ESEAP Conference 2024/Report/Tofeiku

The ESEAP Conference 2024 was the third edition of the Wikimedia conference for ESEAP communities which was held in Kota Kinabalu. This was the very first Wikimedia conference held in Malaysia and co-organised by Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia. My role in the event was the programme lead of the conference. I express my gratitute to the ESEAP community and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for all the support and trust given to us and myself for co-organising this huge celebration of free knowledge in the region.

With the community

The conference has gathered more than 10 countries and regions of the ESEAP community. The community has grown since the previous ESEAP Conference 2024 and the region-lead Wikimania 2023. The last time I joined the conference was back in 2018 which was my very first Wikimemdia conference and also was the first ESEAP conference to be held. I managed to catch up with my fellow Wikimedia friends that I have met for the past 5 years. Conference like this made a huge impression to me towards the hardworking community of ours in their effort to free knowledge at their place. This helped me to connect and collaborate with them seeing that their effort was celebrated and fruitful.

A learning process

The conference was a huge learning process for the organising team, the user group and also for myself. Despite this was our first conference to co-organise the event, we received a lot of feedbacks regarding the event whether they were positive or not. For some people, this was their very first Wikimedia conference and I would like to make this conference gives a huge impact to them just like what happened to me during the 2018 conference. Personally, this was my very first time being part of the organising team of any Wikimedia conference. The team and the WMF has been helpful in making the event a success. Even though there was many room for improvement that could make the conference perfect, the team and the WMF has reminded myself that there was no such thing as a perfect event and I should be proud of myself with the achievement that we have gone through in making the event a success.

To the future

After successfully co-organising the event, I would like to see another conference to be held in the future especially the national-level Wikimedia conference in Malaysia. I am looking forward for the next ESEAP Conference to top off with this year's conference!