2022:Program/Process/pl
Full program will be published here as soon as it is finalized.
Below is information about the general schedule, language approach, and selection process.
Theme, session criteria and session evaluation
In order to promote transparency on how the review committee made programming decisions, we are now publishing the criteria that we used to evaluate program proposals. This year, as stated in the call for proposals, we wanted to focus on making the program regional, fun and welcoming of newcomers. We prioritized sessions that best responded to that criteria, while also being mindful to try to include sessions on a wide range of topics.
Keeping our core goals in mind, we used this specific criteria for evaluating the proposals:
- To what extent does the proposal make clear what outcomes the participants should be able to get out of the session?
- To what extent does the proposal, the matters being discussed, and/or the presenters incorporate diversity in gender, geographic location, underrepresented communities, etc.?
- To what extent does the proposal offer something fun, useful, innovative or important to the event?
We had five reviewing groups of 3-4 reviewers each. Reviewers were presented with a list of sessions to review without speaker names or contact information attached. Reviewers evaluated each proposal on a scale from 1-5, with 1 being low and 5 being very high. Overall, most proposals received very high scores, and we selected the top 20 of every group. This means that some proposals that received very high scores didn’t make the cut due to a small difference in points. In total, we worked hard to accept more than half of all submissions.
We acknowledge that some people might experience frustration with the way in which we organized sessions and the program this year. However, we want to highlight the points that made the COT this year take these decisions: We learned from last year that the number of tracks resulted in sessions where there were very few people participating or watching them, which can cause frustration to presenters. We also learned that people needed more breaks. We had to work those in, which removed time from the program. This year we are experimenting with a hybrid format, with some sessions taking place in-person in different parts of the world. We wanted to give rooms for these experiments, even if they don’t necessarily compete with the online program.
Planning your session if it is not part of the main program
Pheedloop (the platform that we will be using for this years’ Wikimania) allows for anyone to organize their own social networking space (up to 25 people). These spaces won’t have simultaneous interpretation or receive staff support. These spaces will work as self-organized spaces. We encourage people who are not part of the main program to make use of these spaces, scheduling talks, meetups and discussions. We also have a Commons category to house on-demand content for attendees to stream during Wikimania at their leisure. We encourage you to submit content there.
Program Design
For this festival program we expect to have a mix of live and on-demand content, hosted in different online ‘tents’ just like at an in-person festival.
- Tent 1: the space where keynotes, endnotes, entertainment, meet and greet, and other key content will be delivered. We will be having rotational regional segments here to spotlight various projects, individuals and affiliates by region.
- Tent 2: a programming track with sessions from Wikimedia movement organizations (chapters, user groups, thematic organizations, and other recognized movement groups). Submissions to this tent are open to all affiliates in the Wikimedia community.
- Tent 3: a programming track with sessions from individual Wikimedians or a collective of individuals. Submissions to this tent are open to everyone–submit to present alone or with a group of co-presenters.
- Hackathon: as traditionally done - yet with a new twist - the hackathon will have a tent throughout the Wikimania festival for ongoing collaboration and co-working.
Networking Tent: Wikimania will have several virtual spaces where attendees can socialize and meet other wikimedians from around the globe and link up to work together on new or established projects. More information will be provided soon.
All of the content will be archived once Wikimania 2022 is finished, as it has been done in previous years.
Program Schedule
The virtual programming for Wikimania 2022 will cater to participants across all timezones. The approach is to optimize for the zone being spotlighted on that day, while also providing times that work in different zones. We wanted to plan with the global whole in mind, building a schedule that spans many hours to allow for each region to connect with every other region.
Multilinguality in the Program
In the past, Wikimania programs catered to an English speaking audience only. However, we want the festival to welcome participants in the languages they feel most comfortable. Language accessibility at the festival will work as follows:
- For all sessions (live and pre-recorded) delivered in English, the Wikimedia Foundation will provide live interpretation into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish to enable a bigger audience to join and participate freely. We will be sharing more on how this will look like closer to the event.
- For all sessions (live and pre-recorded) delivered in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish, the Wikimedia Foundation will provide live interpretation into English.
- In addition to these languages, there will be 1-2 additional supported languages that will rotate on a daily basis. Sessions delivered in English will receive interpretation into the 1-2 rotating languages for that day, and sessions delivered in the rotating languages will receive interpretation into English on those days. More information to come about rotating language support, including which languages will be offered.
Speakers are free to deliver sessions in other languages, but we can’t offer interpretation support at this moment.
We recognize that we will not be able to accommodate every single person and community, but we have learned from the Movement Strategy process how important multilingualism is and we want to keep improving our language approach. Thanks to all who provided their feedback in the community survey.
Get help
Reading all of this information has probably left you with questions. We will be hosting office hours to give you answers. More information on when and how to engage with us will be provided next week.
In the meantime, you can leave your questions for the Core Organizing Team on this talk page or by emailing wikimania
wikimedia.org.