Grants talk:Conference/WMNO/Arctic Knot: A Wikimedia Languages conference

WMF Feedback

Dear Astrid and team,

Thank you so much for this conference submission. I really look forward to working with you on it!

This proposal seems like an excellent next step for the Knot series of events and will be able to include the current community around this event series by keeping the scope to be on all small languages while also bringing in some new folks through the focus shifting to Sami languages. It is also really great to see the collaboration between so many different Wikimedia affiliations and user groups as well as the pre-defined roles and responsibilities for each group. I hope this event and the lessons that you learn from organizing in this way can help serve as a model for similarly structured Wikimedia events in the future.

I am really curious to understand how you will approach the remote and physical groups of participants at once. We have talked a lot about experimenting with hybrid (remote and in person) events since COVID started but I am not personally aware of a larger scale hybrid conference that has taken place since the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017. When you begin to plan this piece of the event I would really love to follow along closely and see how you are working on this, how you can ensure that remote participants are not “second class attendees” and how you can still prioritize the social side of things in a workable way. It is wonderful that you will be experimenting with this.

Another really positive point is your success around in-kind donations. Great work there.

We, on the Conference Grants Team, are really onboard with revisiting this grant request in February to re-assess the international COVID situation and revise the grant as appropriate. We can stay in close communication throughout the process on this and make sure we can be adaptable if appropriate.

Going in detail through your proposal, here are a few more in depth or clarifying questions which we hope you will discuss before finalizing this phase of the grant request:

Programatic and content Questions

• Aside from new connections with cultural and educational partners, what specific advancements / changes do you expect to see to the Sámi knowledge online project due to this conference?
• In addition to the previous question can you speak a little more about this event's overall objectives? Can you be explicit about the core outcomes of this conference? Exactly what changes do you hope to see at the end of this conference? How will you know if you were successful?
• This conference seems to be targeting a whole lot of different types of people coming from different interest backgrounds, how do you envision ensuring that the content is interesting / useful to everyone? Or are some participants only expected to attend part of the conference? For example, maybe outside partners or local students will not be able to integrate into the really wikimedia-heavy sessions where community inside knowledge is needed or conversations from previous iterations of this event are continued. What is your strategy to keep this event useful for the current Celtic Knot regulars and Wikimedians as well as making it interesting and understandable for your outside partners and newbies?
• Regarding the Friendly space policy: this year’s remote Celtic Knot event did an excellent job around thinking through some friendly space & privacy considerations that are specific to remote events. Are you planning to incorporate and / or expanding on those same lessons into your upcoming event as well?
• Are you planning on discussing or incorporating implementation of movement strategy and how it impacts, relates, and affects your small language community?
• Do you have any specific plans for welcoming, orienting, and hand-holding newcomers?
• The top priority from the community survey was a focus on networking and teambuilding. How do you intend to build that into the conference purposefully?
• 20 responses for a conference with 50-70 participants is not very much. How will you ensure that the needs of your participants are being met?

And a few logistical questions

• What language will this conference be held in?
• It sounds like you are not planning on outsourcing any services. Why not? What about documentation, transcription, facilitation?
• Also, will your budget for translation and transcription be enough? These services can be expensive and the estimates seem low. We are happy to heavily support all considerations around accessibility and language support. This is a major priority for our program.
• For the merchandise to participants, did you also include shipping costs?

Some thoughts which you are welcome to take or leave

• Good idea to have smaller cohorts for the in person event, but given it’s a high priority to ‘increase participation in small language wikis’, I would also consider (given you have the capacity) to actually also encourage outreach and non-wiki participants to the remote event, and have some kind of a track or a cohort targeted to non-wiki participants.
• ‘Share technical skills and expertise across language barriers.’ it would be nice to see a more intentional approach to training, impact driven knowledge sharing, sharing materials in advance and having a Q&A, especially for a remorse version. Some people tend to be less engaging when it’s an online discussion.

To conclude, this is a great proposal. We are happy to see the capacity, collaboration, initiative and thought behind it. The budget makes sense and is clear. We are missing some objectives and clear outcomes and understanding the longer term change that you think this conference will generate.

Thank you for taking the time to write your clear and detailed proposal! Rfarrand (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

Answers to WMF feedback

Thanks for the comments, questions and thoughts shared. The details on how we will approach the remote and physical groups of participants at once is part of a broader discussion we should have within the conference team. It also remains to see if it will be possible to gather physically at all because of COVID-19. If it is possible, we will surely plan for ways to try to facilitate interaction between the remote and physical groups. We are happy to reach out to you and share our plans on this. It’s great we can revisit our grant request in February to re-assess the international COVID situation and revise the grant as appropriate. Thank you! Our answers to your questions are below. Please reach out to us if you need more detailed answers to any of the questions.

Programatic and content Questions:

• The conference will be a place to connect the Sámi Wikipedia community with our partners, and to invite volunteers to a conference where their volunteer efforts are showcased and celebrated. This will hopefully result in motivation to continue to edit, or – for our external partners – to start editing. The conference will allow us to connect the different partners we have in the Sámi project. From our Glam work we know how important this is. For example to integrate a Glam partner in an education program. The conference will be a chance to share ongoing projects with each other, and discuss new ideas. Many of our physical meetings and most travels are cancelled, so this conference will be an occasion to connect with all partners and find ways to further expand partnerships.

