 Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the session. I would first like to start by introducing our panel. Eddard, he works as a products and research manager at the user group Wikimonimento Brazil. He has been associated with Wikilabs Monuments for the past three years. More recently, he has been working on a mobile application for Wikilabs Monuments that will make finding and uploading photographs for the competition more accessible. Jeffrey has been a volunteer with Wikimedia Uganda since 2014 and has organized Wikilabs Monuments in Uganda since 2017. He has also been associated with other Wikilabs competitions such as Wikilabs Earth, Wikilabs Africa. Kimo works with Wikimedia Finland and has worked with Wikilist categorization, maps, and so on. He has also organized Wikilabs Monuments in Finland in the previous years. Mikola, our last panelist, he is a member of Wikilabs Monuments Ukraine, organizing team since 2012 and is the vice chair of board of Wikimedia Uganda. We also have SEAL from our Wikilabs Monuments international team helping us with the questions in the chat. So in case you have any questions, please feel free to add it to the etherpad or the feed loop chat. We will get to it at the end of the discussion. And coming back to me, I am Masha Mordley. I am based in Delhi, India. And I've been working as the DEI researcher for Wikilabs Monuments since 2021 and will be moderating today's session on understanding diversity, equity, and inclusivity in Wikilabs Monuments and federated campaigns at large. As part of this process, I have spoken to many Wikilabs Monuments national organizers and other Wikimedia affiliated Wikimedians about the experience of organizing this digital photo competition in their countries. These conversations made me realize how diversity, equity, and inclusivity is an ever evolving process. What might be applicable to one country may not be so for another. So our approach to understanding and finding solutions to such issues have to be specific to the region or country in question. So today we have our panelists sharing their experience of hosting Wikilabs Monuments in their respective countries. And if you are new to Wikilabs Monuments or would like to know more about it, we have our Wikicomments page. And you could also refer to our previous Wikimedia session that included a discussion for new organizers. So let's begin. So my first question to our panel would be their experience with representation of local monuments and communities in the competition. So according to you, how important our local context in understanding heritage and how do you ensure maximum participation from local communities? Eda, would you like to go first? OK. I think it's important to take into consideration that Wikilabs Monuments is a competition, a contest, born in the global north. And that implicates in a set of assumptions. For example, the easier access to photograph equipment or a more stable internet connection, for example. Discussions around what constitutes a monument and how can we improve the impact of the competition results, for example, by highlighting monuments that don't make the cut of beauty in the main prize. But denounce the abandonment of the state or institution responsible for those monuments are also relevant to taking into consideration when you are dealing with local contexts. Thank you. Jeffrey, would you like to go next? Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I think Wikilabs Monuments really is all about sharing our cultural heritage. And I think cultural heritage is really kind of local at the local level. Like what is a cultural heritage site in Uganda may not look like a monument to someone who lives in another country. So I think we have to really contextualize it at the country level first. So what we have done in Uganda, we have worked with the Uganda National Museum who helped us to come up with a list of cultural heritage sites and monuments in the country. But this also has to be kind of communicated with the participants that these are really monuments and cultural heritage sites, but also the jury who judge the photos at the local level. Because without understanding that then they may not, this kind of photos thinking is not a cultural heritage site, but when it is really very meaningful to people who live in that particular location and are using this as a monument. But also I think representation in terms of local communities also have to make sure that more countries participate in Wikilabs Monuments. When you look at the map that is on Wikilabs Monuments, there is very few countries participating in Wikilabs Monuments in Africa. So how can we get that more countries to participate? We need to reach out to new people and encourage them to organize Wikilabs Monuments in their country. So the more countries, the better. So yeah, we need more participation to increase representation for local communities. Thank you, Jeffrey. Kimo, would you like to come next? India. I think that in terms of accessibility, the most biggest barriers are technical ones. It is kind of the first barrier, which blocks people to participate. How they can technically find the monuments, but they sold photograph and how they bought upload and like that. But then there is kind of things like inclusivity, which is in local heritage context that what can be included as a monument in the competition and what local heritage groups think what are important and in that context, we have been trying to select some groups each year and find what they think is interesting and what the cultural organizations, formal cultural organizations like museums are in that area. And create interesting lists and hope and help that those local groups will spread the word and find new people to participate. But this is kind of that we select only small geographic area in Finland each year because in that kind of work, we can scale to whole Finland. So we create one era per year and in next year, we move to next area and next local groups. Thank you. Nikola, please go ahead. Yes, so on Nikola's monuments, Ukraine side, we had a challenge of starting with monument lists because