Grants talk:Conference/WMCL/Iberoconf 2019/Report

WMF comments

Hi WMCL team. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this thorough report. We highly appreciate your effort in facilitating this very important platform for the Ibero American region community. I reviewed your report and have some comments and questions I'll be happy to clarify.

Goals

• Do you have any Data on how and if participants used the skills they have learned in the workshops since then?
• What do you mean by 'external communications' (on the first 'achieved outcome' section)?
• We highly encourage the creation of regional initiatives and collaborations and this is actually one of our main focus points in the future, so we really appreciate the efforts you have made in facilitating the platform for promoting and sharing knowledge regarding regional initiatives. Do you have any follow up information regarding the regional activities you have launched?
• Do you have any documentation to share on the outcomes and learning patterns you've worked on?

Pre-conference preparation

• Gender diversity and emerging communities - Great news! Was there something special you have done to achieve this? And did you had any 'welcome newcomers' plan or a way to specifically support new delegates from emerging communities? ?
• Communicating with participants - Thank you very much for this thorough information. This will be very helpful for next Iberoconf organizers.

Conference program

• Program design - What do you mean by 'flexible track'? Do you mean space and time slots for participants to spontaneously submit sessions?
• Do you have any indications on the impact those active learning sessions had on the community? Were they productive? Do you know if, and how, did the participants used the skills they have learned?
• I definitely agree that creating the platform for gathering and convening is a very important pert of the program. Did you had extra space for informal meet-ups and gatherings?
• Could you provide some examples for problems and potential solutions that people presented in the second day workshop sessions? Was this session productive? Please share some outcomes or follow up thoughts.
• Thank you so much for this very informative summary of the 3 days discussions. That is very helpful for us to understand the challenges the community is facing. But I am still not very clear on any concrete conclusions or ways in which the community wants to tackle those difficulties. A lot of the difficulties you described are relevant to most of the regional Wikimedia communities and we see those as repeating discussions. So I am very interested to know what is the next steps the Iberocoop community would like to pursue. Do you have any follow up plan moving forward (in regards to the Regional structure; Affiliates administration; Knowledge gaps discussions)?
• I'm interested in the Communications workshop. How did that worked? Have you seen a need for this kind of discussion or activity as a capacity building session?
• Are you able to map out main regional thematic focus areas? (in regards to the 'Knowing projects across the region' session).

Learnings

• That's a good point regarding the extra 5 minutes. I would suggest adding more than 5, and to also add time slots for only engaging, meet-ups socializing and etc.
• Yes, I agree it is very beneficial to all to have some extra rooms for 'no-conf sessions' to be able to accommodate emerging discussions (to be in tandem to the program schedule). In this kind of conference, it's crucial as event organizers to be aware and responsive to the needs arises from the participants.
• What do you mean by 'mobile sessions'?
• Room layout and Incorporating new voices - Thank you for pointing that out. This is such an important learning to share. When applied, lessons like these can make a big difference.

Carta de Santiago - This is a good outcome for the conference and I'm glad the community decided to gather forces into creating such a statement. As we are now about 6 months after the event, do you have any update on actions taken as a result?

Budget and financial information

• In the original grant proposal you budgeted 32 traveling scholarships for international participants. But I see that at the end you had only 24 representatives. Was there a reason for not meeting the registration goal?
• As you have remaining funds it the amount of USD 14,497, please follow the instructions on how to return the funds to WMF. You can see more information [[1]].
• As we previously discussed, we are currently waiting to get the detailed expanses documentation. We will not be able to approve and close the grant without it.

Thank you again for the work you have done. I really appreciate this informative and thorough report. Also, we are delighted to see such a regional effort and coalition and we will be happy to continue in supporting the Iberocoop community in the future.

Hope to hear back from you soon so we can learn more from your experience in hosting the 2019 Iberoconf and so we can finalize the grant. All the best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 14:18, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

WMCL responses

Hello Chen. Thank you very much for your feedback on our report. Here we will try to answer to your questions or topics that need some more explanation.

Goals

• Participants use of workshops: No, for now we have not work on tracking this outcomes.
• 'External communications' goal: This particular item was referring to the capacity of communicate and show our work as a Movement and as local Chapters/User Groups, out of our members, in order to reach other society members and futures allies.
• Regional activities: No, but this is more related to the fact that we, as a regional movement, are still struggling with some organization and internal issues.
• Outcomes and learning patterns: No, but we have the project of creating a meta page where you could find all Iberoconf’s presentations, slides and other documents that were share during the event.

Pre-conference preparation

• Gender diversity and emerging communities: No, actually this was a surprise for us. We regret though not having a specific plan to promote emerging communities presentations or participation on the debates, knowing that for some of those representatives this was their very first experience with the regional community. We dedicated a specific reflexion item in our ["Learnings" section], to transmite this to future organizers of Iberoconf or others WMF conferences and meetings.

