Announcing the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2022

After the previous two editions of the Wikimedia CEE Meeting took place online and the Wikimedia Foundation announced the lifting of the Covid Travel Policy earlier this year, Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe are looking forward to meeting in person again at the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2022, which will be held from 14–16 October in Ohrid under the slogan “Bringing Back Together!” to highlight the recoupling.

This is going to be the first Wikimedia CEE Meeting to take place as an in-person event during the COVID-19 pandemic, which means that participants will have to abide by the local measures imposed to contain the pandemic. Additionally, speakers unable to participate on-site due to a positive test shortly before the conference will be allowed to present online.

Call for submissions now open

The programme for the event will be mostly filled with session proposals received through a call for submissions running from 15 June to 31 July 2022, while there will also be a handful of sessions that will feature keynote speakers or will be formatted as plenary discussions on important topics from the Wikimedia movement.

Session proposals can be submitted as lectures, panels, workshops, lightning talks and roundtables with a standardised duration, as well as posters which will be printed and publicly displayed in the venue during the course of the conference. No tracks have been pre-defined in the submission process this year and interested speakers are left with the option to indicate the topics that their session proposals fit the best into (e.g. Education, Community Engagement, Partnerships etc.).

Following the successful implementation of language interpretation from English to Russian and vice versa during the online editions of the conference, this is expected to be the first in-person edition with language interpretation, which means that the event can also accommodate sessions in Russian alongside English.

Central Asian communities invited

The conference is open primarily to participants from the CEE communities and, as usual in the past, the organisers will award scholarships for up to two members of each affiliate or community from the CEE region, with affiliates having the opportunity to send additional delegates on their own cost. There will also be scholarships awarded to interested Wikimedians from outside the region, particularly to people whose submissions will be accepted for inclusion in the conference programme.

In order to extend collaboration with like-minded communities from the adjacent regions that show similarities with the CEE communities, this year’s conference welcomes Wikimedians from Central Asia, specifically from the Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik communities, and the organisers will award scholarships for up to two members from these communities as well.

The registration for the conference is open until 15 August 2022, and all interested participants have to fulfill the registration form.