when we started the contest in 2012, our government monument lists were of pretty bad quality and the monuments were not very detailed anywhere online. So we had first to start an effort by getting this monument list from local authorities and we were very conscious that we were not equally successful everywhere in the country. Some regions had much better details than the others. So we depending on where participants live, some of them might have 5,000 monuments and the region others might have just 100 monuments. Not that there are less monuments, but that we don't notice. Another dimension for us was what is on this list and what is not because of the history, because of historical reasons, typically from communist times, we noticed that we have too many communist monuments, most of them were being demolished or rethought, like Lenin converted into Darth Vader's statue during the decommunization campaign. So it might be interesting for us to document the monument as it existed, as it was demolished and what happens next. And we had also kind of heritage that was not on the government list, probably deliberately, probably by a mission. And we teamed up with partners, for example, on Jewish heritage, or for the monuments that risk destruction. And we worked with these partners to add additional items so that we know that these sites are important to people. We know that they were omitted from the government list. And sometimes after Vards, they found their place on official lists and it's pretty good achievements that we managed to raise awareness. Thank you. So what we get to know is, you know, what is a monument for one person in one country may not look the same in another country. And that is something that needs to be kept in consideration, along with the fact that sometimes national or official lists are not adequate or not readily available for us while hosting this competition in our regions. So that also needs a lot of work from our part to get official lists and make them accessible. But what is one major issue that most people face is the technical end that, you know, even with the resources available, the technology may not be as accessible as we would like. So that brings me to my next question that, you know, given that Vicky Lam's monuments is a purely digital photo competition, how important is technological, what are the kind of technological issues that you face in implementing the competition in your country or region? And what kinds of initiatives have you taken in this area? Can I start? Yeah, please, Adam. Okay. From a global south context perspective, technological accessibility and inclusivity relate to actions. We as local organizers need to adapt the context to our local contexts. So this means that we have to consider and we have been doing this in Brazil since 2019 that we have to consider how they navigate through the lists via mobile devices, for example. Or which devices are they using to take the pictures? Do they have a stable connection to send the photos once they have taken the photos? How high is the learning curve of the participation in the contest? So we have feedback from participants that say that it's impossible to navigate through the tables, the table lists on Wikipedia. So how we've been doing trying to resolve this problem is to build solutions for the lists. For example, we are using a mobile and desktop map application to try to improve the user experience of the photographers participating. It's available through Forge on beta still, but I'll put the link in the interpad later. And that is something that we feel that needs to be addressed, the user experience. And that's it. Thank you. Jeffrey, would you like to go next? Yes, thank you. So yeah, I think it's really very important to consider this gap of technology, because, yeah, with glass monuments and other photographic competitions really depend on whether someone has access to a nice camera or has access to a smartphone that can take really good, quieted pictures when you see the photos that, for example, win the international competition, they're really high quality photos and they can only win if you have a nice camera, but also have that taking your capacity to take a good photo. And I think the good thing with glass monuments is also that it is kind of decentralized or federated. We have a local Uganda competition where at the end of it all, we have winners from Uganda and we are going to judge them depending on the quality of photos that we have that are coming in from the country. But the fact is that not everyone has access to a camera. That one remains the fact. So what we have done in Uganda to kind of reduce the gap is we have a device, a camera for the user group and normally we throw this out to participants. So one person can use it like for three days. So by the time the competition ends, the winner has moved hands like maybe to six people. So someone has just to share a list of monuments that they want to capture and when they want to capture them and then we borrow out the device and someone goes to capture. And we try to prioritize sites that have never been captured before because we have been doing this since 2017 but also there are some places we have entrenched. And the other thing we are doing is also to go for photo hands and when people are going in a group still they can share one device. One person takes one site, another takes another. So sharing devices and lastly also supporting people with internet data and also transport. So someone needs transport to go. Some of these monuments or sites are located in remote places. So we use also your support from the foundation and we give support with transport and also internet to upload pictures and in that we are kind of reducing that kind of barbarian participation. Thank you. Kimo, would you like to go next? Yeah. I think that at first we tried to use the Wikipedia table list for showing what should be photographed but it was pretty fast that we were built that they were just too complex or hard to use for general users. And after that we have been mostly used to use the maps which user can browse and see what are the networks