Grants:TPS/Jonas Xavier/Campus Party 2012/Report

Event name: Campus Party 2012 and USP meeting

Description of your participation:

My work was to discover and invite people interested on Wikimedia projects, mainly the ones related to the academic stuff involving Open Data, Web trends and related topics, like machine learning and open knowledge tools. At the Campus Party, a diverse environment, I focused on finding participants to Hackathon and Balaio Hacker (a new event which is been incubated by Wikimedia Brasil). I got contacts of people from Brazilian Planning Ministry and Cabinet Digital – all of them focus mainly the Open data and the collaborative sharing tools.

The lecture at USP happened on Wednesday - February 6th. It was took place at the Jacy Monteiro auditorium, Institute of de Mathematics and Statistics (IME) of the USP. Thanks to Everton (Tom) that requested the space and all the necessary structure.

It was a good opportunity to meet students, professors and scientists from the USP -- one of he most important Brazilian universities, a world top-100 university. The event encouraged students for the Campus Ambassador, which will get volunteers in the Brazilian educational project. It also served to invite researchers to the Wikimedia Research project, since there’s no Brazilian research involved at the present day.

As a volunteer, I could help in a workshop on Wiki and editing, both at the Campus Party.

I presented to people there two main points: scientific projects developed with data or content from Wikipedia and a project that I am conducting, joining the social and web trends, based on the Wikipedia data.

What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events? The list below describe main points that I found for both events:

People wish they could create things, so subjects related to empowerment called too much attention.
We must avoid bureaucracy – people should be free to ask and talk about whatever they consider important in relation to the topics in discussion.

All the things mentioned are valid mainly to the Campus Party, where everything happens quickly and in a diverse way, so the simple things are better than the complex ones and the complexity is better than complication.

Giving a lecture at USP was a great experience, some of the most important Brazilians scientists were there or came from there. People were pretty receptive and big questioners. It was productive to the lecture as a whole. I could have done my presentation a little different, writing a shorter text and using more visual elements.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation? During the lecture at the USP we meet people already developing projects related to Wikipedia, but without any contact with the Wikimedia Research initiative. Now they are planning to be part of Wikimania and the Wikipedia Academy this year. We have the opportunity to talked to the CCSL members - CCSL is a free software center that gives a great help to our hacker-like events, serving as an invitation for the Wikimedia Brazilian projects, with around 30 people attending to it.

The editathon and workshop on Wiki projects for the Campus Party had 10 participants - all of them active editors for the Portuguese Wikipedia nowadays. All those teachings activities can give us a wonderful experience for the future events.

During the week we had great opportunities to see discussions between the Wikimedia Brasil members and the Wikimedia Foundation visitors. We created an event (Balaio Hacker, news soon) and we improved some solutions for the open questions related to our future plans, chapter creation (legal aspects) and participation in events. After the Campus Party we were invited to take part in a big event by presenting workshops on MediaWiki platform and development – this academic event is related to the Computer Science at Uberlândia-MG.

Detail of expenditures: Amount received: R$ 1,181.66

Expenditures (Values in Real(R$)):

Flights: 1,051.39
Local transport: 20.00
Meal: 123.81
Total: 1,195.20

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency): The amount requested was completely used, the underspent/left-over is R$ -13.54.