Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/WCNA/WikiConference North America 2024

Location: Indianapolis, Indiana

I'm one of the authors of this proposal, and I notice something that should be made clear at the top. Our answer to question 4 should have made said that we have a definite location in mind: downtown Indianapolis, which we'll usually call "Indy." As you'll see from the later questions, we have rooms in a university conference center selected already, and the local team checked out hotels and picked one to be the conference hotel. The organizers have regular meetings every two weeks and have discussed these core elements of the proposal. -- econterms (talk) 01:28, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Endorsment from OhanaUnited

• I support this grant proposal. It provides an opportunity for North American hub discussion, connecting with Canadian Wikipedians, meeting underrepresented groups from the Caribbeans and outreach for various sister projects and open movement.

--OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:22, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

WMF review and feedback

Hi @Econterms and the WikiConference North America team.

Thank you very much for this proposal and for your initiative in organizing the WikiConference North America 2024. I highly appreciate the time and effort you put into this proposal. I have reviewed your proposal and have some comments and follow up questions:

• Can you clarify the length of the conference? How many days/nights?
• I did not know there was a concrete proposed NA Hub structure. I’m looking forward to hearing more about it.
• What do you think is the reason for the very low rate of responses to the survey? Aren't you worried about the interest and relevance of the event as it shows by the lack of responses? Especially as this is one of the biggest regional events that we have in the movement.
• “Make participation for Spanish and French speakers as easy as possible” - This is a new (I think) and worthy cause. But I didn’t see a translation component in your budget. Do you want to consider practicing this at the conference?
• Scholarships - How will you decide who is eligible for a flight vs ground transportation scholarship? Do you have any criteria for this? (maybe the length of travel?).
• What about lunch and dinner for scholarship recipients? And meals during the conference hours for non scholarships? I’m not sure if this is covered and addressed on the budget.
• Roles and responsibilities - within the 3 wiki partners and UG’s - how many people do you have on the COT?
• What are some of Wikimedians of Indiana user group’s internal aspirations (locally) that you hope to achieve? Is there anything special you would like to learn or gain from organizing this conference?
• Metrics - 60 presentations - This might be too much. In the last year we have been getting more and more feedback across the movement about organizers accepting too many presentations that results in lack of focus.

Budget:

• I see you have budgeted for 9 conference rooms. Isn’t that a bit much? I see (and appreciate) that you have secured a significant in kind savings rate, but I am not confident you really need that many rooms. But I will leave it to your discretion.
• What is the ‘Event Support staff’ item?
• Is the catering calculated for all 240 participants?
• I’m not sure that boxed lunches are suitable for a 3 day conference. Do you have any other options?

Thank you for a good proposal that is also a demonstration of a good collaboration. My main concern is that there is not enough clarity about the gaps, challenges, and the way that this conference will build on top of the last one. What has happened and changed since the last WikiCon NA? How do you reflect the continuity of this regional platform? This is a concern especially given the very low rate of responses to the community engagement survey. I wonder if this is the power of inertia, or is there a real need and continued motivation for this event? Il’l appreciate your thoughts and reflections on this.

When you're able, please respond to the questions on meta and revise the proposal on Fluxx if needed (I have sent the application back on Fluxx so you can edit it, just don't forget to re-submit when you are done). These revisions will be due by March 4, 2024 after which the Conference Grant Committee will begin formal review of the proposal to make the funding decisions.

Best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 05:40, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

WCNA organizers reply to WMF review and feedback above

Thank you for this feedback! Organizers wrote and met today to achieve consensus on our replies:

Q1: Can you clarify the length of the conference? How many days/nights?

Typical North American WikiConferences run with regular programming for 3 days from Friday-Sunday, with a pre-conference day on Thursday for cultural outings. We plan to do the same thing this year.

Q2: I did not know there was a concrete proposed NA Hub structure. I’m looking forward to hearing more about it.

Wikimedia DC will be filing a research report in fulfillment of a Movement Strategy implementation grant. You will receive it officially after many people have a chance to review it. The proposal will be for user groups and chapters in North America to commit to cooperate more among themselves on an opt-in basis. This does not directly affect the conference but will hopefully provide a better basis for planning it in the long term. We want to be able to make some commitments for future conferences before even filing a grant application. The conference will continue to be the largest collaborative North American activity.

Q3: What do you think is the reason for the very low rate of responses to the survey? Aren't you worried about the interest and relevance of the event as it shows by the lack of responses? Especially as this is one of the biggest regional events that we have in the movement.

