Wikidata talk:WikidataCon 2017/Volunteer/Program committee

I was recently hired by the Wikimedia Foundation as Community Liaison for the Structured Data on Commons project. But I am (and stay) a member of the programme committee as volunteer, doing all the committee work in my free time. And obviously I'll avoid any conflict of interest: I won't participate in committee discussions about any submissions that relate to projects I'm involved in as staff member or volunteer!

Hello,

Can someone have a look at the categories? Category:WikidataCon 2017 open submissions contains 6 pages, when Category:WikidataCon 2017 submissions has 7, and on the subpages list there are also 7.

I think it's better to have the submissions only categorized in Category:WikidataCon 2017 open submissions, which is itself in Category:WikidataCon 2017 submissions (later we will split them between accepted/rejected/waitlist, something like that)

Thanks!

+1 ~~~~

Hello dear committee!

@Thiemo Mättig (WMDE) @Andrawaag @Spinster @Masssly

Thanks all for your feedback! We're about to start the call for submissions, which is planned on Monday, June 12th :)

I created this page about the spirit of the event, the program, ideas of types of submissions. I may have forgotten some stuff, feel free to improve it, based on what we discussed earlier.

I also created the raw schedule, to give us an idea about the free time we have for all the program. Basically, it's about 16 hours, with an average availability of 4 rooms (I'll be able to give you more information about the rooms soon), so that makes in total 64 hours for our program :)

Finally, I created a draft for the form. (you can notice that I <s>stole</s> was inspired a lot by the form of Wikimania.) Please, improve it or discuss about it before Monday.

Once we agreed on the structure of the form, I will need some help to make a fancy field that create a pre-filled page, also to create the status template, including the category, and all this. Who of you would have the knowledge and a bit of time to help me with this, tomorrow or Monday? :)

If you have any question, suggestion, concern, feel free to express it. Thanks a lot for your work!

Hi @Lea Lacroix (WMDE), thank you so much for doing this preparatory work! I think these formats and forms are all very much tried and tested in previous Wikimedia-related conferences, they function well, and I really don't see any big issues or problems. I think we can totally go ahead with the call for submissions.

It's nice that we can have a late evening program on Saturday (19.00-23.00) - that sounds very suitable for more hands-on and hackathon-ish activities. (Are there any plans for an 'official party' on that evening too? Just curious.)

I do expect we'll get some questions from organisations and people 'outside of the community' (e.g. external GLAMs, researchers who work with Wikidata, etc) who might ask whether it's OK for them to submit proposals. Is this something we still want to clarify on the program page?

And about the submission templates: I looked at examples from the current Wikimania and created this draft submission form (can be pasted in any page), edited Léa's draft into this preload template for prefilling and structuring the submission, and created this template that will pre-categorize the open submission. I'm not sure about the categories I used, and we will probably need more templates as we go, but this is a start. (I'm not a template guru, so feedback and help from others will be appreciated - maybe we have some community members who would like to assist?)

Thank you so much Spinster! I'll look at this in details tomorrow, but this looks like the puzzle piece I missed in my preparation :)

About the external organizations using Wikidata: for me they are welcome in the attendees and in the program, because they are part of the Wikidata community as well as the editors. Maybe it's our vision of "community" we should explain more :)

Hello all,

Thanks for your help, the call for submission process is ready to start :) You can find the guidelines, the submission page, the list of open submissions. Feel free to make some improvements if necessary.

I still struggle a bit with the categories (my test is supposed to appear in this category but doesn't) but I guess it can be fixed easily.

I'll take care of announcing it to the world today :)

Hello dear committee,

I'm currently working on providing you a proper ground plan of the location, with the rooms we will be able to use for the conference, and also a raw schedule, so you can have an overview of the time and space we will have. In the meantime, let's start discussing about the different formats and topics we would like to suggest to people when we start the submission process.

Basically, I'd like to let it as open as possible, so people can suggest any type of content and format, but I think it's good to provide some suggestions to help people to have ideas about what they could submit. Here's my first list, tell me what we could add!

• Talk (the usual conference format. Maybe 45min, large audience)
• Workshop (30min or 1 hour, small group, on a specific topic, with time for attendees to practice)
• Lightening talk (10min, on non-technical topics)
• Round table (45min, 2 to 5 persons sharing time to discuss about a topic)
• Discussion (30min, all participants take actively part to the discussion)

These are quite "usual" conference formats, but maybe our community need some specific/creative types of events. I'm thinking about:

• Demo (10min, similar to a lightening talk but focused on one of the tools people use to edit Wikidata or reuse the data)
• Request for comments (the speaker comes with a question or a topic on which he would like some feedbacks, or to take a community decision)
• Meetup (informal meeting of a specific sub-group of editors (WikiProjects, librarians, SPARQL addicts, etc.)
• Sprints (session to work together on a specific stuff, e.g. "translate all the descriptions of items related to genetics in Portuguese")

Let me know what you think :)

I see all the listed items as interesting inclusions. I like the meetups because participants usually return to their various communities as ambassadors :-)

Whiles it's good to give people a guide, we could as well keep it open and make it clear that other formats can be suggested.

