[WMCEE-l] FDC on the CEE Meeting

[aktron at centrum.cz]

My fellow friends from the CEE Chapters,
 
We've been discussing the upcoming Kiev meeting in Wikimedia Czech Republic in recent days. We will have our representative(s) that will come to the meeting. We've been also preparing some agenda for the meeting, so we will be able to share what we have, what is working well and also what is not and where we would like to learn something.
 
As far as I've understood the CEE meetings, it's more about sharing experience, so we can learn from our successes or fails in order to repeat what was good and avoid what was not.
 
A month ago me and Vojtěch Dostál have outlined a long-term plan for the developement of Wikimedia Czech Republic. The plan, that I believe is sound, would anticipate us joining the FDC in some reasonable future.  And we have more challenges ahead of us that we'll have to address, like perfecting our projects, working with more institutions etc. We would also like to share the experience we have with another projects we did, like FČO. The impact of FČO is getting close to wikiexpeditions (as we could have seen in the past) and so I believe that the international community should hear about it.
 
These are the issues that I believe our representative should discuss in Kiev. And FDC is the most important one ... The whole process have for sure significantly changed from 2013 when we tried to join it, and it is something where we need to learn from more experienced ones... such as Wikimedia Estonia or Wikimedia Serbia. There are many questions - like the voluneer time needed, the amound of effort that has to be invested, the level of transparency (reporting) that should be done - and overall the level of professionality we have to achieve before we'll be able to push our own professionalization process a bit more forward.
 
That is why we would like to have some discussion related to FDC on the meeting. Having seen this being pulled from the conference is understandable, yet I believed this might be highly important panel for us on that very meeting. 
 
All I hope is that there will be some informal time during the session to have this topic discussed. 
 
All best
 
Jan Loužek - Aktron
Wikimedia Czech Republic
chairman