Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014/Survey results

Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2014

City & Venue

Travel

Programme

Participants

Team

Sponsors

FAQ

Preparation (Questions&Needs • Wikimania)

Survey results

A post-conference survey was organised in December 2014 — January 2015.

Total number of answers: 24 (33% participation rate).

General evaluation

Usefulness

We asked the attendees if they found the conference was useful.

We are happy that all attendees found it was either very useful or useful:

• Very useful: 63%
• Useful: 37%

Satisfaction

The level of satisfaction (Very satisfied + Satisfied) was above 80% for everything except food and Internet (the latter being a common problem of all international events) where it was still above 2/3. We are quite happy that no one was dissatisfied with the choice of topics and only one person was less satisfied with the schedule (the person did not like that one particular session was not held in the main hall and was not held on a particular day).

Criterion	Very satisfied	Satisfied	Less satisfied	Unsatisfied
Hotel	43%	48%	9%	0%
Venue	37%	42%	21%	0%
Food	34%	50%	8%	8%
Logistics	42%	50%	8%	0%
Internet	21%	46%	29%	4%
Choise of topics	35%	65%	0%	0%
Timing	29%	58%	13%	0%
Breaks	50%	50%	0%	0%
Social events	48%	48%	4%	0%
Quality of information provided by organizers before the conference	39%	57%	4%	0%

Support from the organising team (from 1 to 5, 1 being the worst and 5 being the best). Apparently only one voter was not satisfied:

• 5: 79%
• 4: 17%
• 2: 4%

Scholarships

20 out of 24 attendees who filled in the survey stated they had a scholarship.

• 80% were happy about their scholarship experience
• 20% found it was okay

Sessions

Most useful

Up to 4 answers were possible.

The results show that participants found most useful the sessions about cooperation (such as Cross-border initiatives or The Future of CEE) and projects that can be replicated in different countries of the region (such as Freedom of Panorama or Education program). Both sessions oriented towards mature communities (like Microgrants / scholarships + Local fundraising or Hiring staff) and sessions oriented towards emerging communities (like Starting a movement organization) were also named among the most useful ones.

Full results (only sessions with at least 3 votes are provided):

• Freedom of Panorama: 10
• Education program: 9
• The Future of CEE: 8
• Cross-border initatives: 7
• PR: how to deal with press and social media: 7
• Microgrants / scholarships + Local fundraising: 6
• Recruiting volunteers: 5
• WikiExpeditions: 5
• Article Contests & Thematic Weeks: 4
• How to organize a workshop / training: 4
• Wiki Loves Monuments & Wiki Loves Earth: 3
• Hiring staff: 3
• Applying for FDC funding: 3
• Starting a movement organization: 3
• WikiCamp: 3

Popular reasons why sessions were useful:

• sharing experiences and perspectives
• good ideas to put in place in their local communities
• insight into experiences of other communities
• defining common problems and new approaches to them

Least useful

Only one answer was possible.

All three sessions nominated as least useful were targeting only a part of the communities (Applying for FDC funding and GLAM) targeting more mature communities while Making small Wikipedias grow was targeting smaller communities. These three sessions received negative votes both as not relevant to communities of particular attendees and as poorly organised (no new information, badly presented or not practical enough).

Full results (only sessions with at least 3 votes):

• Applying for FDC funding: 5
• Making small Wikipedias grow: 4
• GLAM: 3

Popular reasons why sessions were less useful:

• not relevant for the community
• boring / badly presented
• no new information
• no practical details / outcomes

Level of understanding of English

We asked people to evaluate the percent of the content they understood.

Only one participant cited that the level of English was a significant obstacle for them, while 65% of those who filled in the survey stated that they have understood everything or almost everything.