Thanks Léa, I also think this is a wonderful start, and I agree with Masssly that it would be nice to allow flexibility too.

Additionally, I really liked the 'open space' format that we used for the strategy discussion at the Wikimedia Conference 2017 Berlin - which is basically 'anyone can propose a discussion on the spot, which then anyone can attend'. Might be a bit too unstructured for this conference though.

Also, how do people feel about tutorials? I usually love them - I'm a voracious learner and prefer learning things from people in classroom settings and face to face - and am curious how others feel about it for the WikidataCon.

How much do we, and the community, want the WikidataCon to feel like an official conference, how much like a more informal meetup?

Well, there are pros and cons for both :)

For sure, the unconference/barcamp allows more flexibility, last-minute decisions, spontaneous meetups. I like this format. But it is also quite uncertain for the participants, to register to an event when they have no idea about what will happen. It's also more last-minute work for the organization team.

In our case, we should keep in mind that registration will require a certain involvement for the participants: as we can't provide scholarships for all the attendees, most of them will have to book themselves travel and accommodation, likely a long time in advance. To take such a decision, the motivation provided by the idea of a nice and community-driven conference may not be enough, that's why I'd like to provide a program, at least an overview of what the program will look like, via a transparent call for submissions.

Of course, we can completely build a mix of both. Some traditional, selected talks and workshops, and a room dedicated to spontaneous discussions, meetups, hacking around.

About tutorials: that was a bit my idea with the demos, maybe the difference between both would be the length (10min for a demo, 30min for a tutorial?)

Additional information: we will have 6 different rooms (the big room of 150 seats can be split in 3, plus 3 workshop rooms for 15-20 persons). The lounge/relaxing room is not included. I'd like to keep one of these rooms for a quiet space, maybe another one for informal hacking area.

About the schedule, we should keep in mind that we have 1,5 day in total. We will start on Saturday morning with an opening session, finish probably around 19:00. We can continue the meetups and informal sessions in the evening. Sunday will be quite short because we have to set up another keynote, and conclude with the birthday celebration + closing, probably between 15:00 and 17:00, to let time for people to travel back home.

I agree with Lea, we should certainly leave room for independent plans to materialize during Wikidata con. At Wikicite 2017 last week in Vienna, I noticed various people to already plan to touch base again at WikidataCon. So some level of flexibility should be planned for, because I expect it to happen anyway.

However, WikidataCon also provides us with the opportunity to focus on some of the interesting/unique features or success stories of Wikidata usage. @Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) slide@ wikicite showing the impressive performance of the WDQS comes to mind. I would love to hear more details how this number is achieved and what the nature of the queries are. Then there are alternative user interfaces to Wikidata (e.g. Wikigenomes, WikidataQueryServiceR) or actual usage examples (e.g. Eurowings) that are worth showing.

A different angle could also be the existing strategies to focus on underrepresented data areas in Wikidata. There still remains quite some "blind spots" What are ongoing initiatives to fill that gap? Initiatives like Wikipedia Zero Coding Da Vinci and WikiCite

May take the liberty to suggest a preliminary list of sessions:

1. Unconference
   1. Technical hackathon
   2. Edithons
2. Success stories
   1. Science
   2. Cultural heritage
   3. Politics
   4. ???
3. Filling the gap(s)
   1. Cultural heritage
   2. underrepresented area's/domains.

Thanks Andra, that's a good point! We can definitely suggest all these as ideas as examples to give people inspiration about what they could suggest.

I'll come back to you very soon with a draft of presentation of the program, and a draft of form, so we can improve it all together.

We all agree that the submissions should happen on-wiki, so everyone can watch proposals from others and get inspired, right?

What would you like to set up for the reviewing part? Votes, scores, criteria? I would suggest something quite simple, like a rate from 1 to 5, plus special mention such as conflict of interest. We can also think about multiple criteria, then we also need to think about how to rate the whole thing in the end ;) Any suggestions?

I like the on-wiki part of the submission process. I don't know how that integrates with reviewing systems. I am only familiar with systems like easychair. How is this dealt with on other wiki events, like Wikimania or Wikicite?

For the discussions at WikiCite, they used this tool which is made for big groups to vote and rate ideas: http://allourideas.org/wikicite17 This one could be use for discussions or lightning talks.

For Wikimania, the process looks like this: https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submission_Review/5 followed by a selection of the best rated submissions. This process is OK but I think we don't need 10 degrees of votes.

What about a combination of both`/ Use the submission review system to assess the submission and use allourideas to select the accepted ones. That is if there are more good submissions then there are presentation slots.

I agree 10 degrees of votes is to much. I guess 5 would work as well