Grants:TPS/Magioladitis/OSCAL17/Report

Event name

OSCAL '17

Participant connections

I came into touch with many people from Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group and I participated in a Wikimedia Meetup on 14 May. I also met Dimitar Dimitrov and discussed EU copyright issues since my user group already have helped in that direction. I also had the chance to talk with Greek students from the Fedora group. I led a workshop on Mediawiki and AutoWikiBrowser where about 10 people participated.

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience: What is one way you shared something from your experience with your community (either locally or globally), after the event?

Add a link here to a blog post or newsletter you wrote about your participation afterwards, or to a meet-up you organized to share your experience with your local community.

On the weekend of 13-14 May I found myself in Tirana, the capital of Albania, to participate in OSCAL '17 an open-source conference with the participation of communities like Fedora, Mozilla, OpenStreetMaps, etc.

I represented the Wikimedia Community and organized a workshop on "AutoWikiBrowser: Dealing with data sets" giving participants the opportunity to see that they can develop open source tools and programs on Mediawiki. The workshop incuded an orientation Mediawiki and Phabricator.

I had the opportunity to meet people from the Albanian Wikimedia community as well as people from other countries who came to the conference. I learned that the Albanian community has been organizing Wikimedia Weekend the last 3 years which is a very interesting conference that could also be organised in Greece too.

I had discussions with people from the Fedora and Mozilla communities on organizing conferences, open source issues, software, and more.

A team from the University of Tirana also made a 3D printing demonstration.

All the speeches and workshops took place at the Harry Fultz Institute, which had been appropriately designed with stand stands, to be just outside most of the lectures and the workshop area in the adjoining building. The organizers provided a mobile app with all the events and the telegram was used to solve instant questions and sudden changes to the program.

I followed talks about copyright, data security, privacy, and participated in a cryptoparty where PGP Email Account Creation was demonstrated and more.

It was the first time I attended an International Open Source Conference not organized by the Wikimedia Foundation. I have previously participated in a Fosscomm conference in Greece and in many International Conferences organized by the Wikimedia Foundation itself. The discussion agenda was clearly different, with a much wider range of topics. I hope this experience will be repeated in the future.

My slides and a report in Greek is also available online:

I tweeted everything and the Official Tweet page and the organisers re-tweeted my reports and slides.

Finances

Airplane ticket: Paid directly by WMF
Accomodation: Paid Directly by WMF
Registration fees: 0 EUR
Total on transportation: 26.92
- Taxi from Airport to Hotel: Paid by OSCAL organisers
- Taxi to Corfu airport: 6.92 EUR
- Taxi to Tirana Airport: 20 EUR
Total on per diem 21.55 EUR
- Food on airports: 9.05 EUR
- Food during my stay: 1820 LEK (~ 13.5 EUR)
Total: 48.47 EUR

Amount left over

Anything else