Wikimedia CEE Hub/Catch up
WIKIMEDIA CEE HUB
Regional hub covering Central and Eastern Europe
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CEE Catch Up is a series of bi-monthly meetings about projects, activities and communities of the CEE region. The initiative is curated by the Wikimedia CEE Hub (staff members) and Wikimedia Foundation’s Movement Communications regional specialist Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska.
Goals
[edit]CEE Catch up initiative is a series of online gatherings which started taking place from March, 2023, focusing on communication in the CEE Region, and between the Region and WMF about major events, meetings, initiatives, or other things, that are happening or will be happening in the region and/or in the Wikimedia movement.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/CEE_Hub_SC_meeting_in_Tallinn%2C_2032.jpg/220px-CEE_Hub_SC_meeting_in_Tallinn%2C_2032.jpg)
How to participate?
[edit]Events are open to everyone who's interested in learning about new initiatives across the region and in the Wikimedia movement.
Please register yourself on this separate event page, so you can receive a link for the next event (28th June 2024). You can read more details about that below.
List of events
[edit]All times for every event are in CEST (UTC+2)
Seventh Catch Up
[edit]Join us at the next CEE Catch up on June 28th at 6 PM CEST! This time we will be discussing how to use social media to promote Wikimedia projects and Wikimedia events.
We will learn about how different organizations from the CEE region use social media and we will hear from the Wikimedia Foundation about their social media strategy.
Register on the event page
Sixth Catch Up
[edit]The sixth CEE Catch Up was held on 8th of May 2024, 19:00-20:30 CEST. This was the sixth meeting of the Catch Up initiative.
Topic of the upcoming event was Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan for the period 2024-2025, where WMF gave the introduction of the Annual Plan, and then CEE Hub team gave an update of the Year 2 of their Annual Plan. Afterwards, we had more than 20 minutes for Q&A.
Agenda of the sixth CEE Catch Up |
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Agenda of the sixth CEE Catch Up |
Fifth Catch Up
[edit]The fifth CEE Catch Up was held on 26th of February 2024, 18:00-19:00 CET. This was the fifth meeting of the Catch Up initiative.
Topic of the upcoming event was Why the brand is important?, and we will have four various sharers from the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimania 2024 and regional community member.
Agenda of the fifth CEE Catch Up |
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Agenda of the fifth CEE Catch Up
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Report from the fifth Catch Up meeting on 26th of February, 2024 |
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The meeting started on time (18:00 CET) with over 25 participants from the whole CEE Region, and even outside of the region, as the topic was quite interesting for the participants. You can find a recording of this meeting below.
At the beginning of the meeting, organisers of this initiative CEE Hub staff (Barbara Klen and Toni Ristovski) and Wikimedia Foundation’s Movement Communications regional specialist (Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska) shortly introduced themselves. As Barbara and Natalia had their backgrounds with some designs of the Wikimania 2024, they already announced the topic of this Catch Up with that. Additionally, it continued to explain more into visual identity and brand itself and why is that important. During the session we will had four sharers from different organisations. At the end of this segment, Toni shared the friendly safe space policy with all of the participants.
Our sharers for this meeting were following:
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Fourth Catch Up
[edit]The next CEE Catch Up was held on 16th of November 2023, 18:00-19:30 CET (check your local time). This was the fourth meeting of the Catch Up initiative. This time we discussed Artificial intelligence (AI) tools and its implementation in our everyday work with sharers from the Wikimedia Foundation, and four different CEE communities (Slovenia, Greece, Cyprus, and Poland).
The event had live interpretation to Russian.
Agenda of the fourth CEE Catch Up |
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Agenda of the fourth CEE Catch Up
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Report from the fourth Catch Up meeting on 16th of November, 2023 |
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The meeting started on time (18:00 CET) with over 25 participants from the whole CEE Region, and even outside of the region, as the topic was quite interesting for the participants. You can find a recording of this meeting below.
At the beginning of the meeting, organisers of this initiative CEE Hub staff (Barbara Klen and Toni Ristovski) and Wikimedia Foundation’s Movement Communications regional specialist (Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska) shortly introduced themselves. She explained a little bit for the importance of communication and cooperation with the community, and she announced that during the session we will had an option to use Russian interpretation. Afterwards, we explained our theme for the meeting which was "Artificial intelligence" (AI) and our five sharers from different organisations. At the end of this segment, Toni shared the friendly safe space policy with all of the participants.
