ESEAP Conference 2024/Report/Robertsky

Unlike 2022, which one of the first few movement events I attended, for 2024, I attended as a member of the ESEAP Preparatory Council, and inadvertently a translation admin.

Coming in hot on from Wikimedia Hackathon 2024, while attending the Conference from the start, I begin working on adding translation tags for the timetable so that the timetable could be translated using the translation system as I became concerned that the Japanese team had made their own translations earlier. The effort to add the translation tags is always a time consuming activity, and it took up much of my time, as a translation admin, during the Conference. I ended up finishing work with the final touch up only on 13 May to make it easy for participants to access the translation link to the timetable template. I would like to suggest that the next Conference/Summit COTs to rope in translation admins ahead of time before the start of the events so that the relevant pages and timetable can be prepared and marked for translations before the events start. For the ease of setting up, the structure, icons, templates used for this year's timetable can be reused/reutilised so that we need not reinvent the wheel. Maybe for the next Conferene, I would run a session to teach others how to prepare a page for translation. Although it is used primarily on meta, it might be beneficial for the various affiliates to have the knowledge for themselves so that their work can be translated into other languages for anyone who is interested to learn more about them.

As part of the EPC, I presented on our proposed governance structure. While there was not much adverse reactions to the presentation, I note that it was particularly heavy and attendees would have to spend some time digesting the material. On hindsight, the cool reaction might be a harbinger of things to come as it was modelled closely to the proposed Global Council setup which would eventually be vetoed. It was heartening to see that attendees of the Conference were receptive to the ESEAP Hub concept and had contributed their thoughts to what the Hub can do to help the region developed. We also presented that as EPC, we would need more time to have the Theory of Change, grant funding, and hopefully the governance model secured, which the attendees moved to allow us to continue our mandate until at least the Summit in 2025.

Aside to the Conference proceedings, I had the pleasure to room with Reke from Taiwan, who is also an EPC member. We had a lot of discussions on a prospective 2026 Taiwan conference as well as him sharing his training materials for workshops with me. I later spent the time translating (from Chinese to English) and adapting the training materials was used for a workshop conducted by me in May 2024, with the assistance of Exec8.

Photos

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  At the cultural village
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  Sunset shot on the last day
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  Sunset shot on the last day