Melbourne Meetup 33 took place on 3 May 2017 during the visit of Katherine Maher, Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation, for Melbourne Knowledge Week. Katherine presented the opening keynote for Melbourne Knowledge Week on Monday at 7.30pm).
Date: Wednesday 3 May 2017
Time: 5.00-6.30pm Presentations and strategy session facilitated by Wikimedia Australia committee and Katherine Maher, Wikimedia Foundation
Jon Lawrence from Electronic Frontiers Australia outlined the rationale for the proposed Fair Use campaign, and the banners scheduled for display to Australian readers from 18 May 2017. It is predominantly an awareness campaign, leading up to the release of the Productivity Commission report on copyright - to be tabled in next session of Parliament. The call to action is a request for Australians to contact politicians and urge adoption of fair use. The campaign will link to an external page with contact details for local members and additional information on the campaign.
There is a History of Fair Use proposals in Australia page for briefing on this issue.
Global Movement Strategy workshop with Katherine Maher
Members were pleased to welcome Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation and introduced themselves. Katherine outlined the Global Movement Strategy process and set the scene for looking ahead to 2030.
Strategic priorities and current issues raised by participants included:
Diversity and inclusion of all groups
recording Indigenous languages, not just Australian languages - Pacific Islander and African languages have shared issues
overcoming barriers for language groups
funding outreach for awareness activity in areas of major content gaps, eg Papua New Guinea
increasing the influence of women in the movement
continuing focus on inclusion of all kinds
Article quality
integrating the academic community including students, to build content quality
building effective ways to teach people to edit
spreading the word about wikidata in broader open data community, and spreading the work
working on structured citations
Technology and interfaces
uploading content to Commons has to be easier, especially from mobile
easy editing on mobile devices is essential
the articles for creation process is a cultural roadblock
Community health
prioritising the campaign of niceness
communication channels that facilitate members of the community finding out about and connecting with local/geographic and topical groups
addressing cultural issues masquerading as technical issues
Questions for Australian chapter
How can affiliates be better empowered as public advocates in their region?
Where are key partnerships that would help address scale issues and geographic challenges?
How to get increased awareness of the chapter and more off wiki engagement locally
How to prioritise our limited resources - human, time & money?
The Wikimedia movement strategy core team and working groups have completed reviewing the more than 1800 thematic statements we received from the first discussion. They have identified 5 themes that were consistent across all the conversations - each with their own set of sub-themes. These are not the final themes, just an initial working draft of the core concepts.
You are invited to join the online and offline discussions taking place on these 5 themes. This round of discussions will take place between now and June 12th. You can discuss as many as you like; we ask you to participate in the ones that are most (or least) important to you.
Here are the five themes, each has a page on Meta-Wiki with more information about the theme and how to participate in that theme's discussion: