Grants talk:PEG/WM NL/GLAM WIKI 2015/Report

Hi Sandra and the rest of the GLAM-WIKI organizing team. Congratulations on a successful conference and thank you for this very thorough report. We appreciate all your efforts in documenting the conference -- on Meta/Commons, in this report, and through your other reports such as the statistics page. We are impressed that even with some challenges, including project management turnover, unclear communication from WMF on how to the fund the project, and a tight timeline, the team was able to organize a quality and diverse conference. We have a few questions/comments below and look forward to your responses.

1. We note that the program committee tried to "create a balanced schedule that accommodated both beginners and experienced participants." Because there was such a diversity in participation this was very important. However, we realize it was still still a challenge and some participants were frustrated. How would you change things in the future to make sure the needs/interests of different experience levels are met?
2. We are very interested in the longer-term impact of the conference and look forward to the results of the October 2015 survey. Please be sure to update the grant report with the "multiplication" metrics. If you need any help in getting participants to respond to the survey, we are happy to help!
3. We really appreciate that the program committee was committed to organizing a diverse conference and we were happy to help you with vetting the scholarships. Thank you for involving us in this process and considering our advice.
4. The section on what you would do differently is very useful. We will be adding some of this information to our conference program resources page, as well as the new learning pattern.
5. Please see the instructions for returning unused funds to WMF.

Thanks again for all your work! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:03, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Response

Hi Alex, thank you for this very positive response! We very much enjoyed organising the conference and the event itself was extremely energising :-)

In reply to your questions and comments:

Different experience levels

How to make sure that the needs/interests of different experience levels are met? This is a tough one, and I have given it quite a bit of thought, but have not been able to come up with a very clear solution.

A few ideas:

1. Expectation management. Being more clear in advance about the experience level(s) that will be tackled during the event. Is it a mixed event, targeted towards beginners, towards people who are already experienced in a certain topic?
2. Indicating the level of needed experience/expertise of individual sessions. (We actually tried labeling the conference's presentations by experience level, but to be honest this was a quite complex additional criterium in the process of building the programme, and we abandoned it at some point)
3. Deciding in advance to organise a more targeted event (e.g. only for beginners, only about specific sub-topics). This was actually discussed as an option for future GLAM-WIKI gatherings, during the second strategy session of the conference, on Sunday. As an advantage, this will also make sure that events are more small-scale, easier to fund and organise. On the other hand, it might offer less opportunity for learning and forging new connections for relatively 'new' attendees: beginners' events will attract fewer experienced GLAM-WIKI volunteers and more targeted events might be too 'high level' and too intimidating for beginners.

(Also, I have the impression that participants' reviews on this issue were quite mixed. Some participants really liked the variety of experience levels offered, while others didn't like this at all...)

October 2015 survey

We will definitely report on the results!

Thanks and many greetings, SandraF (WMNL) (talk) 12:40, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi SandraF (WMNL), when will you be publishing the results of the survey? Thanks! --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 01:03, 20 October 2015 (UTC)