New Learning Days at Wikimania 2017!

We are happy to inform that we will be hosting Learning Days at Wikimania!

In addition to the core-conference, the Learning and Evaluation team at the Wikimedia Foundation organizes pre-conference Learning Days. During these days, there will be workshops on program design, evaluation, and communities learning. The event will be held on Wednesday, August 9th and Thursday, August 10th.

This year, participants will be selected along two tracks according to practice and knowledge:

Traditional Learning Days track: Pre-conference participatory workshop sessions on program design, evaluation, resources, learning, & community engagement for folks working to implement programmatic and community engagement activities in their home communities.
New Leadership Development track: Pre-conference sessions for affiliate representatives who are focused on developing leadership for programs and community building through train-the-trainer and other skills development approaches in their home communities.

If you would like to focus on developing programs for the first time in your community and have never attended a Learning Day before, we will have options prepared for you. Alternatively, if you have attended Learning Days before in past conferences and have already accrued experience in implementing Wikimedia Programs, we need your help! Aside from having advanced workshops for experienced program leaders focused on leadership development, we also want your help in co-hosting trainings and presenting what you know to others.

Registration & Selection

Registration for Wikimania 2017 opens on Friday, May 5th. In the registration form, you will only be asked for your general interest in the pre-conference Learning Days. By stating your interest, you are not automatically registered, as only a limited number of slots are available. Selection will begin on June 5th, for the best opportunity at selection, please register by June 11. Qualification does not guarantee participation. Participants who apply prior to June 5 will be selected based on the extent to which they demonstrate the selection criteria. Following June 5th additional qualified applicants may be approved until there are no open slots remaining.

Should demand be less than expected, restrictions may be loosened. Follow-up communications and notifications will be sent beginning June 5. If you have any questions, please reach out to Maria Cruz (eval@wikimedia.org).

Selection Criteria:

The selection criteria for Learning Days include that all participants must be endorsed to participate by their affiliate group and demonstrate evidence of at least 3 of the following to qualify for participation:

You want to teach back home what they learn.
You have implemented one or more programmatic activities in the last 12 months or you plan to implement one or more programmatic activities in the next 12 months.
You have engaged, or plan to engage, in learning and evaluation practices in order to learn about their program outcomes.
You are interested in teaching about community programs and/or engagement activities at Learning Day.
You have taught or presented in a Learning Day event in the past.
You have demonstrated application of something they learned at a past Learning Day event.
You are working to develop and/or lead skills training workshops for leadership development in their home community (e.g., skills development for community engagement, community health, program design and evaluation).

Looking forward to a new day of Learning Together!

Agenda

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This is a draft agenda for the conference and may be updated at a later date.

Day One: Wednesday	Room One: Drummond West	Room Two: Drummond Center	Room Three: Salon 3
Live co-design
Program Skills & Resources
Cross-cutting
Grants + L&E Skills & Resources
Leadership Skills & Resources
9:00-9:30	Plenary Welcome and Orientation
9:30-10:30	Plenary Opening Session (Day 1)
10:30-11:00	Break
11:00-11:40	Campaigning for New Editors (L)	Logic Models and Theory of Change (T)	Facilitation Skills(Part One) (L)
11:40-11:45	Transition	Logic Models and Theory of Change (T)
11:45-12:30	Designing Wikimedia Programs and Events (Part One) (T)	How to plan a pilot project (Part 1) (L)
12:30-13:00	Lunch		Lunch
13:00-13:30	Lunch		Facilitation Skills(Part Two) (L)
13:30-14:30	Designing Wikimedia Programs and Events (Part Two) (T)	How to plan a pilot project (Part 2) (L)
14:30-14:45	Transition
14:45-15:30	Community Development Lightning Talks (T)	Evaluation Plans and Making it Count (Part One) (T)
15:30-16:00	Break
16:00-17:00	Tools Rotation (L & T) Qualtrics/Surveys, Grants Metrics, Legal Questions & Issues, Budget Planning & Tracking	Evaluation Plans and Making it Count (Part Two) (T)	Community Health:Tips & Tools (L)
17:00-17:15	Transition
17:15-18:00	Plenary Review Session
18:00-19:00	Learning Days Social Time

Day Two: Thursday	Room One: Drummond West	Room Two: Drummond Center	Room Three: Salon 3
9:30-10:00	Plenary Welcome and Orientation
10:00-10:30	Plenary Opening Session (Day 2)
10:30-11:00	Break
11:00-12:30	Working Better Together: Developing Wikimedia Affiliate Partnerships for Programs (L)	Building our learning network (Communications) (T)	Staying connected through conflict(L)
12:30-13:30	Lunch
13:30-14:30	Unconference	Program Tracking Tools Demonstrations (L & T): Program & Events dashboard, Wikimedia Resource Center, Global Metrics API, & Hashtag tracking	Making decisions together: Tools for community listening (L)
14:30- 14:45		Transition
14:45- 15:30		Programs Lightning Talks (T)	Engaging Volunteers (Social Media) (T)
15:30-16:00	Break
16:00-17:00	Tools Rotation: (L & T) GLAM Category Tools, Quarry, Phabricator, Legal questions & issues	Programs Lightning Talks (T)	Group Consensus Building (L)
17:00-17:15	Transition
17:15-18:00	Plenary Review Session
18:00-19:00	Wikimania Opening Social

Participants

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If you have already registered for Wikimania, and have interest in participating, sign up below

--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 20:08, 21 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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Instructions for sharing knowledge

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=== Posters ===

Estimated preparation time: 3 - 5 hours.

