User:Iopensa/Application Wikimania 2018 Scholarship

Tell us about your recent involvement in your home wiki or the broader Wikimedia movement. What have you built or contributed to in order to improve your wiki or community? Have you led or organized any of these activities? Please indicate which of these activities took place in the last 12 months.

In the last 12 months (2017):

I direct as volunteer the post-Wikimania Esino Lario project which will end in May 2018 and which includes a large series of Wikimedia related activities in Lombardy Region (Wikimania Esino Lario - Protagonismo culturale offline e online). In particular the team has been very active in the Wiki Loves Monuments project in Italy. We also organized a series of training; a particularly interesting training was the Wiki Camp in Esino Lario. I have been presenting Wikimania Esino Lario at conferences (as an example of offline community involvement - i.e. TEDxVarese) and we published a book about Wikimania Esino Lario.
In the frame of my work as a researcher, I organized two wikidata workshops at SUPSI and a Wikipedia workshop in Basel during ECAS, the European Conference on African Studies. We also publish the book Public art in Africa with texts under cc by-sa and an experimentation involving scholars in producing contributions to articles on Wikipedia published in a book. We finished the research project Research:Wikipedia Primary School SSAJRP programme.
I am particularly interested in issues related to the governance of the Wikimedia offline ecosystem and I am very committed to activities that support volunteer initiatives. I strongly believe the volunteer essence of our community is something specifically important which needs to be preserved, respected and supported. I am a founding member of the non profit association InFormAzione established 1st January 2018 and aiming at developing territorial projects linked to the Wikimedia projects (I am a volunteer supporting the initiative). I am active in the Wikimania Steering Committee (I am currently chair) as lead of Wikimania Esino Lario 2016. I am active in Wikimedia Italia as member of the consiglio dei garanti (ombudspersons). I am a member of Wikimedia CH.

The full list of conferences, articles, events and projects related to Wikimedia I did or I have been organizing is available here User:Iopensa/Past.

What’s something great that happened as a result of these activities? This could be described either quantitatively or qualitatively, and could impact either online or offline. Here are some examples that might help.

The main results of these last 12 months (2017) are:

Pilot initiatives. We developed a Wiki training program for primary school children WikiCamp in Esino Lario. The program has been shared with the South African team which is working on trainings in schools. Also the Wikipedia workshop in Basel involving scholars is an interesting pilot initiatives (scholars provided specialised bibliographies or full articles and during the workshop they uploaded them Workshop ECAS Basel 2017 - Literature and sources about African cities and open access.
Post-Wikimania Esino Lario results: All city councils linked to Wikimania Esino Lario have provided the authorization for Wiki Loves Monuments (Italy has a very complex legislation Italian cultural heritage on the Wikimedia projects). Esino Lario and the territories around it have received post Wikimania funding from Lombardy Region (around 1 million euro for infrastructural investment). The funding programme is called "post Wikimania Esino Lario" to recognize that the event did something exceptional in terms of territorial development, involvement of a local and international community and management of complexity. We published the Wikimania Esino Lario book financed by Lombardy Region https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Libro_fotografico_digitale_%22Wikimania_2016%22.pdf
Triggering the production of articles based on documentation released under cc by-sa (the book Public art in Africa and the articles for Wikipedia commissioned to scholars) within the frame of the project Culture and Safety in Africa.

What collaborations with other Wikimedians or Wikimedia organizations are you most proud of?

I am an active member of Wikimedia Italia and Wikimedia CH, but sincerely this year the most interesting experience was at itwikicom (the first Italian-speaking Wikimedia related conference) where there was an extremely hight number of very active Wikipedias and a different community compared to the one we can meet at Wikimedia Italia and Wikimedia CH events. I am very proud I could contribute to the event a little with some resources from Wikimania Esino Lario and with a talk related to how to organize event (sic) ItWikiCon/2017/Programma/Organizzazione e gestione piccoli eventi. I think offline activities are a challenge: we really need to foster a better coordination between the online and offline community: my impression is that at the moment the two communities are working in parallel, not together, and I feel the gap between the two is becoming bigger; it is an imperative to reduce the gap and to focus on this relationship. Contributions to the Wikimedia projects can be of different kinds.

How do you usually share your experiences (or things you’ve learned) with your community? Examples of on-wiki summaries/reports, blog posts, meetup talks, etc. are welcome here.

I share reports and information about my Wikimedia-related activities on meta. Also my work-related projects are under cc by-sa (or cc0) and documentation relevant to the Wikimedia projects is shared on meta. I have been quite active in updating pages related to Wikimania and in providing documentation related to GLAM initiatives and its legislative issues.

Current projects are on my user page on meta User:Iopensa
The archive - with links to all reports, lesson learned, slides – is here User:Iopensa/Past

Wikimania 2018's theme is focusing on supporting underrepresented voices and filling knowledge gaps in our movement. What are some communities, forms of knowledge, or subjects that are important to you and still missing from Wikimedia? How would you like to participate at Wikimania to help address this?

Filling knowledge gaps is a central topic in my active work on the Wikimedia projects. I am specifically interested in developing systems to improve Wikipedia geographic imbalance (I have been active on this topic since 2006 with WikiAfrica and now with the organisation Wiki in Africa) and to reduce the gaps between centre and periphery (the topic at the centre of Wikimania Esino Lario 2016 with the idea that Anyone, ANYWHERE, can contribute to the Wikimedia projects). I am currently very focussed on "indirect" contributions; I think the use of open licenses is an efficient tool to fill knowledge gaps, more than outreach. I would like to present at Wikimania this issue (I have been drafting a paper about "The need to contribute to Wikipedia. The improbability of an African Wikipedian" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GmqsiQ_LwwFH5XO9K5_JAq3RpnAvEoSGLJhHS6_-9H8/edit).