Grants talk:Conference/WCNA/WikiConference North America 2018

On 25 March 2018 user:SuperHamster posted the results of a community survey. I was not involved in any part of creating or administering the survey. I did participate in submitting survey responses. I did not direct anyone else to take the survey.

My experience with the survey was that I thought it was well formed in selecting and presenting questions. In looking at the results I find no surprises, and based on my own experience, the results match what I would expect the target audience to report based on my experience as one of the conference organizers in previous years. If I had to name a surprise, it would be that the survey led people to report interest in "tools". I recognize that tools can be many things, including software, social infrastructure, documentation, or any usable process, but there is a tendency in the wiki community to assume that tools are software. In the case of this survey and this community, I interpret the interest in "tools" to be interest in the addressing the challenges which the tools are meant to solve, and not necessarily always in participant interest in using the conference as a hackathon to design code, documentation or actually work and create during the conference time.

Great survey, encouraging results! This is progress and validates much of what in the past we had assumed. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:36, 26 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Bluerasberry: Thanks for the feedback! This was our first survey of this kind (I believe), and I think we got some nice results and thoughts to work off of to improve the conference. Nothing too surprising, but always good to have data and see what people think. As the primary creator of the survey, regarding tools: your interpretation was my intention, as well as seeing what tools people want to learn more about (people really liked our tool demos last year, for things like Wikidata, Education Dashboard, etc.). That could be something we make more clear in future surveys (and perhaps we can have a separate question to gauge hackathon interest, given that we're planning to host one). Cheers, ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 05:13, 27 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Is funding catering no longer a thing? Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:03, 28 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Hi Bluerasberry, WMF has supported WCNA team to request in-kind support from the event venue for catering, they are likely to get at least part of the catering donated. We did not fund the catering because we had a limited budget for this round of grants. Several proposals were not fully funded. I hope this helps. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 18:07, 31 May 2018 (UTC)Reply