Poster dimensions

The maximum dimensions for your poster size A1. Following are the technical specifications for the poster:

Size: A1 (594 x 841 mm "or" 23.4 x 33.1 in)
DPI: preferably 150-300 DPI
Color mode: Preferably CMYK (most graphic editing software programs have the color changing mode and CMYK is great for lossless printing)

Creating your poster

In terms of content, the kind of poster we are looking for is academic poster ^[1], a presentation of information that is educational to others, and serves a learning purpose, rather than a promotional or marketing end. Once you chose the topic you want for your poster, lay out the story in a way that lets other people know what happened, what were the key results, and what is your key advice to them, if you have any. You can also use the ABCDs of Storytelling as a guide to creating your poster. Find more detailed guidance on this Learning Pattern, and also looking at posters submitted by others in previous Learning Days:

There are many programs you can use to create a poster. We have found that Microsoft PowerPoint, LibreOffice Presentation, and LibreOffice Draw are the most easy to use, and make good looking posters. Other programs like Adobe InDesign & Illustrator have more features, but they are also more difficult to learn, and they are expensive. Another option is to use Google Draw.

Whichever program you choose, make sure to set the size of your poster file before you start adding words and pictures. This will help you make sure that the fonts you are using are the right size, and that the pictures you include have a high enough resolution to print properly. Here are some links that may help you create a poster of the correct size:

Finalizing your poster

Once your poster is complete, please print it to PDF format and open it in a PDF reader to make sure that everything is displaying correctly. Are your pictures blurry? Is your text aligned? Once you are happy with the way your PDF looks, please send the PDF to eval@wikimedia.org.

If you have questions, or experience trouble making your poster

Please email eval@wikimedia.org. Remember that the deadline for submitting your poster for printing is Sunday, February 26. If you have questions or requests for us to help you, please email no later than Monday, February 20.

References

↑ Academic poster, on English Wikipedia

Lightning Talk

Estimated Preparation Time is 1-3 hours.
Share with your peers something inspiring about your project experience. Give a 3-5 min talk and share:

What you did
How you measured success and
What you learned

There will be time for questions at the end of your talk.
To create a successful lightning talk, make sure you have some visual support. You can use a poster you submitted, a few slides (not more than 3 or 4 is recommended), or a page you want to show to support your story.

August 9-10: Learning Days at Wikimania 2017
August 9-13: Wikimania Montreal 2017

Learning Days Outcomes

Participant engagament and feedback

In the 10th issue of Learning Days, we hosted 96 community members, and 14 Wikimedia Foundation staff members. This was the second iteration of the Leadership track, and we were happy to see more community members stepping up to present something they learned. Of the total community members that participated, 29 (30%) nominated themselves to teach or share what they know, in the following way: 6 people co-present or co-facilitate a session; 20 community members presented a lightning talk, and another 4 presented a poster. Aside from these, there were 3 community members who fully led their sessions: Jan Apel and Elisabeth Mandl, from Wikimedia Deutschland, led the session Campaigning for new editors; Rosie Stephenshon-Goodknight led the session Group Consensus Building. In terms of content type, we 35% of the sessions we offered were training workshops, and 65% of sessions were interactive or participatory sessions.

This time, leadership sessions were distributed across both days. In this issue of Learning Days we used our comprehensive feedback form, that allows participants to share something they liked best about the session, something they would suggest to do different next time, and something they plan on doing in the next 30 days, based on what they learned. The analysis presented below stems from the feedback forms received for each day, as follows:

Learning Day	Number of evaluations	Percentage
Wednesday	47	70.15%
Thursday	18	43.90%

On Wednesday, the sessions Evaluation plans and making it count, How to plan a pilot, and Logic models and theory of change were among the most liked sessions, as well as those that inspired the most actions in the next 30 days. Tools rotation and Designing programs and events came in second place.

The idea behind asking participants for feedback on what they would do differently in the next 30 days is to assess how the information shared is useful or applicable to the participants context. To a large extent, the feedback in this area focused on applying new tools to the existing work.

A few examples are:

“	I will help community members in writing learning patterns.	”

“	I'm going to narrow the focus of my programming goals	”

“	I will present the skills learned to my community.	”

“	Think about the types of leadership we encourage or discourage.	”

“	Think of different forms of leadership and try to recognize it.	”

“	Trying to reuse old hashtags and see if we can get more effect even after something	”

“	Learning so much from my peers, will think about the ways we conceptualize retention.	”

“	I will build a staircase model for my own project, adding and developing history photography entries that are marginalized.	”

“	Talk about accounting software that might help my chapter, with my chapter	”

Legend:

Tools

Learning from others

Teaching back at local community

On Thursday, the sessions Program lightning talks, Building a learning network, and Group consensus building were among the most liked sessions, as well as the ones that inspired the most actions or changes in the next 30 days. The comments in this section were predominantly about sharing experiences and learning valuable skills that they could share back with the local community.