 This is Abel from the Democratic Republic of Congo. And I'm so happy to be presenting to you this talk where we will be learning more about the experience of the Wikimedia community in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So the title, as you can see there, it's building a community, a Wikimedia community, an example of Wikimedians of Democratic Republic of Congo user groups. So the goal here is just to show experience so that it can help you start your own, Wikimedia-like group or community. Or if you have one already, it can help you move forward. So there are main things that we're gonna learn in this talk. So I think I'm so happy that you joined the session and we are about to start. Before I start, this is an African proverb that I love so much. As you can see, along we can go faster together, we go further. Sometimes while you work hard, you alone, you can make this decision very easily and you can decide wherever you wanna go. And you think that you're moving so fast and faster and everything is going well. But as you can see in this proverb, it's better to move with a community where you two, three, four persons working on a project, it's better than being alone. So this African proverb is very important for us as we are working in a community. So what is it? In this talk, we are discussing about the community. We want to see exactly an example of the community. First of all, Wikimedia is a community-driven project and we all know that. It's the encyclopedia or built with the community all over the world, so it's a community project. And it's very important that we keep this in mind. And the success of Wikimedia depends on its community. It's very important. If Wikimedia is what it is today, it is because of the amazing community surrounding it, the amazing community from all over the world trying to make it happen, trying to make it something great. So it's very important for us to see it. It's very important for us to understand and to value the communities, very, very important. So let's see some statistics from Wikimedia. Wikimedia, exactly. Today, we have around 300 languages, version of Wikimedia, in French, in English, Lingala, in Swahili, in... So many languages that you can imagine. So it's very, very important that we notice that. It's a big community project. And so far we have more than 30 million articles. So many, so many. This is what the community is doing so far, so many. And visitors, we have more than 500 visitors, more than five million, I would like to say, visit us a month. It's not so easy. It's a very, very huge community. And who are editing Wikimedia? Those amazing people who are making Wikimedia, who are making Wikimedia what it is today, more than 100,000 of people a day, say a day, more than 100,000 of people trying to build Wikimedia, to make it what you are saying, to try to do or to construct the project. And so far, per day, we have 25,000 articles created. So amazing. Can you imagine the statistics of the project? And all about the community around it? So let's discuss what is a community at all? What is a community? I'd like just to give you a simple definition. I don't like to take a very complicated definition. Just very basically, very basically, my understanding of a community is a group, a set of individuals, at least two people who share the same vision. That is what I can call the community. Instead of at least two people sharing the same vision, the same goal, that is what we call community. And this is an example, a perfect example of Wikimedia community in Africa. There you can see the grin. You have what we call user group, affiliate recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation. As user group, as this. And then you have chapters, unfortunately, until now we only have one chapter from Africa. And it is in South Africa. As you can see here on the map. So you have community all around in DRC, Uganda, and so many countries so far, Ghana, Nigeria, and you've got some geographical community. So I know that there are so many other communities that you can't find there. But here, I've just put community by country. In each country, if there is one community, and you can see that there is a need to build a community in Africa, a community Wikimedia community is in Africa because until now we don't have, we don't cover communities in Rwanda, and so many other countries still don't have an official community. So it's very important that we help them create a Wikimedia community in their own countries. So this is the goal of this talk. You'll get inspiration. You'll get some advice that we use. You learn from our experience and you'll build your own Wikimedia-like community. Trust me, it should be amazing. So let's discuss about the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is a dream come true, it became true. It was a dream to have a community like we had in Côte d'Ivoire, like we have in so many countries, some countries I can say in Africa. So it was very important for me, for us, I mean to have a community, a strong community, an official Wikimedia community in the country. So what is the agenda so far? So far, what we are going to discuss here is about the past, a little about the history of the community in the country. Where are we now? The present, we'll see what's where we are, what we are able to do, what we have learned so far, all the way to what lessons we can learn, we can show. And I'll tell you what you can do and what you should avoid. And what's our future? What is the future? This is the structure, the little structure that I want to discuss with you in this talk. So history of DRC community. And let's start by this, it's very important to let you know the history. So when I was working on this idea, this project, this talk, and I was thinking, oh, what can I say? What is exactly the history of Wikimedia community in