For Wikimania it is surely too late for anything official. Still, we could follow the sessions being approved and invite the speakers to use the forum to warm up their sessions, gather interest, and collaborate. Also to have a place to continue the conversation after the event.
I hope so. One of the main problems that we have faced in the CEE region in the last couple of years is the language barrier which prevents people from the communities of Russia who do not have good command in English to take an active part in region-wide discussions and events. However, things have improved after introducing language interpretation at the past two Wikimedia CEE Meetings, as well as some other online events.
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Is there an option for unofficial Wikimania and other events?
I can imagine individuals enthusiastic over Discord using it before official adoption, but … for not to be locked in with chicken-and-egg situation…it should be possible to apply for an individual user status that grants you permission to start limited number of new discussions and likely for their sub-threads? This could be a separate section per event or one with all WM events?
+…is it an option for individuals that would build up significant content and userbase here for events beyond summer* to continue using this instance of Discourse at least until end of October? *(like Wikimedia Summit in September or October CEE Meeting and QueeringWikipedia conf.)
Uważam, że korzystanie z Discourse może być przydatne do rozmów po sesji lub do zadawania pytań prowadzącym przed ich sesją. Prowadzący prezentacje mogliby również umieścić na Discourse skróty swoich sesji, żeby społeczność mogła się z nimi zapoznać w większej liczbie języków!
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The admins of this forum would love to work with event organizers and event participants, officially or unofficially. 
Technically there are different ways to approach this. One way could be to have an Events category with subcategories for each event. This is clear from an event perspective but it might clash with the organization of the forum by recommendations. If a Wikimania discussion is very useful for Topics For Impact, it would be a pity not to have it in that category, where other users specifically interested in this recommendation (and perhaps not in the event itself) will find it. Also, categories of events may be rather empty especially at the beginning, or ghost places during 10 months between events.
Another approach could be to have a main topic for an events i.e. “Wikimania 2022” a #wikimania tag, and use the topic and the tag to spin off or track other Wikimania related discussions about any of the recommendations.
There are probably other sensible combinations.
OK - will talk to two events coordinators I am involved with to consider this, but both are in Autmn and some commitment that forum should still (at least somewhat) operate by the end of 2022 (even if just for us) should exist, not to have fast close down like WM Spaces. If, when and how can this commitment be made? (I know running a service is not super co$tly financially for WMF, but there are other aspects)
If software and setup is flexible enough with generating and forwarding URLs (that will not die but redirect in case of refactoring) I would think both are useful to practice for different scenarios and even switch between them, but then just clean up later if some categories and topics did not get used at all. No?
The only reason to close this forum would be a community decision to do so. Adoption of this forum by events would be an important data point to test and show community interest.
About the technicalities sure, we can try things and see what works.
A post was merged into an existing topic: What goals should be set to consider this forum successful?
I am positive that this forum would be fully embraced by participants from many events, as long as we bring this fully to their attention. I would like to cast my vote and my support for encouraging the moderators to fully seek to present this at a variety of events currently being organized and convened at meta, and other related sites.
There isn’t much we could do to integrate this Forum to Wikimania, but we can still have some fun in this topic while it happens:
Do you have other simple and easy to implement ideas related to Wikimania that we can try this week?
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Actually I may not be able to attend Wikimania at all. So I think maybe this forum could play a pivotal role, and I’m grateful to you for mentioning it. Perhaps a few people who do attend Wikimania could pick a few sessions to discuss here, and could open some threads here to relay the discussions and the findings?
I really appreciate this forum’s role, for those people like me who cannot attend real-time events such as Wikimania. I think this forum can play a great positive role for extending the impact of major real world events and conferences such as Wikimania.
as ONE example… posting this youtube video, HERE at MS Forums, helps to spread this to the larger Wikimedia community.
and also, here is the specific page, to read more details on this.
Wikimania and the Summit, the two biggest Wikimedia events, didn’t result in significant activity in the forum. During the event people used the own event platform (makes sense) and also Telegram or similar real-time apps (makes sense too). There wasn’t much activity by the participants before or after these events, which is something to improve in general, as a movement, with or without this forum.
A series of regional events are coming, We also have many meetings. Movement Strategy related discussions and feedback are shared in each of these events. Videos are recorded, notes are taken on etherpads, summaries are posted… All this is good, but again it makes it difficult to even be aware of everything going on, even less follow, even less participate asynchronously, even less in languages other than English or the language(s) used in the specific event, during the event.
For these reasons I still believe that this forum can play an important role complementing the setup of event organizers, usually focus on the days/hours the event takes place. There are two features that we could add to the forum to better support event organizers and participants:
- The Discourse Event plugin, as proposed on Improvements for posts related to events
- The Shared Edits plugin, as proposed on Try the Discourse Shared Edits plugin for real-time collaborative note-taking (Etherpad-style)
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عندما تكون لنا مقارنة كمية ونوعية لاستعمال المنصات الأخرى يمكن أن نجعل من هذه المنصة محورا، وأجد أن تطبيق متكامل من مشاركة الصور والفيديوهات والاراء والمحادثات الجانبية وغيرها ضروري وليس تطبيق الحالي الذي يحيلك على متصفح مع إمكانيات محدودة للمشاركة
I totally agree.
Also I think these specific ideas are helpful in an additional, larger sense; namely, as an example of formulating specific and innovative ways that we can actively seek, in a proactive manner, to contiually make this forum have a greater role and usefulness to the community as a whole.
Indeed for events IMHO the WM Summit platform was brave (love that it was FLOSS), but not a success to celebrate. Many people did not log into it until they had to, so preparation was both minimal and under-supported. I think it was kind of OK as hybrid event environment, but leaves a lot to be desired.
I realized that many (important) people in the organizational part of the movement are not aware of Forum at all, so I hope that part will be corrected somehow with top-down communication efforts.
As for next steps I will focus on using Forum for follow-up discussions to both CEE Meeting 2022 and QueeringWikipedia 2022, but I would encourage you to install both plugins as soon as possible and try establish use case examples. I can help with some.
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So far the CEE Meeting has brought the most successful integration of the forum to an event. Still just a mild success, but the experimentation with the calendar, the relative time boxes in the timeline, the event boxes, the RSVP, the local times, the note-taking in shared edits… It was worth the experimentation and the tests.
Next: Wiki Arabia, WikiIndaba, WikiConference North America, ESEAP Conference, WikiConvention Francophone, Iberoconf, and maybe more?
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Ping @Adélaïde_Calais_WMFr, comme partagé par mail, ce forum peut être utilisé dans le cadre de la WikiConvention comme c’est le cas pour d’autres évènements wiki.
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I agree. We had semi-spontaneous situation with tests, but also on the ground improvization, with some HR and infrastructure limitations.