and mostly we are using custom Wikisuit me tool for that. And generally it is very important that we should have globally very well-working tools for the competitions just for finding what user needs to photograph and also what they need to fill information when they are saving photos. That is another thing. If we want the IDs and coordinates and everything like that then this will be automatically filled. Thank you. Nicola, do you have something to share? Yeah, I think we have quite a lot. We have no real big problems with access to the internet for example, at least before the war started we did not have it. So we know that participants can have their photos on a device that has internet connection but we know that some of them are not very used to upload forms like we have on comments so they might get lost in accurately describing these pictures or just not knowing how to attribute them correctly and so on. So what we have done is we added upload buttons to monument lists which regenerates as a monument description so that we know that at least if a person clicks on these buttons the picture will be correctly described and in the right category and so on. We also added a feature which a few people used said if you're uploading pictures of a lot of monuments I mean hundreds that we can help them with the bot to automatically add descriptions to these images if they add identifiers to file names in this case a person just needs to sort these images on their computer and the bot will take care of putting them into right categories and adding them correct descriptions. We still have some barriers to for example people are asking to have some sort of to do list or maps that they can choose what pictures to see what monuments need pictures and create like lists for themselves by equicating lists from multiple areas that's not something we still have but well those are things that would be good to add probably it's international level as well. Thank you. So listening to these experiences obviously there are roadblocks that each of us face in different ways right so how is it that you get your participants motivated each year year after year to send in entries and participate in the competition. Go first on this. So that's very key like to get participants and get every and continue participating and what we have done in Uganda is to hold events so we normally have events and this helps to help people learn about the competition and why they should participate. It has been a challenge in the past two years because of the COVID situation and events had to happen online so the engagement really is not the same as an in-person event but that really helps. Of course the other thing that helps are the prizes so we normally have prizes for the winners and this also helps to encourage participation but I can also say that still the numbers are low when you compare like the participants in Uganda for example with participants in other countries for example last year in Uganda we had 15 participants who submitted 334 photos and when you compare that to a country like Italy who had 675 participants submitting 11,000 photos there is a huge difference so we can get a few people getting involved every year and continuing participation but we also need more people to mobilize as many people as possible to participate which is still a kind of a challenge. Thank you Jeffrey. Nicola would you like to go next? Yes, so for us the biggest challenge is a bit different that we have many participants and many pictures we typically get around 30,000 images per year and this means that many participants feel I don't have a lot of chances to win if we just award prizes for the best 10 pictures like my chances are slim so we tried to encourage participation by adding more awards people can win we added awards by regions so that you also get a smaller prize for the best picture of your region and we also added prizes for the number of monuments pictured and this evolved in time with the prize by the number of new monuments pictured so the goal is to say to people well maybe you don't have spectacular monuments in your area but you also have some important a bit less beautiful but also historically important monuments and we also want you to encourage picture maybe not very spectacular historical buildings around you it's not like the best castle of Ukraine but that's something that we want to have on Wikimedia and this encourages also people in different geographic areas to participate that we are not joining us before. Thank you Edda would you like to go next? Yes So we have been doing something similar I think it's the same thing in Brazil as well we have been promoting since the 2019 different prizes for participants of course we have the main category that is the best images that go to the international phase we have also since 2019 the best contributors or the people that contribute to illustrate the most number of monuments and we also from 2021 since last year we had a state of Brazil and we in context of another other set activities we also established category for those for a state of Brazil to give prizes for that region but one thing that we struggled a lot is with outreach and communication that was something in 2019 since we assumed the competition in Brazil that we attributed to the lack of participation and then covid hit and we had fewer people going to the streets and photographing but year by year we have been adding things to improve the user experience to try to tackle this participation problem but if you look at the numbers the contests on wiki are all of them we love earth, we love Africa, we love monuments we scientific all of them are rely on newcomers so you have a high percentage of people participating in the contests become a wiki median in the moment of the contest in the context so we need to read these numbers tackle why are the retention rate so low globally I think it's 9% for all the users 3 for newcomers in Brazil we have 3 for all the participants and 1% retention rate for newcomers in Brazil that is something that we are trying to tackle by improving the user experience thank you can we have anything