Conference program

• Program design: By 'flexible track' we mean tracks that could be interchangeable from one day to another, or from one time of the day to another, according to the debates evolution and participants interests. We had very wide and rich debates during the conference, and sometimes we had to cut them of, because of the program. This was not always appreciated by the participants, who manifested us that they would have prefer to keep the discussion instead of passing to some other activities.
• Activities and learning lessons impact on the regional community: We received a lot of positive comments regarding the practical sessions of the conference and those where we talked and learned about local experiences, as long as we could see it in the final survey with applied to the delegates. However, we are not sure if Chapters and User Groups have use those learnings in their local projects. We, as WMCL, we can say we learned a lot from this practical skills and perspectives, and that are currently using them in our work.
• Extra space for informal meet-ups and gatherings: As we pointed it our in our report’s “Learnings” section, we did not considered having an extra space for informal meet-ups or parallel activities or sessions. This was a problem for us in somehow, and we finally solved it using the "coffee space" and some other common use spaces of the venue for having those conversations or debates. We think it would have been very useful to have considered a supplementary space or salon to do so.
• Second day workshop's projects and ideas: We held two workshops; in the first one, participants had to imagine different critical and hypothetical (but possible) scenarios for Wikimedia projects/communities, and then come-up with solutions or strategies involving local context and regional alliances. We talked about: an eventual internet blackout; the closure of the national ministry of education or culture; political animosity or even persecution against Wikimedia members; and difficulties to access to economic funds due to local political problems.

In the second workshop, representatives had to think about a communication issue or problem (campaign that they wanted to lunch, a Wikimedia project they wanted to highlight, new alliances they wanted to promote, etc), and create a small plan to achieve those goals. Some of the projects they proposed were: motivating more people to join a specific Chapter/User Group; launch a regional 8th March campaign to raise awareness about gender inequalities; and a regional project to explore and promote the presence of native cultures and languages in the Wikimedia projects.

In both activities, the idea was to work with different Chapters and User Groups in order to know new local realities and promote regional collaboration. We think these sessions were very productive, and so the participants pointed it out in the final survey; they appreciated the learning process, the opportunity of working in smaller groups, and the final group discussion that took place at the end of each activity.

• Iberocoop today: As a regional movement, we are still dealing with our internal organization, how to concrete collaboration ideas and projects, and how to track them to assure their success over the time. As WMCL we believe that Iberoconf was a useful opportunity to discuss those problems, but we still have a lot of internal things to solve before been able to concrete those projects.
• Communications workshop: As noted above, communication workshop was a very succesful activity during Iberoconf 2019. The workshop was preceded by two talks about communication management, and how to use this tool in the NGO field, something that was also very appreciated by the participants. We think that these activities, where Chapters/User Groups can learn from other experiences and then share and compare their own are very important to the group.

• Main regional thematic focus areas: As far as we have track the different regional activities and main areas during this year, we can point out the following subjects by Chapter/UG:

Argentina: Human Rights and Diversities

Uruguay: free culture

Venezuela: access to knowledge

Ecuador and Colombia: local cultures and languages

Bolivia: cultural heritage and local cultures and languages

Mexico: access to knowledge and gender perspective

Chile: education and content's gaps

This information does not represent the only topics of work of each Chapter/User Groups, but those where we believe there has been a major or sustained work during the last months.

Learnings

• ’Mobile sessions’: As explained above, as organizing team we learned a lot from the process of creating a useful and coherent program, even though they were some things that did not work as well as expected. Regarding the program and its schedule, we learned that it was necessary to be a little bit more flexible with time slots and tracks. We suggest to add "flexible tracks" to every program; that means activities or sessions that you could easily move or change from one day to another, or from one time of the day to another, so you could be able to adapt yourself to communities discussions, interest and debate's pace.

Carta de Santiago: Sadly, regarding this issue and statement, we have not receive any official outcome or response coming from WMF or the AFCOM.

Budget and financial information

• Traveling scholarships: Yes, we budgeted more scholarships that the ones we used and provided at the end. This could be explained, in some part, because we considered that the number of number of Chapters/User Groups that were authorized by the AFCOM to participate in Iberoconf 2019 was more elevated that it really was.

• Detailed expanses documents: Already sent.

Thank you again again for your comments. We hope to have answered to your doubts, and we will remain very attentive in case there are more details than you would like to discuss with us. Best regards, --PDiazR (WMCL) (talk) 15:54, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Thank you PDiazR (WMCL) for your response. It was helpful and informative. However, I do want to highlight our expectation for follow up actions and outcomes evaluation. We see all Wikimedia events organizers as community leaders and not just facilitators for the event, and as such, we are looking at you to take the necessary actions to meet your goals according to the agenda you have set. It means that we would like to see more clarity and active actions to understand what were the outcomes and the impact you had on the region. Please keep that in mind while working on the '6 months after' survey.