the Democratic Republic of Congo? And I'll try to figure out, I'll try to think, I'll try to move forward, to see what's happened so far. So I've concluded that we can split the evolution of the Wikimedia community in DRC in three main periods. Three main periods are what I found important to show with you. So the first one, prior to 2015, prior to 2015, no, in this period, I can say there were just some contribution, individual contribution and some trainings that I cannot even, we can't still count. We don't have so more information, but I think that Wikimedia France and some other institution tried to run some trainings, but still people were not able to gather. People couldn't concentrate their efforts to work together. So that's the period. And I can remember myself contributing using IP address, because just when I went to internet, I see when I, as every user, I type something, a word on Google, hope I'm on Wikipedia and I see a button called, it did. So I say, okay, yeah, I can go there. I can click and I try to edit. Now, that was the period and everyone, everyone was trying to do so. Now comes the second period. The second period, I think it's the very important periods, 2015 and 2018, the very important period. Here, we got more trainings and community contributions. So here, people are working in the community and the world, they need to coordinate efforts because we were trying to gather, to meet more of, very often to say, okay guys, let's do this together. Let make our country visible on Wikipedia, on internet, it was very important. It was what we wanted. And I think thanks to this period of three years, we were able to do something. We were able to reach out to people. And what happened? I was happy to see this history. You can see here, I am on the discussion page of a user called Benoit Rochon, he's a Wikimedian from Canada. So I reached out to him, say, okay, guys, guys, tell me how can you help? How can we do to coordinate or effort from a country or from a city? So he tried to give me some advice that was very important for me and he tried to point me to Bashunda. Thank you Bashunda for your support. As you can see the discussion, that was here we were seeking support from experienced users. We tried to reach out to people. Hey guys, can you head? Hey guys, can you tell us what we can do? Can you tell us how to call? And I was amazing. I can see some more Bashunda told me, do you speak English? Because he did ask some questions. So I can say that the word like requirements said, okay, the first question as you can see here, it is in French, I'm gonna translate for you. The first step, sorry, première étape, première question, combien vous êtes? How many are you? That is the first question Bashunda did ask to me. The same question, the second question. Avez-vous suffisamment le temps, vous et votre groupe pour mener à bien cette mission? It asks about the time. Do you have a little time for that because it needs time, commitment for this? And the last question was, do you speak English? So it was some, those three questions from Bashunda, those questions helps enough. I think that today I don't think that English is so important, I don't think so. But because today the foundation is trying to work so hard on that, about the language because not everyone can speak English. And then after working so much with the foundation for three or one year, I can notice that the language barrier, the English requirements is not an obligation. So people from French community, don't be afraid. You can speak in French and the Wikimedia Foundation has so many people that can help for that. Apart from that, we try to reach out to people, to invite people, hey, come, come on, join us and see what we are doing. We try to say, here you can see on a discussion page from a user, I found that this user was contributing too much to the content from the country. Then I reached out and said, hey guys, are you okay? Can you join us to the movements? And then we try to discuss. So I think you can notice two things here, two important things here. The first one, we seek support from those who can help. We try to go where we can to get support. We go, we try to reach out to people on their discussion page, we try to ask questions. So you can see, we ask questions. And after having some kind of responses, some kind of answers, so we try also to reach out to people to join our movement. You see, there's two important things. You reach out to people who might give you some advice, who might tell you, who might guide you. And after that, you also reach out or invite people to join you. Yes, it's better to have people, it's more team with you so that you can start, but don't forget to invite other people that you can find on the way. So the last and the third point of the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo User Group is the creation of the User Group with four members. Thank you guys that helped to do this. And among those four persons, I can notice one woman who are with us. Thank you Valencine for your support. Thank you Eve from Lubumbashi, thank you Irene. Those persons and myself of course had asked in 2018, we were able to structure the community to try to reach out to Wikimedia Foundation to ask for recognition and we discussed and so on. I think in November, in November of 2013, we were recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wow, it was amazing as you can see. And that's about the little history. I know that there are so many things I could say, so many things I could show you, but I gave the very important that can help you. So let's see, where are we now? Now, where are we? It's a very important question, where are we now? This is about the presence. I've talked about the past and now, I wanna talk about the presence, where are we now? Yeah, we are still learning and growing. It's very