Our sharers for this meeting were following:
First speaker was Maryana Pinchuk, Product Manager in Future Audiences in the Wikimedia Foundation. She started with the interactive exercise for the participants, and then she started talking for the history of the Artificial intelligence in the movement. Even from the very beginning of the Wikimedia projects, bots and tools were part of it. In 2014, it was launched Content Translation tool, which is widely used by the new editors on the Wikipedia. When ChatGPT was created in November 2022, WMF started working how to implement this new technology, so just nine months later it was introduced Wikipedia plugin for ChatGPT. Then, she shared some slides that AI is a tool, that can be used if AI is human-led, equitable and transparent. She also mentioned who is working now in the WMF on AI, and main points were building the infrastructure, open model governance and researching ways AI can support existing users. And for the end, she mentioned future ideas, such as: they are working on developing quick experiments, monitoring external trends in AI, and making recommendations for future investments. Second speaker was Natalia Ćwik, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Poland, and she mainly focused how AI can be used if you work in the organisation, mentioning that they used AI so far for grant writing, social media posts, summary of the notes from the meeting, etc. Also, she mentioned that giving instructions to the AI is not different than giving instructions to the people. At the end, she shared where you can learn more having free seminars from TechSoup and beta versions of the AI assistants. Third speaker was Vera Pelhan, editor in the Slovenian community, which shared her journey through the daily adventures of a Wikimedian. She shared some of the tools she used in the daily activities on Wikipedia, which helps her like direct sidebar translation and summary of the complex pages. Last speakers were Marios Magioladitis and Anna Prodromou from Greek and Cypriot community, respectively. Marios started first and he shared some aspect for the AI mentioning AI as the double-edged sword. He especially mentioned AI-generated images and problem that can arise here on the Wikimedia projects, but also he shared some positive aspects from the usage of the AI. At the end, Anna shared some ethical implications of bias connecting with the AI, transparency and user trust. After every session of the speaker we had a questions from the chat or from the registration forms asked to the speakers.
At the end, Barbara and Natalia thanked to our sharers, as well to the participants. Additionally, we shared post-survey for the opinions and feedback from the participants. |
Third Catch Up
[edit]Third Catch Up was held on 31st of July 2023, 18:00-19:00 CEST, which will be third meeting of this initiative. This time we will discuss Supporting community health with sharers from Human Rights Team, Wikimedia Poland and Wikimedia Ukraine.
Agenda of the third CEE Catch Up |
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Agenda of the third CEE Catch Up
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Report from the third Catch Up meeting on 31st of July, 2023 |
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The meeting started on time (18:00 CEST) with over 20 participants from the whole CEE Region. You can find a recording of this meeting below.
At the beginning of the meeting, organisers of this initiative CEE Hub staff (Barbara Klen and Toni Ristovski) and Wikimedia Foundation’s Movement Communications regional specialist (Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska) shortly introduced themselves. Additionally, Natalia shared the safe space policy with all of the participants. As we wait for all registered participants, we talk about longest editing streak on Wikipedia and recent blog post about editor with the longest streak ever. Afterwards, we explained our theme for the meeting which was "Community health" and our sharers from three different organisations.
Our sharers for this meeting were following:
Nicky shared about plan of the Human Rights Team to set up a separate Meta page which will be Resource Center dedicated to "Mental Health", which often is neglected as a topic in our movement. This page should be published during the August, on which ordinary users can find out advices and information about mental health. As everyone knows, it is not just to create a Meta page, and everyone then to forgot about that page, Human Rights Team will try to promote and to communicate well with all of the users from the movement, this page to be visible, easily findable and to be used whole the time. During the presentation, Nicky shared link where participants from the session can ask questions about this project. Natalia and Paulina from Wikimedia Poland talk about their new internal policy to develop and implement an anti-mobbing, anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policy and procedure. They went into complete process to organise this, which includes training for the employees. During the creation of the policy they talk with other organisations from the movement as well. Additionally, Wikimedia Poland works a lot to have safer meetings and conferences and they introduce implementation of the Universal code of conduct during their online meetings, as well to in-person activities. They adapt this policy from Wikimedia Germany, as they have proper documentation about this in their own organisation. Anton from Wikimedia Ukraine talk about impact of the employees and contractors of the Wikimedia Ukraine after Russian invasion of Ukraine. He explains what the war has not changed and what the war has changed of their work and how people feel about Wikipedia even in wartime. He talks a lot about that now it is very hard and unpredictable to organise events and in-person activities, although they are still organising these events, taking a preparations for every possible scenario. He shared also some learnt lessons from dealing such unprecedented event.
At the end, it was scheduled to have an update for Wikimania 2024 from organisers team (Maciej Nadzikiewicz ), but as we did not have a time, this update will be published on social media channels. |
Second Catch Up
[edit]Second Catch Up was held on 16th of May 2023, 18:00-19:00 CEST, which was second meeting of this initiative.