to add to it yeah some ideas or comments about the newcomers what I have been filled about all the time is that the Wigilos monuments and such competitions are mainly outreach campaigns to the site of the current wiki community so I haven't really seen a problem that that my growth of the users have been newcomers because it is kind of have been our focus another thing about the technical sites we have been doing different photographic campaigns in wiki which are focusing to photograph statues or photograph of some buildings or something like that and we have had tools for that and we have been developing wiki suit me for that and we have had a rephotography app for rephotographing historical photo again it shows that what photographs have been taken of the displays on the phone and they are now rewriting it so that it will work also with the EOS phones and one idea of what we are trying to do is that how well it will be working also in the competition but it is kind of focusing at least for those people who are already doing targeted photographing in wiki thank you for those inputs one last question this came from one of our international organizers so she asked that how important do you think gender is a factor for a photo competition such as wiki loves monuments and what does it bring to the table this is open to everyone do you have any ideas or comments about it that you would like to share yeah maybe I can start again I think gender is always a perspective that we have to look into in every aspect of our competitions or activities and gender in this case relates to access to the resources that photographs have for example our internet connection it's shown in research that women have less access to internet than men and that includes economic resources as well we all know that and that plays a role in defining the profile of photographer and photographs that we have on the competition but gender is something that is difficult to measure in wiki loves monuments because we only have access to the user name of the photographers and people tend to not answer surveys so we don't have this number at hand at any time so it's difficult to measure the impact of gender in the competition thank you since we are coming up on time we just have 5 minutes left I think we could have one more speaker share their inputs and then we could move to the audience questions would that be okay? would someone want to go ahead and answer the question go ahead also think gender is a very important factor to bring diversity and inclusion within competitions like wiki loves monuments and when for example you look at the example I gave last year in Uganda we had 15 participants but only 2 of those were women and if we had to really get more women involved then as we reach out, as we organize events that's where we have to make sure that we have equal representation in terms of gender so if we are giving out for example support in terms of internet data and we have a budget for 20 people at least make sure 10 of those that support goes to women and 10 goes to men so that there is if we are organizing an event and have like only 20 slots also make sure that there is representation on who is coming to the event and also things like supporting people like with internet data so one of the things that I think is equally important is also to get organizers for events and for competition like virtualized women so are women, I think women are more likely to participate if the organizers people are leading the event also women I want to give a shout out to my friend Tepile from Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe last year and she is organizing it again this year and I think because she is a woman more women are more likely to participate in the event so we need more gender representation if we are to achieve diversity, equity and inclusion which allows monuments Thank you I think we could move to the questions on the etherpad so first question is for you Jeffrey do you organize transport for groups so people can join to visit remote monuments the challenge with monuments in Uganda is that they are really scattered so they are not like in one place so if you have a group and it is visiting one monument and these monuments are like 5 hours apart then there is a lot of time lost there so for WikiLabs monuments what we have done really is to send one person per region to go and capture monuments but when we when the monuments are concentrated like in one place then there we do group photo walks so for example in the capital Kampala here there are monuments that's where most of the concentration of monuments are and there we have organized group activities we support people in a group to go and capture monuments but also makes it more fun when people can go out as a group it gets the competition more exciting because people get to interact as they contribute to WikiLabs monuments so we have done that where we can but also for sites and monuments which are very remote then we just send one person to a particular place Thank you similar in Ukraine via WikiExpeditions for example where we focused on visiting a few areas there which are badly pictured on comments not only in terms of WikiLabs monuments but in general which have very few pictures we organize individual or small group trips to these regions to cover as many sites as possible and it's also very helpful if there are local authorities who helps us or local historians Thank you I think our next question is to Edaar about the retention rate do you mean retention on Wiki after WikiLabs monuments or newcomers participating in WikiLabs monuments in the following edition Yeah, by retention rate I think I put on the the interpreter as well I define as participating in the WikiLabs monuments competition in another year so if people participated last year this year if they participate again so we have retention rate based on the number of people from last year or the years before participating again so that's our definition Thank you so much I think we are on time Thank you But Yeah, thank you everyone for joining us for the session It was great I think we are off air now Are we?