SAARC Meetup

SAARC Meetup
Friday August 10th
Level B, La Centre Sheraton, Montreal

Attendees

• Krish Dulal
• Yann Forget
• Ravishankar Ayyakkannu
• Wassan.anmol
• Pmlineditor
• Shanmugamp7
• Neechalkaran
• Muzammiluddin Syed
• Sailesh Patnaik
• Jayanta Nath
• Tanweer Morshed
• Satdeep Gill

Discussion

• WikiConference India 2018 - Ravi, Satdeep, and others shared his learnings from WCI2016.
  • Conducting a conference is an exhausting process. We need to rotate the conferences to different communities. Communities with lot of young volunteers are best to do it
  • We should do more WCIs before attempting to host a Wikimania. It is time to strengthen our communities and do basics before trying to do major global events
  • We can do a Wikimania only if WMF offers more support regarding more full-time employees to manage the event
  • We can do the next WCI without the cumbersome city selection process to make it possible within few months.
  • Sailesh from Odia community expressed interest to host the next WCI.
  • We strongly advised hosting the event in a hotel. This way lot of logistics tension can be avoided. Any university/college, how much ever best intentioned they maybe, is not professionally geared to run major third party events like these.
  • Wikisource Conference India - Yann Forget and Jayanta Nath stressed on focusing on Wikisource, and the participants discussed the idea of organizing a Wikisource Conference in India.
  • Odia Edit-a-thon (September 2017) - Odia community is collaborating with the Odisha government, and they are going to place QR codes all around Bhuvaneshwar. They are going to organize an edit-a-thon to get articles about Bhavneshwar and Odisha in various languages.
  • Satdeep Gill is trying to do a short film documentary about the travails of Wikimedians trying to get a visa for Wikimania. Please reach out to him if you have thoughts to share.
  • Participants felt that Wikimedia Bangladesh is the strongest community to host Wikimedia SAARC. Tanveer said they are open to the idea but cannot do it immediately as the chapter needs to get some regulatory clearances for securing funding.
  • We also explored the option of doing it in countries like Nepal which can be relatively more visa-friendly.