Thank you for providing the breakdown for thematic focus areas. This is very helpful for our future work.

As for the Carta de Santiago, I know there were a few AffCom and Roles & Responsibilities working group representatives at the event so I guess they are aware. Have you been actively asking for a response? If not, and you wish to get one, I suggest to directly reach out to them.

Thank you again for the work you and the team have done and for your further clarifications. Your financial documentation was also reviewed and approved. Please remember to follow the instructions as for the USD 14,497 remaining funds to be returned to WMF so we can finalize the grant.

Best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 12:11, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Dear Chen, thanks for your review. As Treasurer of WMCL, I will be in charge of the financial aspects regarding the return of unused funds. It might take a few more days, since it is the first time we do this process with our bank, but we will inform you as soon as we do it. --Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo (talk) 22:04, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo for letting me know! Please make sure to notify me or the Grants admin team by email once it's done so we can confirm with our finance team. Best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 12:29, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Hello CAlmog (WMF) (CAlmog). We will like to inform you that we have already updated our Iberoconf’s report, including some information we took out of the 6-month-after survey we send to the representatives two weeks ago.

We will also like to answer some of the comments and recommendations made in this report, that are very sensitive for us as an organization.

As WMCL, we regret that 6 months after organizing Iberoconf 2019, WMF is asking us to be more than “just facilitators for the event” (something that already demanded a lot of work and coordination), in order to become “community leaders” to the Iberocoop activities. We believe that this requirement was not a part of the specific project we presented when we accepted the challenge of organizing this conference. We remark that no other regional structure (not even those with more experience or that already had permanent staff members) wanted to assume that challenge at that time.

We understand the expectations of WMF, that wants to assure that regional meetings (like Iberoconf) translate into concrete and sustainable actions. However, this monitoring and coordination work goes beyond what we can currently do as a local chapter.

Even though we recognize our privileged position, having a professional team (that went from 0,5 FTE in January 2019 to 1,5 FTE only two months ago), their current job is to assure that we can fulfill the projects and responsibilities we proposed in our annual plan. The rest of our team, even though they have been committed to this movement for the last 10-15 years, participate in Wikimedia as volunteers.

This is a reality that represents not only WMCL but most of the chapters and user groups conforming Iberocoop. Indeed, only four regional structures have permanent staff members; the rest keep assuming their responsibilities as volunteers. This is something that really concern us as a regional initiative. In the survey we launched to update this report, we asked representatives to express which were the main difficulties they have to go through in order to develop regional activities or collaboration work. All of them pointed out the excess of local work, and the lack of both human and economic resources were the main difficulties in order to maintain those activities.

On the other hand, the idea that WMCL should assume a sort of “leadership” within the regional movement, motivating or taking the “necessary actions” to concrete regional goals, indicates us that WMF is not familiar with the way in which the structures that compose Iberocoop are organized. We recognize that collaboration is one of the main elements of our movement, but so it is chapters independence and autonomy. As WMCL, we strongly believe in respecting affiliates pace and agendas. To assume that we should intervene those agendas in order to achieve regional goals or projects, is something that neither we, nor other Iberocoop members, will support.

It would be a completely different situation if some other chapter or user group would ask us for our support to promote regional activities. In that case we would be (and we have been) happy to collaborate.

For the above, we want to express our disagreement with WMF current request, stating that regional-event organizers (as Wikimedia Colombia, who is organizing Iberoconf 2020, or other African or Middle-East affiliates) should mandatorily assume a regional leadership role. This represents a supplementary effort to every structure that volunteers to organize this kind of meetings, and goes beyond the original goals of Iberoconf. We ignore if there is any other regional chapter or user group that is willing to assume that particular request.

In the case that WMF wants go pursue this new path, we suggest that this information should be clarified and communicated to all regional members, in order that every chapter and user group knows what really implies to organize (or even participate in) this kind of events. We fear, however, that this new level of responsibilities may demotivate new regional actors to host this conference, due to the large number of supplementary tasks. This is especially critical for the emergent Wikimedia communities, for whom organizing these events are more an inner learning process than a leadership opportunity.

Finally, we fear that possibility could be something really negative to our regional movement, knowing how significant this meetings are for our communities. From all the representatives that took part in our last survey, 80% think that Iberoconf is important or highly important, and that they will happily participate again. They remark that Iberoconf is an instance where the exchange of ideas and experiences encourage their local work.

We insist that these suggestions are made with the good will and collaborative spirit that represents Wikimedia movement. We also like to express that we remain open to discuss this situation with other WMF members and regional affiliates, in order to keep contributing to our movement with our vision and experience.

Best regards --PDiazR (WMCL) (talk) 14:59, 24 September 2019 (UTC)