Full results:

• 100% understood: 39%
• 90-99% understood: 26%
• 80-89% understood: 0%
• 70-79% understood: 18%
• 60-69% understood: 13%
• less than 60% understood: 4%

Other topics to cover

All ideas mentioned by participants are provided here. Only the first topic was mentioned by two participants, all the remaining topics were mentioned by only one participant:

• Technical topics (e.g. Lua, Visual Editor and WikiData integration): mentioned by two participants
• Psychological aspects of how to advertise and popularise Wiki among people
• Trainings by Wikipedia or external experts on particular useful skills (e.g. media relations; public speaking; project management)
• Experiences of problems solved in different countries
• Solutions for similar languages Wikis
• Dealing with User Groups, Chapters and other forms of Affiliations
• Creating a great guide/brochure
• Best innovative practices
• Ask the Developers session
• Problems between different communities, cross-border problems and ways to solve them.
• Article naming practices and conventions in non-Latin alphabets (e.g. Latin-to-Cyrillic transliteration of trademarks, musical bands/albums/songs, etc)
• How to detect machine translations, copyright violations, hoaxes.
• Wiki Loves Arts
• Wiki Loves Cultural Heritage
• Views of partner organisations
• Audio
• Experiences of small chapters about problems they encountered within community
• Edit-a-thon during the conference
• Cooperation with governments
• Creating bots

Outcomes

Learnings

We have provided the attendees with the list of six groups of learnings they could get from this conference and asked them to tick all that apply to them.

All attendees who have answered the survey reported having learned about at least one thing from the conference. The distribution of learnings is the following:

Project-based learnings (96% reported any of these three)

• Projects they would like to join: 63%
• Ideas of new projects for their communities: 92%
• Improvements to existing projects for their communities: 63%

Community-based learnings (79% reported any of these three)

• Project management: 33%
• Chapter efficiency: 38%
• Community building: 71%

Observations:

• people who stated they have learned about project management also stated they want to launch a new project with their community
• people who stated they have learned about chapter efficiency were members of chapters or user groups or want to create a user group
• people who have not chosen any community-based learnings were mostly members of chapters with experience in Wikimedia movement over 6 years

We have not observed any patters based on gender and age of attendees.

Potential collaborations

We asked whether people met anybody they want to collaborate with.

88% of people who filled in the survey have stated they have met such people, while one person (4%) they have clearly not met people they want to collaborate with.

Some people have estimated the number of people they want to collaborate with, the most popular estimation was 5-10, and two attendees stated they want to collaborate with over 30 people.

Things to do next

We asked everyone to share the two things that they feel motivated to try (or learn about) soon as a result of attending the conference.

The three most recurring topics were: work with their local community (5 people indicated they want to work on creation of a user group, while others want to share their ideas or work on community-building), launching a project with their community (most popular ones being wikiworkshops/edit-a-thons and education programme), international cooperation (either a collaboration with a particular country or work on CEE Spring). One person made a commitment to improve their English.

Full list of outcomes people have mentioned (with number of people mentioned the idea in parentheses):

Work with their local community

• Creating a user group (5)
• Share the ideas of new projects (2)
• Community-building (2)
• Work with media (1)
• Social media coverage (1)
• Submitting their first grant request (1)
• Plan a new project in group (1)
• Find more volunteers (1)
• Encourage volunteers to apply for microgrants (1)
• Test a new wiki learning practice (1)

Organising a project

• Wikiworkshops / edit-a-thons (3)
• Education program (3)
• Freedom of Panorama (2)
• WikiCamp in their country (2)
• Wikiexpedition (2)
• Writing contests (1)
• Organising WLM or WLE (1)

International cooperation

• Collaborating with other countries over particular issues (3)
• CEE Spring (2)
• Organise a cross-border project (1)

Personal commitment

• Learn English (1)

Ideas of improvement

Ideas mentioned first were shared by more people than those mentioned last. Most ideas are published without moderation, although in some cases two or more ideas were merged into a single one.

General programme

• More dynamic facilitation
• More discussions in groups
• More attention to ice breaker session
• Not enough speakers on some sessions
• Stronger commitments after the event (e.g. follow-up session)
• Providing translations into other languages
• Video recording of all sessions
• Getting a few more Asafs :)

Particular sessions

• Clearly define target audience (some people attended sessions they were neither prepared to nor interested in)
• Sharing not only good but also bad experiences
• Providing particular examples of how successes were achieved and how to prevent failures
• Asking moderators to check before the session if all presentations are relevant
• Harder timing of the sessions

Organisation

• More attention to the programme before the event
• More time for preparation
• Inviting non-Wikipedians (people from universities or mass media)
• More time for social events
• Bigger organisational team

Venue

• Lunch, venue and hotel in closer proximity
• Better internet connection at the venue
• Poor English skills of the staff at the venue

Scholarships

• More transparency and clearer rules
• More careful review of scholarships
• Scholarship covering too much expenses