[WMCEE-l] What the meeting is good for?

[Balázs Viczián]

Laura,

Iberocoop is a culturally homogeneous community with no language
difficulties at all between its members. It can be best compared maybe to
the UK's Commonwealth.

Or imagine a cooperation between the UK-USA-SA-AUS-NZ-IRL-CAN and other
closely related "English-first" countries.

The CEE region in contrary can be divided into at least 4 (or more)
distinct groups:

1) North Slavic (CZ-SK-POL),
2) South Savic (CRO-SLO-RS-BIH-MAC-BUL)
3) Russian-related (RUS-UKR-BLR-KAZ+wherever a sizable Russian minority
lives,like the Baltic states plus maybe even as far countries as ISR and
the USA)
4) Baltics (EST-LAT-LV)
5) Caucasus (ARM-GEO-AZE and Caucasaian Russia, -Iran, -Turkey)

and others, like ROM-MOL, ALB-KOS or HUN with the sizable Hungarian
minorities in the neighbouring countries, or GRE-CYP or Turkey(-North
Cyprus-AZE) or others without a country (Sorbians, Rusyns, Sami, etc) and
the many-many more I missed listing here (one example: the Finno-Ugric
cooperation of FIN-HUN-EST+many ethnic groups without a country)

The only "real" similarity is the Soviet/Communist history (but not for
all) what actually almost everybody who had wants to get rid of (and what
made most of those CEE countries look similar on the surface) and of course
the geo-location.

I understand that from the UK these countries might look very similar but
beleive me, they are not.

Apart from being roughly at the same part of the map if you zoom out enough
(Budapest and Astana are 4500 kms away from each other...exact same
distance as Lisbon-Moscow)

And I have not even mentioned the history yet what gives a CZ-SK
cooperation far better chances of success than for example a CRO-RS one
(not to say examples like AZE-ARM...)

Chapters would probably cooperate better than the general population
though, however ignoring all mentioned above could lead to painful fails.

Me being from Hungary have not much in common with lets say the Kazakhs due
to the physical, linguistic and cultural distances we have between us.

It is _absolutely not_ a bad thing just a simple fact. We are too different
and too far away from each other (in all means) to find easy ways to
cooperate (if we will ever try to...)

Probably instead of pushing a single "CEE-coop" it would be better to let
those "natural groups" be created. (Note, many countries would belong to
more than one group but on different levels and depths what cold help
create more focused cooperations).

Balázs
2014.11.15. 8:55, "Laura Hale" <laura at fanhistory.com> ezt írta:

> To accomplish goals, to be better integrated into the wider community, to
> help build the global Wikimedia brand for your own benefit, to get better
> access to grants, to find other partners in chapters to do projects with,
> to teach others what you have learned to be successful, to learn from
> others what they have done to be successful, to alert others to important
> copyright issues facing your local community, to better lobby on reforms
> related to open access to information, etc.
>
> Improving visibility in a positive way is about improving collaboration.
> Collaboration is at the heart of all Wikimedia projects, and what makes it
> successful.  Often, you need face to face to do that.
>
> At the end of the day, you can argue go it alone all you want.  What
> success has this strategy of going alone brought you?  Why is eschewing
> collaboration in this case the better option?  Why is not working with
> others a better road to success for your chapter or your Wikimedia project?
>
> Sincerely,
> Laura Hale
>
> On Saturday, November 15, 2014, Juan de Vojníkov <juandevojnikov at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> And why we have to improve the visibility of wmcee comunity?
>>
>>>
>>>
>
> --
> twitter: purplepopple
>
>
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>
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