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

[Mykola Kozlenko]

Hi, 
One particular problem is that we wanted to organise a CEE meeting _2014_. As far as I can see, at least one chapter (WM Serbia) has allocated funds for CEEM in their 2014 grant ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round1/Wikimedia_Serbia/Proposal_form#Supporting_Regional_Cooperation ), and I guess this may also be the case of other chapters with Jan-Dec financial year. It would be very dissappointing for these chapters not to use the funds they have already allocated, thus we would like to know: 
Are there any chapters who have already allocated funds for CEE Meeting 2014 on their budget? 
The more they are and the more important sums they have allocated, the less probable it is to move this meeting to 2015. 
For us (Wikimedia Ukraine) it is manageable to move it to February (probably not to January as Orthodox Christmas holidays may last until mid-January, and people are unlikely to work before 12 January or even later), although we will need to renegotiate quite a lot of things. At the same time, we should also bear in mind that we have Wikimedia Conference (April 2015?) and putting CEEM 2014 just before it will reduce its impact. 
We already have a draft programme and draft schedule, we are making final corrections and expect to publish them today or tomorrow. 
And while I understand that again we are making late start for CEEM 2014, this year we actually started in August by thinking on what we expect from this meeting, although I agree that it was once again a bit short notice. I do hope CEEM 2015 will be prepared better in advance, provided that we already have one bidding country at the moment (Estonia). 
Mykola Wikimedia Ukraine 

--- Оригінальне повідомлення --- 
Від кого: "Vojtěch Dostál" <vojtech.dostal at wikimedia.cz> 
Дата: 16 листопада 2014, 14:41:01 

Hi all 

I generally think that a CEE meeting, if carefully organized, can be a valuable conference where a lot of work can be done and new bonds established. International cooperation in eg. content creation or organizing competitions is very popular with our communities and as such should be encouraged. It is also a great opportunity to exchange ideas within a culturally relatively homogeneous region - for example, Czech projects are somewhat more likely to succeed in CEE countries than eg. in South America or Eastern Asia which are culturally very different in terms of academic relationships etc. 

At the same time, organizing a conference on such short notice is, to say the least, unfortunate. Apart from high travel costs, there is also not enough time to carefully plan the agenda. I know Ukrainians are very good in organizing conferences and I trust them that the conference would be a great one - but would it be worse in January or February next year? 

We could finally prove that CEE countries are able to organize conference well in advance. Actually, that would be a very big achievement for the conference organizers as it would also make the CEE countries better (more trustworthy) partners for international cooperation or funding within the Wikimedia movement. 

Vojtěch Dostál 

vice-chairman 
Wikimedia Česká republika 
Konopišťská 790/3, Praha 10 
http://www.wikimedia.cz 

2014-11-16 13:11 GMT+00:00 Marcin Cieslak < marcin at cieslak.name > : 
On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 10:45 AM, Tomasz Ganicz < polimerek at gmail.com > wrote: 
> Yes.. and the pardox of the situation is that the only "lingua franca" 
> for the teritory is actually English :-) 

That's unfortunately true. For some older generation, it was Russian 
to some extent... 

> + some countries are at the 
> war at the moment or they have been quite recently. 

That's actually a very good reason to keep our cooperation working 
despite this. 


Having said that I'd love to come to the next CEE meeting, but I am 
not sure I can get off work 
(I do work weekends too) and it will be very difficult to get 
reasonable travel costs 
due to Christmas season starting with most airlines mid-December. 

//Marcin 

//Marcin 
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