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)