WikiProject remote event participation/Documentation/Wikimania 2022

• Title of the event: Wikimania 2022
• Date: August 11–14, 2022
• Organizers: Wikimania 2022 Core Organizing Team, Wikimedia Foundation

Format of the event

Main format

Duration

Main goal

Main target audience

Total number of participants

Number of organizers

Language(s) spoken during the event

Tools used

• The main conference platform during the conference was Pheedloop, which provided a way to navigate the program and supported chats. It was a wrapper for some other tools such as Zoom and Jitsi.
• The submission system used was Limesurvey.net [https://wikimediafoundation.limesurvey.net/815465?lang=en]

Methods used

Communication

Lessons learned

Challenges

• There were widespread failures of the online platform during the event
  • The opening session saw lots of roughness with audio dropouts and segments where no one from a large panel was speaking, and it wasn't clear what should be occurring.
  • Some sessions never started and had to be cancelled because either speakers could not enter the platform or once everyone was on, the audio was not working.
  • The session with Maryana Iskander was notable as two of the four speakers could not make it onto the platform.
• Pheedloop as a platform seemed to be a wrapper for other services such as Zoom or Jitsi. As a result, this posed a number of challenges:
  • It was confusing as to where the conversations should happen - in Pheedloop? In the Zoom chat?
  • The interface of the actual functioning presentation video session was severely shrunk down because it was "iframed" several times within the Pheedloop interface.
• have a "base" conference but without rejecting most "intermediate" or "advanced" talks

Possible improvements

• wikimania:2022:Present and future - in short:
  • ability to join, see, participate the conference without using proprietary software

    → compared to 2021: not improved

  • GDPR compliance (core problem this year: tool with Google Analytics)

    → compared to 2021: situation worsened (in 2022 some European states declared Google Analytics illegal) [1]

  • do not ask sexual orientation in the same survey asking for email

    → compared to 2021: somehow improved (in 2021 the survey was asking that information plus first and last name and email, while in 2022 the survey was asking for that information plus just email)

Recommendations

• proactively involve at least one organizer from LibrePlanet, FOSSDEM or CCC so that we don't need to reinvent the wheel with proprietary software

Documentation

• Link to videos, slides, etc.
• Notes of the event
• Link to the structure/schedule

Questions & discussions

If you want to talk to the the organizers, ask further questions, feel free to use the talk page.