BBC to make sure they're well seen. Finally, a lot of interesting things are happening in Wikimedia this year. The visual editor is a massive thing and a lot of people are actually quite worried about how much it may increase participation but it's a chance for a lot of other people to come and have a look at you know what's happened in the past few years. It's a big change.

5:12In terms of usability, especially for, you know, for the editor side of things. You know, what with, yeah, here's a visual editor, notifications of flow. I mean, Wikimedia is practically becoming Facebook now, right? Except instead of friends, you have topics, which is pretty exciting, I think. And, you know, it's a good chance to sort of launch these things in some sense with a big international conference. Just add to that point, in terms of EduWiki is a very good example of this, because of the connections we have as a community, we are able to leverage that into, you know, we can have school children from the local area, we have high school professors, we have university lecturers, all the way up to senior government.

5:48So we have David Cameron coming, we have Boris Johnson coming, this is a very good opportunity to actually talk to these politicians and talk to people in power and actually say, you know, these are the opportunities which Wikipedia provides in education. And that's just one very small project within, obviously, a whole portfolio. I stress with these people, we're not flying them in so they can come and talk to the Wikimedians. We're flying them in so we can go and talk to them. People seem like, what does David Cameron have to say about Wikimedia? Nothing, but he has a lot to listen to. I think the other key point also on this slide is that we're also partnering with a lot of similar free culture organisations, so the EFF, the ODI, Students for Free Culture, these kind of organisations.

6:26And the objective behind this is not just to promote the wiki projects, but promote the concepts behind them. So, you know, obviously wiki data being a flagship project, we want to promote open data along with that. We're proposing to invite some of the schools around London to bring students in. Yeah, absolutely. We're working with Hackney Council pretty closely on that, which is where the Barbican is based. And it'd be worth reaching to the home counties as well to drag in some of the students.

6:59Indeed, but even college. yeah all right so um what are we working on right now and what do we need from you guys most right now we're working on raising all the money that we need to pay for this thing and this is considerable amount but this has been really interesting had lots of interesting side effects because sponsors come to us and say who comes so far we see no one's really well answered this question partly because they don't know what sponsors want to hear but partly because People don't know that much about the demographic of Wikimedians. The answer to people who tend to get is, well, the Wikimedians come, which isn't an answer at all.

7:56So we did a bunch of thinking and talking to people. And these are the communities which we think comprise primarily of Wikimedians, at least in terms of things that are named. And I think largely they shouldn't come as a big surprise, hopefully. And we may have to miss them often. If you can think of any others that we should put on there, please come and suggest. but in terms of the outreach portion you know it's not just any old public right we want relevant public who actually have something to offer back and may become good volunteers rather than just people who show up and say cool website walk off again so what we plan to do is recruit community liaisons for each one we're gonna figure out what's going on in these communities in the main area of activities and try and organize activities involving them you know Wikimedian activities involving them in the upcoming year and invite them to create you know present content at the conference You know to really like bridge with these I mean, I think a lot of you will be in both communities anyway

8:56But the idea is if we find people in these ones who don't self-identify as Wikimedians, they're people we should try and try and speak to Yeah? So, yeah, if anyone can think of adding to this list, or anyone who wants to work with us with any of these communities and actually help us build these events, you know, we'll probably be talking to a bunch of people, building a bunch of relationships, and organizing some events over the course of this year, that would be really interesting. the second thing is the Bob can isn't just a venue you know they're a large eminent cultural organization in their own right and they've been really excited by the event that we want to run here and what you know really want to support us and get there and get involved with what we're doing and you know they've said okay you know here are some things we're doing come and suggest some ways we can we can get involved with you and we don't really understand the community at all frankly but we're really excited and you know that you're

9:58inches on many and I think getting involved in these things will help us run a much better much better event there you know they'll understand us better you know every event is site-specific right you know we have the bulk of the active Wikimedia community a large chunk of the active Wikimedia community coming and sitting in one place for five days and you know if there's something real that they're actually coming to this location for that would be great and this will really help build a sort of lasting legacy from this conference. The Barbican has a lot of resources and a lot of its own sort of programs, and if we can secretly make those Wikimedian programs, or at least in the parts that we'd like, that would be a big win, I think.

