Grants:Project/Rapid/EMWConSpring2018/Video/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2017-18 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

• To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/EMWConSpring2018/Video.
• You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
• You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

Our main goal was to provide quality videos of the conference. The group was extremely pleased with how the project went.

Outcome

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Hold a three-day conference featuring discussions of topics related to "Enterprise MediaWiki", i.e. the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies, non-profits, governments, and other organizations.	We held a very informative conference spanning three days of talks with about 35 attendees.	Several employees/developers/administrators from NASA, General Electric, European Space Agency and smaller organizations attended. A few key WMF staff members helped organize, attended and spoke at the event - with Victoria Coleman providing a closing keynote presentation on Friday. The event also featured some of the top MediaWiki consultants - from North America and Europe.
Further the WMF strategic goal of Knowledge as a Service	This is a long-term target, but we did achieve some notable progress in this direction.	One of topics of discussion was the Meza system developed at NASA. Meza is an automated deployment system (based on Ansible) for creating fully functional wikis and wiki farms from zero. By providing full-fledged wikis in under an hour, it lowers the barriers of entry for MediaWiki in any environment, for any purpose. QualityBox founder Greg Rundlett takes it two steps further by providing hosting and commercial support for wikis - again making the MediaWiki system available as a "Platform As A Service" (PAAS). NASA is also working on solutions for synchronizing wikis between sites (ie. Earth and International Space Station). This would be an obvious achievement in organizing and exchanging free knowledge beyond Wikimedia. (The content can be used by all astronauts participating in the ISS program - regardless of country.)
Improve the visibility of MediaWiki usage by third-parties	I think everyone involved received the message that MediaWiki is in use by a wide variety of industries and types of organizations.	We had people talking about their usage of MediaWiki in the Oil and Gas industries; Geology; Manufacturing; Data and Finance; Space agencies; Government; Law and Legal; Technology consultants and contractors large and small.
Spread awareness of commercial support, regulatory certifications, and distributions (e.g. BlueSpice)	This was a focus of Greg Rundlett's talk on MediaWiki As A Service. Sabine Melnicki talked about MediaWiki and the European GDPR Ben Fletcher talked about how the UK Ministry of Defense used MediaWiki for Delivering ICT capability and Dr. Michael Barylak talked about Comprehensive Quality Management at the European Space Agency.	We did spread awareness of the availability of commercial support. We had discussions about how MediaWiki hosting organizations meet regulatory certifications pertaining to security and privacy like SOC 2 (SSAE 16), or the new GDPR and also how MediaWiki is used in certification of standards for quality and management like ISO 9000/9001. Distributions of MediaWiki like BlueSpice from Hallo Welt! GmbH are typically those that have certified data centers, and have the tooling for doing intensive data collection and auditing (for obtaining certifications) and support the hosted distribution.
Recruit new organizations to adopt MediaWiki as a platform for enterprise knowledge	Unknown	We are hoping to collect feedback from attendees on whether the conference; or more specifically the videos, had any outcomes related to this goal.
Increase skills for existing editors, administrators, consultants and support organizations	Definitely!	With a diverse audience, there were many "Aha!" moments where people learned new skills, methods, or possibilities of using the MediaWiki platform.
Recruit maintainers and contributors to extensions that are crucial to organizational use outside of WMF	Unknown	We are collecting feedback from attendees on whether the videos had any outcomes related to this goal.
Add or improve content available at mediawiki.org	This outcome was indeed affected by the conference.	I'm not so sure that it can be tied to the videos, but Cindy Cicalese's contributions to Commons and the video uploads by Kunal Mehta definitely are. Yaron Koren was prolific before and after the conference. James Montalvo III created a ton of new content on mediawiki.org as a result of the conference. More contributions: GregRundlett, Ckoerner I created a program, and event using the Grant Metrics system on toollabs. I was able to identify 27 English Wikipedia users who participated in the conference. Unfortunately the Grant Metrics system only analyzes *.wikipedia.org sites, so it reports a limited amount of relevant content contributions that can be attributed to the conference or videos of the conference.
Provide quality videos of the conference which may be shared, re-used and built upon.	25 Videos hosted on YouTube and Commons The YouTube channel has combined views of 2,661 as of the time of this report.	The way that Carl Karsten of Next Day Video was able to provide a consistent look and feel to the videos was great. His process and tools were able to capture both the presenter and the screen as needed. Audo and Video quality was superb. Live streaming was provided at the last minute thanks to the push from Cindy Ciccalese. And if that wasn't good enough, the turn-around time was about 24 hours or less for these videos going up. I attended a conference the very next day which didn't have nearly the same results.

Learning

• What worked well?

  Hiring a pro. We got exceptional results compared with the range of possibilities - including DIY or no video. By using online chat channels like Slack, Telegram and Matrix, we were able to coordinate things between organizers, facilities, and Carl. Using the event page on wiki worked really well to plan, outline, and then provide updates and details as the project progressed.

• What did not work so well?

  The logistics were a bit complicated, and we definitely could have prepared earlier to make it even smoother.

• What would you do differently next time?

  Although we had live streaming, we didn't plan for it. We should plan for it, and publicize it well in advance to attract a live online audience to the conference.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Next Day Video normally charges $9500 for a three-day conference. We contacted them early, and were offered a steep discount as a Free Software and Free Knowledge organization. We spent the entire grant of $2,050 - This amount at least offsets the hard costs of travel and lodging; with about $1,000 going towards producing videos of the conference.

Remaining funds

There were no remaining grant funds. I received the grant money on 05/01/2018, and sent a check to Next Day Video, LLC the same day for the same amount.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?