Each year, we conduct our Community Engagement Survey by sending it to participants from the previous one or two WCNA conferences, and to a few mailing lists and chat groups focused on North American communities. Our response rate for this survey has never been high, but we have also never seen it as a cause for concern. The organizers are in touch with the attendees.

WikiConference North America is one of the biggest regional events, and this has held true for many years despite low survey participation—so we do not consider a low response rate to correlate to weak interest in the event. Attendees appear to have interest and confidence in the conference.

We primarily use other means to gather feedback and learn about what our community's needs and interests are. This includes WCNA itself and its closing session, numerous meetings that happen throughout the year that include WCNA organizers and community members (WALRUS calls, North American Hub research, affiliate meetings, on-wiki discussions, chat groups, etc.), and the fact that our organizers come from many of the groups within North America. Our conference organizers are actively embedded in the community. We learn about the needs and opportunities in our community through other paths; interactively, not by survey mainly. WikiConference North America draws large numbers of attendees each year; over 240 in 2023. We have an ongoing Telegram group of past attendees with over 170 members, and some ongoing discussion occurs there throughout the year.

If needed, we could do another round of communications and can press harder for more responses by sending more reminders. We try to limit the communications we send out (e.g. for emailing past conference participants, we limit our survey emails to the initial email + one reminder, to respect that conference registrants didn't necessarily sign up to receive communications beyond updates about the conference itself).

Our Community Engagement Survey may get more participation if we are able to customize the default questions. Given how widespread the North American community is, we've had some survey participants express confusion over the scope of the questions, what "community" means for the sake of the survey, etc. If we're able to tune the survey for our region, we believe we may see greater participation.

Q4: “Make participation for Spanish and French speakers as easy as possible” - This is a new (I think) and worthy cause. But I didn’t see a translation component in your budget. Do you want to consider practicing this at the conference?

We have a $6,000 budget item for language interpretation in the proposal. We were not able to secure a formal estimate from a translation provider prior to the proposal, so this is a guess. But we have spoken with the venue's event support staff about translation and they have worked with outside vendors to provide these services in the past and are willing to coordinate translation for us. This budget item could also include sign language interpretation. For all interpretation, we also expect the cost will be dependent on the needs of who ends up attending the conference. Last year's WikiConference in Toronto provided French and Spanish language interpretation (paid by Wikimedia Canada), and the GLAM-Wiki conference in Montevideo last year had multiple languages being translated simultaneously, so we know this is not new in the Wikimedia community.

When the WCNA conference was online in 2021 and 2022 we were able to offer audio interpretation between Spanish and English through the online platform, Hopin, and a translator collective enterprise in Mexico. That was a major accomplishment, as we reported then. The task is somewhat more difficult or expensive in person, and we would like to stretch forward from the modest interpretation services we could offer in 2023.

Q5: Scholarships - How will you decide who is eligible for a flight vs ground transportation scholarship? Do you have any criteria for this? (maybe the length of travel?)

For Toronto last year, scholarship applicants were asked to provide their preferred route and method of travel in their application. Rough estimates were then calculated and scholarships were granted based on these estimates. Changes were not guaranteed if a scholarship recipient requested an alternative route or method of travel. The estimates proved pretty accurate as we were close to budget once all costs were reimbursed.

We want to experiment more this year, perhaps allowing those who can travel cheaply to make their own arrangements and reimburse them. Most will use our travel agency along the model of the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin. We will need to put a cap on costs for all but the most remote travelers.

Q6: What about lunch and dinner for scholarship recipients? And meals during the conference hours for non scholarships? I’m not sure if this is covered and addressed on the budget.

We plan to provide lunch for all attendees every regular conference day (Fri-Sun) as we did last year. This approach avoids complexity and supports peer conversation without any distracting or unequal transactions. WikiConference North America has not in the past given meal reimbursements or per diem for scholarship recipients, but we would be willing to follow Wikimedia norms and guidelines or try something new. Grab-and-go lunches give people a chance to have planned meetings at lunchtime; they don’t have to wait in line.

Q7: Roles and responsibilities - within the 3 wiki partners and UG’s - how many people do you have on the COT?

As in previous years we do not have a formally listed COT (core organizing team). It is a risk; in theory we could have people decline to follow through. However we have over 30 Wikimedians in the organizer telegram group which is made up of past organizers. We have divided some responsibilities — the local arrangements and the fiscal sponsorship, so far. Program planning can be done by a different group. We list committed volunteers and chapter staff at https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2024/More/Team. Our meetings so far have 8 or so people and based on last year they will grow in size over time. We have arranged a conference location and an affordable conveniently located conference hotel, earlier than last year.

