Grants talk:PEG/WM DE/Wikimedia Conference 2015/Report

Hi Nicole, Daniela, and the Wikimedia Conference team. Thank you for this very thoughtful and comprehensive grant report. We appreciate the time and effort the team has put into this report as it provides a lot of useful context and learnings. We have a few comments/questions below and look forward to your responses.

1. We are looking forward to the PEC report this September as it is too early to know how effective the post-conference coordination has been. I'm sad to have missed the WMCON Follow-up Day at Wikimania and it would be great to have a short summary of how it went. It's great that 37 people signed up to participate! Were further agreements made on how to take specific issues forward? Were any of the thematic ambassadors able to attend? If not, an update on their coordination efforts to date would also be helpful (knowing we will have much more detail in a couple of months).

   Around 60 people attended the Follow-up Day, and conversations were quite effective. 5 ambassadors led specific sessions on topics to follow-up. We are working on a more detailed documentation and will publish an update (“news from the PEC-man) until mid-August.

   Hi Alex, just to give you a short update: I've published a small report on the PEC's activities at the Wikimania. Best regards, --Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE) (talk) 16:02, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

2. What are the PEC's objectives for participating in the upcoming CEE meeting? It sounds like he is advising on program development leading up to the meeting.

   We have been approached by the organisers of the CEE meeting with a request to support them building their program. We shared some material regarding our program design process and some experience with previous conferences. We offered to further advise throughout their program design process, to make sure that WMCON topics find a way into their agenda as well and to participate in the meeting itself in person (PEC), if the organisers find this helpful.

3. We really appreciate all the efforts at better documenting this year's sessions and especially the new section on "how to move forward" on each session page.

   Thanks! :)

4. Many thanks to the event and logistics coordinator and broader team who did a fantastic job! Also thanks to the WMF travel team for all their support.

   We appreciate the good collaboration between WMF’s and WMDE’s teams. Thanks for your continuous support!

5. Thanks for the great insights on what to differently next year. We agree that the main area of improvement is more preparation time to engage participants in program development and preparing for fruitful sessions. Clearly defined tracks that cater to different experience levels will be even more important as the number of new user groups rise and there is a growing diversity in levels of experience in the movement. We're looking forward to supporting the program team as they think through how best to address this challenge.

   We are currently in the process of fine-tuning the whole program design process, and – being aware of the growing challenges during this process – will take different stakeholders input into consideration. We’ll be in touch in the next couple of months to further define this.

6. In terms of eligibility, we'll need to be even more clear next year, especially regarding reporting deadlines since people will be selected so far in advance. Hopefully, we'll continue to have Winifred's great support with this.

   Creating and applying these eligibility criteria was very helpful for us as they were clear, fact-based, easy to understand for everyone and publicly displayed. Thank you, Winifred! We look forward to communicating them earlier and more precisely.

7. We're committed to early conversations and agreements between the project partners to improve the process for coordinating all the preconference activities (Affcom, Learning & Evaluation, FDC, etc.). Pinging Winifred, Katy, and Jaime so they're sure to see this : )

   The WMCON is a great platform for different teams and we highly appreciate that they take advantage of this opportunity.

8. Thank you for the 2016 timeline. We especially like the proposed "how to choose the right representative briefing"!

   This will be something that we will ask more input for from your side in the course of the development of this briefing.

Thanks again for this report and all your efforts. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 22:06, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks again for all your support! We look forward to further improving the WMCON together with you. Feel free to reach out with further questions and remarks.

Best regards from Mexico City

--Nicole Ebber (WMDE) (talk) 15:53, 18 July 2015 (UTC) & --Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE) (talk) 19:44, 18 July 2015 (UTC)