10:39A really obvious one is their archive. We can go and say, you know, come and open your archive. They literally have no thinking, but they can't even conceive of that idea right now, because they've never heard of it. But they're in a very, very early stage where it's like, you know, we have all this stuff sitting in the basement, you know, sitting on these hard disks, and we don't know what to do with it. and yeah I mean effectively what they're calling for is a Wikimedia residence which I think I will probably become this year and then try and facilitate the things they're doing here but it's not just their archive it's also all kinds of events they want to run and you know outreach to school children that they already are trying to figure out what to do with so you know I think that's a big opportunity as well yeah next summer there's a large digital cultural festival which Barbican is running which is going to span about two months it's more than likely that Wikimania will actually fall within that mandate and there's a lot of really interesting stuff in terms of cross-pollination that we could do. In particular, there's well, I mean, there's the Kirk Gallery. I guess, you know, a really obvious one is, yeah, they're commissioning a big gallery exhibition and we could say, you know, commission some

11:41Wikimedia-based art and then that will go and that will sit there for, you know, six months and they will tour internationally and it can be about anything, you know, the community comes up with an idea for it to be about and it'll be funded by them and promoted by them. You know, they have an enormous internal reach. And you know, also beside that, for example, in that same thing, you know, we could get the whole thing QRPD'd up or something like that, you know, just as a starter. The last project that went on tour lasted for 10 years. It's still going, actually. Yeah, it's still going. So this is a very good opportunity in terms of, again, lasting legacy.

12:13I think the other point to make here is that this is just, this is a very abridged list. We have a list of about 30, 40 different things which the Barbican is interested in doing. And not just the Barbican, but the City of London Corporation, which owns the Barbican. They have substantial archives throughout the city. They own multiple venues, multiple glam institutes, and they're very keen to have a much more prolonged engagement with WMUK. And through building these relationships specifically for this conference, what we really hope to achieve is getting these lasting relationships, both with the venue, but also with the sponsors.

12:45And the way to look at this is the spotlight of the conference that we're running next year is a really good way to activate volunteer activity on these things because it's not just a project that's going that has no obvious endpoint it's really building towards something very visible in the space where this is happening. Any questions? When is it exactly? August 10th. Sorry, should have been for that. Thoughts, criticisms, complaints, ideas?

13:21I used to work in an archive at a university and at a government department, so I'd like to get involved in what you're doing at the barbican. Great. So, that has vast potential. Yeah. If anyone is interested in any of these roles, please come talk to us. What we're going to do over the next six months, realistically, is we're going to slowly look at recruitment phases for the wider fit team. right now we just want to get past the main the main sign of pity inside the conference team we want to get past the main hurdle of fundraising first before we start bringing an extra laser man yes okay which okay so with the with the community liaison pot okay with the community liaison pot you come to us and say this is the community I'm interested to liaise with and we'd say you know what

14:24have you done in this area in wikimedia what have you done in this area in that community you know who are the important influence in that community you know and go and go and become friends with them go and break the subject of things that we could do together and then think about some way that could create interesting content for the conference. For the Barbican part and this is something I think we can all get involved in right now List really bold ideas of what could be done with this venue slash institution, and then we'll think about who would actually want to do them, but at this stage it's just, you know, we could go back to them and say, here are the really exciting things we want to do, maybe they'll even need to fund it or something, and certainly facilitate.

14:56On the Wikimedia 2014 website, there's a list, a full list of all the Barbican initiatives which they've suggested to us. Yeah, it's a big list, and it's really exciting because they're really in a very early stage. They've sort of realised, oh, we're a fusty old arts institution and we want to modernise. be part of tech city and all this new exciting cool stuff that we don't understand at all because our retired board of directors is you know very very traditional um and you know that they're really just looking for some direction here and i think you know we're a great work organization to provide them so davis okay one of the things i think you're doing is doing some editing some training sessions straight away so that's another way of volunteers getting involved particularly people who've been through trainer trainers, and that would be good.

15:44Well, a question to you. We failed the year before, possibly because we weren't Hong Kong, I don't know, but the two big criticisms were the cost of getting to London and being here, and the cost of accommodation in London. How did you get round those this time? Sure. It's hard to get to Erusha. Essentially through partners. People here have got no idea of the background. Yeah, sure, sure. So fundamentally, we're working with London Partners, which is basically a business advocacy group in London.

