Grants talk:Conference/UG HI/Hindi Wiki Conference 2020/Report

Hi Hindi Wiki Conference 2020 Team, Thanks for the detailed report :) It sounds like you had a successful conference that met the goals you set out with. It is really great to see the Hindi language projects taking off and becoming more diverse.

General overview

Thanks for all of the quotes for participants here. It is really nice to see reactions from everyone. It would be really helpful to also include in this section or maybe another a quick rundown of what actually happened at the conference. How was it structured? How many sessions happened? How many speakers did you have? How did you approach the program and strategy of the event. Was the event different in any way than what you were expecting when you were originally planning?

Goals

It is looking like you are exceeding your expectations in most areas and behind in the two you mentioned. Do you have any lessons around why you did better than you thought or worse than you thought that other communities and new wikis might be able to learn from? I think that would be the most helpful thing for other future organizers that is missing in this section.

Next steps

“We also succeeded in bridging gender gap among contributors and team leaders. At present we have more than 30 active female editors on Hindi Wiki projects who are continuously active. Amongst them 17 are doing more than 100 edits every month. In fact we are witnessing reverse gender gap on Wikisource.” How are you tracking your active editors and their genders? What makes you think that they will continue to contribute over the long term?

It also sounds like you found a good group of gender diverse newcomers to join you conference. And then you expect to have a very high retention rate of editors. Higher than many other events have been able to accomplish.Can you talk a little bit more about how your recruited, and how you were able to target people who you thought might be willing to stick around Wikimedia projects for the long run?

How much time and effort is your organizing team / local community going to spend working with the attendees of this event into the future. Do you have any steps even further than 4 months into the future?

Learning

It sounds like you provided a lot of newcomer support and thought through a lot of ideas around how to make sure newcomers had access to long term wikimedians and help. I would be really curious to hear even more about this. Across the Wikimedia movement we are focusing on new ways to welcome and include newcomers so even more detail about your full approach and thoughts on this could be really helpful. You may even consider writing a Diff blog post about this along with the Wikimedia communications team. I think your dedicated 3+1 seating arrangements and other approaches as well as specifics about how it went and what you would try if you were going to do it again would be interesting to others.

Focusing on 3 projects instead of 5 projects sounds like a great lesson to learn. More focused conference can be more effective so I am happy to see that this is a lesson and a goal for next time. Thanks for being transparent with that. When you realize you needed to only focus on 3, how did you decide which ones you were going to cut?

You mention “Due to COVID-19 related restrictions, the organising team decided to change outreach mode from offline to online. We used social sites and most importantly our sitenotice on all three most active projects for running a month long editathon. It worked very well and helped us to meet our conference goals. We recommend aspiring organisers to add these types of follow-up events.” Can you explain a little bit more around what you did and what other organizers can learn from it?

Extra efforts for zero gender gap: You mention that some participants were not able to join the conference because their families were not comfortable with their attendance. Do you have any thoughts or ideas around how you might be able to support participants' attendance from more cautious families? A remote event? An event only for women? Something else?

Finally It sounds like an overall fun and productive conference, thank you for leading the efforts to expand the reach of the hindi language within our projects! We are looking forward to partnering with you again in the future. Rfarrand (WMF) (talk) 15:52, 15 September 2020 (UTC)