WikiWomenCamp/Agenda/Chapters and Women

English Notes

Participants

• Al
• Netha Hussain
• Susana
• Laura Hale
• Beria Lima
• Teresa
• Martha
• Charlene
• Maria
• Siska

Discussion

• Laura : Money is an issue. Justification for providing funding to people from other countries is difficult with WM-Australia. There are conflicts about the right way of spelling the words between the English speakers of different countries. The Chapter was very supportive with the idea of conducting a WikiWomencamp and offered scholarships. The board and the members were very supportive and they were aware that openspace works well. The editor community requests the boards for conducting the projects and the board provides funding for the same. WM-Australia would like to have professional funding and the chapter is working towards it. Wikimedia Australia is planning to create their own version of commons as they have copyright issues.
• Maria : Many interactions happen between other chapters and Spain. The Board has to look after the budget. The board expected to go professional in around 5 years.
• Charlene: WM-South Africa is a relatively new chapter. People at the chapter have problems with creating the infrastructure. They have inadequate relationships with the foundation. External communications are poor.
• Teresa: There are people who create conflicts in Wikipedias because people belonging to one geographical area have problems with people of other places.
• Netha : The Board has middle aged people. The board has no issues with the editor community, but the board has to be fair in dealing with the funding as they have to distribute the funding equally between all Indian Wikiprojects.
• Beria : 10-15 volunteers exist in Portuguese Wikipedia. Brazilian Portuguese is different from Portugal Portuguese. There are conflicts between speakers of different varieties of Portuguese language.
• Siska: There are no conflicts at WM-Indonesia Chapter. The Presidents have got funding, developed MediaWiki and have organised many activities in the past. At times, members failed to take risks, as a result of which there were no presidential candidates at WM-IND for a few months. they have a board of trustees and a board of Executives working independently. Middle aged people are mostly occupying positions at the Board. Every member except the Treasurer is a woman in the Board of Executives. There are no women among trustees. Female editors who win the editing competitions are more interested in working with the chapter initiatives than men. There are differences between projects and organization. Projects have funding but organization is fully voluntary. All project directors work independently. Wikimedia Indonesia does not want to go professional, but would like to let project directors who are volunteers to help with the smooth conduction of projects.
• Anya : One could find very high funding for the projects if they are huge. Wikidata is a large project in which one could do specific searches.
• Martha : Argentina has problems with Wikiloves Panorama. therefore they are not able to actively engage in WikiLeft projects.

Chapters

WM España is a young chapter, so they need people to get involved. Is easy to do the work form these chapters because they are involved with Iberocoop, where they are expecting to help between countries. They have a lot of different people coming from different fields of expertise: people from the FLOSS community, lawyers, people from other organisations, economists... Naturally, they have some frictions arising from time to time, but everyone is focused in the same direction. They have a variety of ages. They try to have the different official languages of the country represented. They have one women per six members of the chapter.

WM SouthAfrica, there are wikipedians by one side, and by the other side there are people who are in charge of social organisations and who knows how to work with them, and there are tensions which arise because of these reason.

• They have 1 women per 7 members of the chapter.

WM India: they don't have problems with the FLOSS community, but they have a lot of editors in different languages, and it is difficult for them to make all the languages to feel represented in Wikipedia. It's hard work, but they try to do it. Is not hard for women to do things into the chapter, but they don't have so many women involved, some of them have support. There are no women in the chapter.

WM Portugal: it was founded in 2009, so is not as mature as the rest of the chapters. They had a relation of 1 portuguese / 5 brasilian. In 2008-2009, they had a big conflict between portuguese people and brasilian people, they have idiomatic issues related to gramatical variations. They even had a different kind of votation for articles which each of the countries had written.

• 2 women per 9 members of the chapter.

WM Indonesia: 2010 there was a little economic conflict related to fund search, which made the president of the chapter to drop out the organisation. They have been for years without a president because of this conflict. Now they have two different boards, an executive board and a directive board.

• There are all women, with the exception of the person who takes care of the accountability.

WM Australia: they wanted to organise the event in Argentina, so they did it. There were no voices against it, they supported it financially since the beginning. In Australia is a cultural thing to support someone if they make successful activities, and if they don't, they won't support them.

• 2 women per 6 members of the chapter.

WM Argentina: this year they presented their annual plan to WMF, higlighting the gender gap issue; they are open to organise these kind of meetings, they have a lot of participation from women; is a really inclusive enviroment wich supports a lot of these issues. It's an example for other chapters.

• 4 women each 9 members

WM Germany is like the mother goose of all the chapters. They have a big budget, a lot of members, a lot of experience. They have a system for asking grants if you are an individual or an organisation. The most known is WIKIDATA, is an ambicious project with a lot of press. They have discussions about how to spend the money and where they focus their attention.

General

The edition wars have influence on the chapter; there has been people that didn't get in touch with people from other chapters just because there were two or three people who didn't like in the group.

There's also a problem with the cultural hegemony of some countries.

Other stuff

They talk about the problem with the location of servers, which are now in USA. They talk about the possibility to relocate them, since the laws that apply to Commons are the laws of USA. They talk about intellectual property laws and the international treaties that restrict the spread of knowledge.