Grants:TPS/nwhysel/IASummit2017/Report

Event name

2017 Information Architecture Summit

Participant connections

This year featured the third Wikipedia event held at the IA Summit. Participation expanded to include a 45-minute, Saturday session on diversity and inclusion projects at Wikipedia which is a shared theme of this year's conference program. We estimated about 40 people attended the talk. The following day during the lunch session, we hosted a mini Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon. We had ten attendees, including two facilitators. Half of the attendees had some editing experience and half were new to editing. I recognized two attendees as particularly engaged from the prior day's diversity session. Prior to these events, I explored the city looking for ways diversity is experienced in the local Vancouver community so that I could add some commentary to my presentations. These are discussed in an article I published on Medium, described in the next section.

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.

I posted about my experience presenting on Diversity and Inclusion in Wikipedia at the IA Summit in Vancouver and the lunchtime mini Edit-a-Thon at my blog and published the article to my Medium feed to reach a wider audience. I intend to propose to the host, the Association for Information Science and Technology, to include a writeup in their special bulletin on Information Architecture to be published in the June/July issue.

Finances

$503.02 Sutton Place Hotel (total USD charged to my credit card was $690.27 for four nights but the first night was sightseeing, so I am only counting three nights. As for the GSA rate, they refer to State department per diem rates which are $179/ night for Vancouver in Winter. The USD converted rate I paid at Sutton Place was lower so I prorated the lower figure for three nights.)
$195.85 United Airlines Airfare (LaGuardia to Vancouver)
$278.64 United Airlines Airfare (Vancouver to LaGuardia)
$70.36 Ground Transportation (taxi to/from airport and subway into Vancouver city center)
$0 IA Summit registration fee (The conference registration fee was waived)
$1047.87 Total

Amount left over

$427.13 USD

Anything else

I have had some difficulty getting the various communities I have created together on the WikiProject site itself and was disappointed to learn upon my return that the WikiProject has been marked for deletion, but thankful that they didn't mark it until after my event, which would have been embarrassing. I plan to reach out to the attendees and volunteers from this event and last year's event to encourage a more active role. Facebook looks like it could be a good communication tool. I joined the Wikipedia Weekly and Teaching Wikipedia groups on Facebook, which have been good sources of information and advice. I created a new Facebook group, Information Architecture and Wikipedia, for recruitment, announcements and ongoing action. This group currently has 13 members. As noted in the Council discussion last year, if I can't get additional traction, I'll suggest converting the WikiProject into a task force on WikiProject Human Computer Interaction.

Session Slides

https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/nwhysel/diversity-and-inclusion-in-wikipedia
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/nwhysel/ia-wikipedia-editathon