16:20Their mandate is to basically help exactly this kind of event come to London. Bring large conferences to London. They help with the Olympic bid, for example. and you know they know every single hotel room in London and you know they have preferred partners with airlines and they can speed up visas and so we basically said to them so we're holding this they said there's a pack and then we make it really easy for this kind of thing to happen that's what we're here for yeah and London's really really keen to host this kind of thing. A bit more specific, okay discounted Oyster Cards, discounted travel, block booking of hotels to again reduce rates actually London is relatively cheap to fly to if you look at people coming from all over the world certainly compared to Eruja yeah yeah oh yeah that's that's a good point we're working with King's College and potentially UCL as well but yeah this will be a point

17:23Yes. Thank you. For the outreach break you're doing, have you spoken to the, we've made in 2011 people in Hyper, because they had a whole thread of people with language outreach that they were doing in the separate building, which sounds quite similar to what you're doing, so it would be interesting to see, and I was actually in Hyper, and I was barely aware that this was there in the separate building, but it might be an absolutely helpful We've spoken to go off at length.

18:03That's interesting, we'll talk about it. Start again. How are people going to find out about it? Ah, good question. So, three different ways, I guess. We have a substantial amount of partners for the bid. Many of them aren't actually publicly listed. These range from mainstream media, so for instance, The Guardian, The Times, magazine yeah to technology journals but also more specifically the partners that we've already mentioned in terms of the electronic frontier foundation you know students for free culture these kind of organizations which are as Ed says well basically organizations which represent these groups are the organizations that we're going to partner with a target to promote this not to mention that the barbican has substantial PR channels on the phone it's the largest R20 in Europe But, you know, really, like, the people we want to come are these people. I think, you know, primarily because I think they will have the most offer and, you know, and really be excited by what they see if they don't know about it already. And certainly, you know, the changes that have happened in the last year and so on. Like, Wikidata didn't exist a year ago. That's an exciting thing to happen.

19:08I think the point that people should know is people will come to this, like, not with medias. I think it's something we've been surprised I guess you know this kind of surprises is you know we're both both in London and we're both involved in the tech scene and large conferences are you know in this kind of area really pretty common there's several year and then many many slightly smaller events all year so you know attendance isn't really something we've been so worried about and I think you know for people who are putting this on in not a major hub like London even that would be a concern it's really not what we have at Especially when the average tech conference costs £1500 to attend and they sell out.

19:47Or is it LeWeb, right? How many? Two grand. Two grand to attend and how many people came? A lot more. Two and a half thousand. Yeah, this is going to be 50 pounds or something like that. For the public. Attendance isn't a concern. How do you strike a balance then between it being the annual conference of the Wikimedia movement and it being this massive outreach thing for non-Wikipedians and how do you get the two to overlap and interact?

20:20Okay, we're doing a lot of that in the design of the venue specifically. We have a venue roughly speaking divided into upstairs and downstairs. technical terms. And it is actually that. There's a conference center on the fourth floor, which has a bunch of breakout spaces, a bunch of conference rooms, a bunch of auditoriums, and this will be primarily for the community, for the community tracks. In the foyer, there's a very large auditorium which seats 2,000 people, and then the second auditorium which seats 1,000 people, and then a large exhibition space where we'll have exhibitions and workshops, and this will be primarily for the community so there's a very natural kind of break there yes are you going to get volunteers and entities and stuff to like control the community area and talk to people and stuff because i'm sure people will be coming to close the questions that we said troll community area you mean the public area yeah I'm sure that will happen anyway.

21:18People who have desks come and ask me questions. Yes, definitely. And we'll be running a program of work-working. We will ask the community to supply a program of workshops, potentially multiple tracks of workshops that go on in that area all the time. We really don't want it to seem less segregated in the sense that they don't cross-pollinate. It's more just organized in such a way that the correct interactions happen in the way they ought to. But if you do want people to troll the community, that's what you seem to be thinking.

22:00Okay, thank you.

Source and licence

Recording: File:WikiConference 2013 talk about Wikimania.webm by Stevie Benton (WMUK) (2013-07-02 20:49:17), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.