Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Blog posts/Break from the seasonal activities in Cameroon

Break from the seasonal activities in Cameroon

By Geugeor

August is period reserved for holidays at the Goethe Institut of Yaounde. It is the place where the monthly meeting (2nd Saturday of the month) of the members of the User Group residing in Yaoundé have been held for more than 2 years, we unanimously chose to take a break; break that allows us to evaluate the last season and throw the prospects for the future one.

The season ended with the holding of five strategic shows in the cities of Yaounde, Douala and Buea where most of the community members are settled. Two Youth Shows were held in Yaounde in partnership with the TechWomen Association.

During these different exhibitions, several topics were discussed: Roles and responsibilities, advocacy, capacity building, community health, products and technologies, income generation. These saw the participation of more than 70 people (with percentage 60% of women.

The quote below summarized the multiple contributions which were made : “With the strategy2030, Wikimedia projects are immersed in the lives of Africans and Cameroonians in particular and traditions.”

The User Group remains engaged since beginning of this past season on several projects like WikiKwatt which aims to create articles with photo illustrations of the districts of the city of Yaounde in Wikipedia.

Primary objectives of Wikikwatt were the training of members of the User Group based in Yaounde to contribute to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, the loyalty of community members and the work of structuring the community. Several of these objectives have been achieved, although much is still to be done in creation of the articles and their translations into English and German.

During the previous monthly meetings in Goethe, several sub-groups were created which are already working against resumption in October 2019; We can cite:

The group which will coordinate the activities of the project WikiCiné Cameroun, il will work to list all the actors of the cinema in Cameroon, to gather the various existing sources before the production of contents according to each category.
The Wikikwatt group will continue its activities with photo releases in the neighborhoods of Yaoundé, the collection of sources (books, press releases, archives, …) and the creation of articles.

A Wikidata group has been set up and especially made up of developers and computer scientists from the community; the objectives of this group are: to support the activities of the other two groups by creating Wikidata entries and training members to discover and contribute to Wikidata.

Other training courses were organized as part of the Wiki Loves Women project in Yaounde and Buea, giving several participants the opportunity to join the Yaounde group and set up a nucleus to form the basis for the meetings in Buea from beginning of the new season.

The impact of our community grew across our country last July at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications where we took part in the International Day of the Girl and World Telecommunication and Information Society Day; this has given us the opportunity to present our community as well as the various current and future projects.

Although we can congratulate ourselves on the commitment and dynamism observed, our community nevertheless encounters problems that weaken its functioning and its visibility through social networks and other media.

Strongly, we welcome a new season because new challenges are open to us with activities and projects that will be born in the Northern part of Cameroon.