Every year Wikimedia Ukraine brings the Ukrainian community for its annual Wikiconference. This year’s edition took place in October and early November, bringing a record 120 people across two cities and online.
Because of the ongoing Russia’s war against Ukraine, we decided to hold three smaller conferences in one to include as many participants as possible. Here’s a brief look at our biggest event of the year.
The format: three conferences in one
Since 2021, Wikimedia Ukraine has a tradition of dividing our annual Wikiconference into several separate events, both online and offline. First it was caused by pandemic restrictions, now by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Because of Russia’s war against Ukraine millions of Ukrainians are abroad or unable to travel within Ukraine. Some are serving in the Armed Forces and can join online but cannot take a leave to participate in-person. However, we still want the conference to be inclusive of everyone.
Doing a truly hybrid event where online participants wouldn’t get an inferior experience is too difficult and expensive (note: live-streaming an offline event for people to tune in on YouTube is great, and we are also doing it, but it’s still an offline event). The solution for us is organizing a separate online-only event on a separate weekend, with its own program.
In 2024, our Wikiconference consisted of three events:
- Online conference on October 19th-20th
- The main offline conference in Kyiv on October 26th-27th
- A smaller conference in Kharkiv on November 3rd
Both the online event and the Kyiv conference attracted over 60 people each, and the Kharkiv meetup gathered 25 people. Some people attended two or three events, but we had at least 124 confirmed unique participants overall (likely an undercount as we cannot capture all online participants).
Online conference: 60+ people, two days
The online edition took place on the weekend of October 19th and 20th. The conference featured 21 sessions, including our small “Wikimania at home”, as one organizing team member joked – 6 sessions from invited international speakers.
Participants rated the program highly, and the feedback form shows that the international program was particularly popular – especially two sessions about AI and Wikimedia from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Asaf Bartov and Wikimedia Polska’s Natalia Ćwik. Other notable sessions included a slate of sessions on the Ukrainian community during the war, interactive welcome sessions, and a review of Wikimedia Ukraine’s activities.
- See full program in English
- How to make an online conference engaging and tackle Zoom fatigue? It’s a big question for us, one that we’re hoping to tackle in a separate Diff post.
Kyiv conference: 60+ people from across Ukraine
A week later we gathered 63 people in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital city. It was the biggest offline event of the year with people coming from all over Ukraine and even abroad.
The two-day event included sessions on traditional topics like the Wikipedia Education Program, news and trends of the international wiki movement, practical workshops and project updates. We’ve also had one major innovation – an award ceremony for “Wikipedia 20”, a newly created award to distinguish people who’ve helped build Ukrainian Wikipedia over the 20 years of its existence.
Although this event was offline-first, we also had a high-quality online stream on YouTube, which helped more people tune in virtually.
- Photos from the Kyiv event on Wikimedia Commons
- More about the “Wikipedia 20” award (in Ukrainian)
Kharkiv conference: a meetup in a bomb shelter for 25 people
Despite being located close to the Russian border and suffering from constant Russian attacks, Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv has a vibrant Wikimedia community. On the first Sunday of November it gathered in a bomb shelter for a day-long conference for Wikimedians from the city and the surrounding region.
Participants had a packed program, featuring everything from the experience of implementing a wikischool for high-school students held in Bohodukhiv last year to ideas for engaging young people in Wikipedia.
In the words of the Kharkiv event’s lead organizer, Wikiconference 2024 in Kharkiv showed the potential of community development in a frontline city and region, even under constant security threats.
- More about the Kharkiv event (in Ukrainian)
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