Meet Essenam, Mermoze, Fatima, and Valentin, four volunteers from the French-Speaking community building the bridge between the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) and their communities.
The MCDC is responsible for drafting the content of the Movement Charter, and the communities hold the responsibility of reviewing it and suggesting improvements. This collaborative process requires some effort and time.
Essenam and Fatima: My name is Fatima Oury Sow Gueye, a librarian-documentalist in Senegal. With my colleague Essenam, an archivist-librarian, we represent “The Librarian and Archivist Sister’s” to share our passion for books, libraries, archives, and of course Wikimedia projects via different communication channels that we join since 2020.
Since 2021, we have been organizing online and in-person events to introduce Wikipedia and its sister projects to the community in Senegal and beyond. We participate in several projects, including Wiki Wake Up Africa with our colleagues in Benin who helped us implement the program in Senegal through weekly learning webinars about Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons among others.
With our participation to Wiki Indaba 2022, we were able to make new contacts with members of the movement and learn about various projects, especially the Charter of the Wikimedia movement. We, therefore, felt it necessary to organize conversations about this charter to allow the small community of Wikimedians in Senegal and Togo, the two respective countries of the two organizers who reside in Senegal, to know better the movement, its functioning and to give their opinions about this charter.
We have organized three community conversations in Senegal and Togo: one in-person in Dakar with the Senegalese community and two online with the Togo community and another one with both communities together.
It was a very enriching experience where two communities (Senegal – Togo) got to know each other and were able to discuss and exchange the understanding of the movement’s charter in a West African context.
Valentin: I am Valentin Nasibu, Wikimedian from the DRC and contributor since 2017. I am the co-founder of the Democratic Republic of Congo User Group. I am a trainer and coordinator of the French-speaking Africa zone of the Wiki for Human Right project (2023) and an Ambassador of the Movement Charter for my community.
I organized in-person and online conversations on the first three chapters of the movement’s charter to gather and publish feedback from my community members and I also translated these three chapters into Lingala.
Mermoze: I am a founding member of the Wikimedia Benin user group. We have joined several profiles, members of NGOs, experienced and new contributors, and those of our national languages. We held several online and in-person meetings with a wide range of participants. Furthermore, we received many feedback about the content and format of the document presented, and the participants felt very valued and happy to have been part of those conversations.
Most people are interested in participating in future discussions as long as they are informed earlier.
Learn more at the Movement Charter Ambassadors page on Meta-Wiki.
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