• Network opportunity; the coming together of people working to support small language communities: making new connections between volunteers, partners and volunteers and partners that result in motivation to contribute, sharing of technical best practices, new projects and partnership.

Support structure for small languages; discuss support (technical, capacity, partnerships, communication) for peer to peer learning on smaller language Wikipedias and communities that can result in a better support structure for small languages in Europe. Success can be measured by collaborations that are initiated, common goals that are agreed upon during the conference.

• Since we haven't started working on the conference program yet, this is a bit difficult to answer. When we do the call for proposals these are questions we will keep in mind. The key remote audience is the current Celtic Knot regulars. We are glad we can build on the learnings from this year's Celtic Knot on how to organise the remote conference and we do expect some participants to only attend part of the conference. It remains to see how/if we organise the physical part of the conference and how this part may be interesting for remote participants. One idea could be to have some keynote speakers with questions and answers sections or prerecorded presentations from Glam partners on for example image uploads. For local participants with less wiki experience we will consider the need for a session to introduce them to Wikipedia editing, something that can be done in person and in parallel with heavier wiki related sessions online. This is something we will look more into when we start putting the program together.

• Yes, we are planning to incorporate those lessons in our event in close collaboration with Wikimedia UK. We will also look into if we need to expand it in case it’s needed, given we want to bring in some new folks through the focus shifting to Sámi languages. Working with Sámi volunteers and partners we need to always keep in mind that we (Wikimedia Norge staff members) are part of the Norwegian majority and the consequences of the Norwegianization process.

• This is one of our ideas, but how it’s done should be aligned with the global discussions on implementation that will happen in November-December and be discussed with our conference team. See the answer under question 2. One of our core outcomes is better support structure for small languages in Europe.

• No specific plans so far, but this is something we will plan for. We can build on ideas from Celtic Knot 2020, and other (Wikimedia) conferences and conferences.

• There are not many reepsones, but we think we have to have in mind the "survey fatigue" Wikimedians and Wikipedians might have. We think most of us receive a lot of surveys almost weekly. Another learning here is that the English version of the survey makes participants from Nordic countries think they are not in the target group. We had feedback that the word Community doesn't really sense for both Norwegain volunteers and partners.
  

This is a question we have to ask ourselves in every project we do, so we have a lot of training in thinking about what target groups we want to attract to event or project X, how do we reach them, what will they anticipate, and what do we want to achieve during event or project X. The diverse participation in the conference team will also ensure that the needs of our participants will be met.

Answers to logistical questions:

• Northern Sámi, hopefully other Sámi languages, Norwegian and English. Possibly more if requested or suggested.

• Thanks for raising this. We have added this to the budget.

• Thanks for raising this. We have updated the conference budget.

• Thanks for raising this. We have updated the conference budget.

Thanks again for the feedback. Astrid Carlsen (WMNO) (talk) 13:29, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

We are funding this event for the 2021 Conference Grants Round 1! Congratulations and we look forward to collaborating further during the planning and organization phase. Rfarrand (WMF) (talk) 16:15, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Request for a change in the conference budget for Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference

The Covid-19 restrictions at UiT The Arctic University of Norway will not allow for us to do an in-person component for Norwegians during the Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference. Because of this we will not be able to offer conference scholarships.

We have been discussing how we can try to still make the conference into a social gathering and how the conference can support the Wikimedia and Wikipedia communities in the Arctic region, during and after the conference.

This is what we suggest:
We will use a tool called Qiqochat for the conference. QiqoChat provides a social wrapper around Zoom. We will use Zoom as a conference plattform. We have secured Norwegian funding to pay for using QiqoChat during the conference and interns from one of the conference partners, Wikitongues, will help us set it up.

We are requesting using the scholarships budget for the conference for the translations of one of the submissions for the conference. The submission in question is the academic article by Professor Trond Trosterud with the title The circumpolar Wikipedia editions. Trond Trosterud is a professor of Sámi language technology at The Arctic University of Norway. The topic of the article is an analysis of the circumpolar Wikipedia editions and getting a deeper understanding of both indigenous language literacy, the position of circumpolar languages in the countries they are spoken, and of how small Wikipedia editions are created.

The article will be translated from English to Norwegian, Northern Sámi, Russian and French. Each translation will cost 20,000–25,000 NOK, according to an estimate from the provider of translations services we have worked with for years, a firm called Noremi. This includes copy editing and spell checking, and the administrative task of handling the translations. Total cost will be between 80,000–100,000.

This new and groundbreaking research on languages and Wikipedia in the Arctic region will hopefully provide support and inspiration for Wikimedia and Wikipedia communities in the Arctic region and their future partnerships. The article will also mark the upcoming UNESCO Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032 and help support Wikimedia Norge’s planned efforts to take part in the Decade of Indigenous Languages.

The academic article will be shared under a free license at Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource and Serpentrio, a publishing service provided by The University Library at The Arctic University of Norway. When all the translations are done, we will publish a blog post at wikimedia.no and on https://diff.wikimedia.org about the article and its findings.

This work can hopefully be a way of giving something to the wider community of Wikipedians that are interested in underrepresented and indigenous languages.

Disclaimer: Professor Trond Trosterud is also a board member of Wikimedia Norge.

--Astrid Carlsen (WMNO) (talk) 12:55, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Hi Astrid Carlsen (WMNO),

Your request to modify the budget to include the article translation, is approved. Just be mindful that it means you won't have budget for accessibility scholarships/support for online participation such as Data packages. Best CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 9 June 2021 (UTC)