Wikimedia Summit 2022
The Wikimedia Summit was held in Berlin, Germany from 9–11 September 2022. This was the first in-person Summit held since March 2019, after the 2020 Summit was cancelled due to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic, although there was a significant hybrid element to the conference which allowed many attendees to participate online.
Alex Lum (Secretary and former President) was nominated for the in-person slot allocated to Wikimedia Australia. Alex had been scheduled to attend the 2020 Summit when it was cancelled.
Movement Charter Drafting Committee
The day before the formal commencement of the Summit, a meeting between delegates from the ESEAP (East, South East Asia and the Pacific) community and members of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC). The meeting was to discuss to replacement of Jamie Li-Yun Lin who had been selected via the affiliate nomination process, but had resigned from the MCDC. The committee acknowledged ESEAP’s desire to replicate the representation of the region that Jamie’s selection had embodied, but stated that the position on the committee was not allocated on a specific regional basis, and there was no guarantee that a replacement would be from the ESEAP region.
Day 1
The focus for the first day was meeting and networking, and sharing programmatic initiatives from your affiliate or region, particularly where it was related to Movement Strategy implementation.
Participants were welcomed to the Summit by Maiken Hagemeister, Nicole Ebber, Franziska Heine, Christian Humborg, and CEO Maryana Iskandar, who built on the ‘elephant in the room’ metaphor employed at the 2019 summit with the ‘blind men and an elephant’ proverb, representing how everyone had different focuses and interpretations of the Movement Strategy and Governance initiatives, and that we were coming together to move beyond our subjective experience and identify the elephant as it were. Kaarel Vaidla outlined how the summit would inform the Foundation’s Movement Strategy work, and Nikki Zeuner and Hanan El-Youssef gave an outline of how the day’s discussions and events would be arranged.
Delegates then used an open-source no-code database tool called Baserow (https://baserow.io/) to document movement strategy activities, which was then analysed to allow connections to be made between people and affiliates with complementary activities and needs. For example, the Australian census tool project was documented here, which raised interest from Wikimedia South Africa who were interested in such a tool to handle demographic updates arising from South Africa’s recent census in early 2022.
I came out of the first day buzzing with excitement at the possibilities, with the needs and capabilities of affiliates matching up to complement each other.
The last events of the day were concurrent self-organised regional and thematic meetups. I attended the ESEAP movement strategy meetup with Taufik (Malaysia) and Mike Dickison (Aotearoa New Zealand) along with Butch Bustria and several online representatives to meet with Hanan, Kaarel and Vivien from WMF's Movement Strategy team.
Day 2
Day 2 was focused on discussing key topics in more depth, specifically the Movement Charter, Regional and Thematic Hubs and Revenue and Resources.
I was interested in and attended the hubs discussions (more representing Wikimedia Australia than ESEAP as ESEAP already had a representative there), but found they were somewhat dominated by the European region hubs Wikimedia Europe and CEE. Additionally, some of the shortcomings of the hybrid format became apparent at this point – a hybrid in-person/online event is always challenging, and the facilitators did an excellent job ensuring that all participants had a chance to speak with speakers alternating between the room and online, but there were some minor technical issues and required significant effort to be disciplined with use of the microphone so all participants could hear.
Day 3
Day 3 was quite short, finishing after lunch and focusing on wrapping up, what have we learned and where to from here?
Several attendees then participated in the traditional walking tour of Berlin conducted by Martin Rulsch, with several peeling off to meet up for dinner.
General reflections
Wikimedia Deutschland once again did an amazing job organising the summit at quite short notice, with the additional burdens of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Rules regarding N95 mask-wearing in Germany indoors and on public transport were stricter than Australia. Additionally, the compulsory “official” COVID test required to attend the Summit and daily rapid testing meant that not a single case of COVID was reported among the participants.
The summit was an excellent opportunity to get a snapshot of where the Foundation and the movement were at in terms of Movement Strategy, the Movement Charter and the Universal Code of Conduct. In some areas, there have been delays in the discussions and implementation of these initiatives, but in other areas there have been rapid progress made.
Catering was all vegetarian which covered a range of dietary requirements, but the food was diverse and delicious. Many delegates, myself included, greatly appreciated the copious supplies of the local soft drink Fritz-kola!
Meeting and networking face-to-face with many individuals who I had only met online was very valuable. In particular, a close-knit group was formed with delegates from Wikimedia Australia, Wikimedia UK, the New Zealand user group and Wikimedia Norge.
Several discussions were held with staff of the Wikimedia Foundation regarding their attendance and participation at the upcoming ESEAP Reconnect conference being held in November in Sydney and organised by Wikimedia Australia. In addition, attending and observing the summit gave some valuable insights into the logistics of running such a large-scale Wikimedia event for the organising team of ESEAP 2022.