Archived agenda and participants on the second CEE Catch Up |
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Archived agenda and participants on the second CEE Catch Up
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Report from the second Catch Up meeting on 16th of May, 2023 |
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The meeting started on time (18:00 CEST) with over 20 participants from the whole CEE Region. You can find a recording of this meeting below.
At the beginning of the meeting, organisers of this initiative CEE Hub staff (Barbara Klen and Toni Ristovski) and Wikimedia Foundation’s Movement Communications regional specialist (Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska) shortly introduced themselves. Additionally, Natalia shared the safe space policy with all of the participants. Afterwards, the purpose of the session was explained, which was to get to know new young people of the CEE Region and to hear what they do in their countries. The mid/long term goal of this initiative and meeting is to create a cooperation of enthusiastic young Wikipedians and Wikimedias, who want to do something together.
All participants were divided into breakout room, where each group could interact and make a short introduction round. After five minutes, everyone returned to the main room and each person was supposed to briefly present one new person they met.
Main session was organised with a short introduction of the sharers, which were:
During the session, sharers had a chance to talk about following questions:
Every sharer had a chance to answer every question while Toni and Barbara facilitated the order and length of the session. Due to interesting discussion, this part took longer than expected.
At the end, Barbara invited all participants to sign-up, if they want to become part of the newly formed cooperation, which will be dedicated to WM CEE youth (people up to 26 years). |
First Catch Up
[edit]First meeting dedicated to this initiative was held on 21st of March, 2023, which coincided with the first day of the CEE Spring competition 2023.
Report from the first Catch Up meeting on 21st of March, 2023 |
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The meeting started on time (18:00 CET) with over 27 participants from the whole CEE Region. Although this session was planned to be recorded due to our misperception about settings of our Google Meet call, we were not able to record the meeting.
Due to the high volume of the participants, only organizers who consisted of two CEE Hub staff (Barbara Klen and Toni Ristovski) and Wikimedia Foundation’s Movement Communications regional specialist (Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska) shortly introduced themselves. Other participants were thereafter invited to present themselves in the chat. Short presentation about CEE Spring was given by Toni. Also, some overall statistics about the contest on a global level were discussed, which will be in detail presented in a Diff blog post this week. CEE Spring contest welcomed two new communities (see participants list this year; Aromanian and Western Armenian), therefore others from the CEE Region can write about these small minority communities dispersed throughout the whole CEE Region. Additionally, after many years, we have returnee of Sakha community in the Far East of Russian Federation as a guest community.
During the first CEE Catch Up meeting, there was an official announcement that the biggest Wikipedia conference will be held in 2024 in our region, as Krakow submission which was also endorsed by the CEE Hub and many other affiliates from the region, was accepted - next Wikimania 2024 will be held in Krakow, Poland. Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz as a project leader of the submission for Wikimania 2024 presented all the details known so far, and also presented to the participants all planned next steps during the process of preparation of this conference.
It is planned that the next CEE Meeting will take place in Tbilisi, Georgia in September 2023, therefor on this meeting we had a chance to hear the latest news and updates from the organizer Mehman Ibragimov. In the moment when conference grant proposal will be approved by Wikimedia Foundation (which is expected to happen by April 2023) organizers will open registration forms for eligible participants from all affiliates in the CEE Region, and they will publish open a call for submissions for lectures, presentations or lightning talks for this regional conference which takes place in our region. Barbara informed participants that CEE Hub, along with the working group from Let's Connect team and International Team from Wikimedia Ukraine, is preparing a session dedicated on knowledge exchange between previous and upcoming organizers of the Wiki Loves Earth campaign which will be held on 13th April, 2023. In the upcoming weeks, CEE Hub will work on defining a list of participants and writing guidelines and we plan to send out the registration form for the upcoming event to all potentially interested communities/individuals.
At the end of the meeting, we had some time to discuss other topics. This time was used to discuss more about Let's Connect network and their events and activities. |
Sessions documentation
[edit]Meetings will be recorded, so you can find recordings from the meetings here:
- due to the technical issues we do not have a recording from the first Catch Up which took place on 21st of March, 2023
- Recording from the second Catch Up meeting
- Recording from the third Catch Up meeting
- Recording from the fourth Catch Up meeting (Passcode: UK6E3.p.)
- Recording from the fifth Catch Up meeting (Passcode: +8LKuC4R)
- Recording from the sixth Catch Up meeting (Passcode: N2G%.@X&)
- Recording from the seventh Catch Up meeting (Passcode: =532NBpX)
Safe space policy for video conferences
[edit]In the collapsed table you can find safe space policy for the these meetings.
Safe space policy for video conferences |
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