Q8: What are some of Wikimedians of Indiana user group’s internal aspirations (locally) that you hope to achieve? Is there anything special you would like to learn or gain from organizing this conference?

Wikimedians of Indiana has several goals for hosting this conference, including:

• By putting on a large event for a general audience, they are hoping for raising awareness of its existence and its events within Indiana. The user group has been active for around 2 years now with events averaging monthly in Indianapolis, but can struggle to get attendees to events because there were no local meetups or other events prior to the start of the project that led to the user group’s formation. The user group is working to build up its contact list to distribute event invites to.
• The user group has worked hard to engage local cultural heritage institutions, and this is an opportunity to expose them to real-life Wikipedians, and also for them engage more deeply with the Wikimedia community by attending sessions they likely would not have traveled out of town for.
• The user group believes it has a compelling story to tell and a model that other communities in mid-sized North American cities could follow. This includes our focus on GLAM-Wiki engagement, building a user group out of a university library, and securing local arts funding for the project. The user group organizers have even presented about this at each of the last two WCNAs (2022 & 2023). Hosting WCNA provides an opportunity to showcase the fruits of these efforts to Wikimedians from other areas, who may be inspired or learn from Indiana’s approach.

Q9: Metrics - 60 presentations - This might be too much. In the last year we have been getting more and more feedback across the movement about organizers accepting too many presentations that results in lack of focus.

Perhaps it is too many. We will consider this. It will be up to our Program Committee, which was not yet constituted at the time of the grant proposal. This figure was mostly just an attempt at a reasonable guess. Previous iterations of our conference (including 2019 and 2023) have had over 70 sessions over 3 days, in 3 tracks generally, but if finders or attendees feel it was too many or too burdensome, we expect the committee to adjust accordingly. We do not want to have 9 intense hours of presentation each day.

There are variations. We could also give some speakers lightning talk slots instead of a pre-programmed slot. We want the time of the attendees is used in a rewarding way. Some speakers need to be on the program to get funding to attend. Another possibility is to offer a poster option; we have not done that in the past, but it would give more people a chance to show their work.

Q10: I see you have budgeted for 9 conference rooms. Isn’t that a bit much? I see (and appreciate) that you have secured a significant in kind savings rate, but I am not confident you really need that many rooms. But I will leave it to your discretion.

These rooms were selected based, as you say, for their low cost, but also working together with the venue's support staff during a walkthrough when we explained our needs for programming, organizers, and food service. WCNA typically has a plenary room and about 4 breakout rooms for concurrent session tracks. Several of the other rooms are not actual conference rooms, and some quite small. A separate room for organizers and volunteers was recommended by past organizers, and one reserved for private Safe Space meetings if necessary (e.g. for people to report or investigate in secure privacy). The venue also recommended at least one room be open for food service during lunch times, since we are using an auditorium with stadium seating for the plenary space, rather than a banquet room with tables as they had in 2023 in Toronto.

Q11: What is the ‘Event Support staff’ item?

This is the hourly fee for the venue's staff person who is on site at all times during the event and assists with all non-AV coordination, such as room setup, supplies, or any other needs requiring the venue's assistance.

Q12: Is the catering calculated for all 240 participants?

Yes, this is planned to cover coffee/drinks, morning snacks, and lunches for all participants.

Q13: I’m not sure that boxed lunches are suitable for a 3 day conference. Do you have any other options?

We plan to use Chartwell's, the IU Indianapolis on-campus food service provider and approved catering vendor for the venue. You can see their menus and costs here. I can't link directly to the listing, but the most economical type of lunch option are the sandwiches, and you can order them in 12-count groupings, which can either be served on trays or for a small extra fee make it lunch boxes which "incudes lay`s bagged chips, whole fruit, and a cookie". Different types of sandwiches and cookies are offered depending on the day so that offers some variety (it also includes a vegetarian option). We offered lunch boxes at the last conference in Toronto and attendees were pleased by the food options, as well as the practical aspect of it (allowing them to eat wherever they want) and the sanitary aspect (everyone has their own box, there were no shared utensils etc.) It is also the most affordable option as we provide lunch for all the attendees. This seemed to us to be the most likely catering option, but if you can explain more about the issue with suitability, there is certainly plenty of time before we have to finalize any catering order. We can respond further to a more specific alternative.

-- econterms (talk) 22:17, 11 March 2024 (UTC)