important. We are still learning, we always try to reach out to people who can help us. Do you have a piece of advice to give us? We open, come and tell us, teach us, show us the way and we can grow. We are learning and we are growing. The community is so big today and it's amazing. We are available in some other cities, I mean, and it's very, very interesting. The next, I've just said that, we are visible and all running activities in three main cities in the country, Kisangani, Lubombashi, and Kinshasa. And we are trying to work hard in a way to be available. We wanna talk about the future in the work, the whole country. So the last step here, we are creating partnership with, okay, and it's a partnership. So apart from Wikimedia Foundation, we have organizations, so far, user group, so far, so let's discuss about the lesson. What did we learn so far? It's very important to see this. What we were able to learn? I think there are two things. The first thing is, there are two things that we learned so far. The first group of things, these are things you should do. These are things that I think, you can see this as object, as advice. You can take this as advice, as inspiration to help you move forward in your user group, in your creation. So there is not a tool in order. I've just put some lessons we learned so far that were very important for us. First thing here I see, as I've written here, surround yourself with good people. Yes, I know that finding good people might be very difficult. But remember, I said at the beginning, what is a community? You have a common, you share the same idea, the same vision, this is the community. So if you can find people that share the same idea with you, I think that these are good people for you. So work or start with available people. Don't wait for a good people. Don't wait for, I don't know, someone to come from or even or whatever you want, no. Find people who are valuable and work with you. If you want to wait for those very bright, intelligent guys from Harvard, from, I don't know, Sorbonne University to come and work with you. I'm sorry, it's not going to be that easy. You can remember, as I've shown you for some discussion I had with Bashunda, he said about time commitment. So it's very important to have people who are ready, to have people who are available. So I don't think that you need to find those people, you need to work with those people instead of waiting, waiting, waiting for the right, waiting for the bright guy to come. Next advice is learn. Don't forget to learn. You can notice, as I said, for us, we are still learning and we are growing. So learn and share. You learn something, you get something amazing. Don't forget to share around you. And it's very important when I'm talking about learning because it is a community. If you have an opportunity to learn someone, try to make sure you share with your teammates, your friends, hey guys, I've noticed that there is a training, a Wikipedia training somewhere. Do you have time to take it? It's very important. You learn and you try to share. You know something, try to share with your mates, try to share with the people around you, try to share with the world. Don't forget to motivate and encourage. It's very important. If you want to be, if you want to still be easy, trust me, if you want to still be easy, so you need motivation and you need to encourage. Motivate yourself. Remember your goal. Why did you, did you start a group? Why did you start a community? Stay motivated and try to motivate people sometimes people say, okay, I'm tired, I wanna live. Try to motivate and don't forget to encourage. You can find people doing some amazing thing, encourage. Support them. Tell them what to do better. So motivation and encouragement is very important. Communicate with the world. It's very, very important communication. So you need to, today we are living in a world that where we can communicate, we can reach to anyone in just a little second. So don't forget to use communication channel that can help you be visible to the world. Because a long time ago we found out we were not communicating so well with the world. We were just trying to write emails for ourselves, but for ourselves, but not at all with the world. But afterwards we did change this and it was very important for us to communicate. And now people tried to know about us. Now people tried to understand what we are doing and so on and reach out to people to guide you and help you. It's very important to reach out to people to guide you and to help you for mentorship. It's very important. Be patient. Very, very important. Be patient with yourself. I've talked too much about many things so far, but you need to be very, very patient because it won't still be easy as you might think. It won't still be easy as you might expect. So be very patient with yourself so that you'll find the results of what you want. So there are some things that you should avoid because here I've discussed too much about some pieces of device, some pieces of notes or advice that you can use, but here there are things that you need to avoid if you want your community moved forward. The first thing that I've noticed is you should avoid to be the only guy to do everything. No, remember, it's a community project. It's a community. So everyone needs to be in the loop. Everyone needs to be in the project. You're not going to do everything. You'll be tired, my friends. Try to associate everyone. Try to share among you. Try to share tasks. You say, God, can you do this? Can you try to do this at all? Because if you try to put everything on your head, hey guys, I'm sorry, you'll be tired. So it's very important that you try to share, to avoid to do everything. No, it's not so quite easy to do so. Another thing is you should avoid not trusting others. It is a community, good people. So it's very important that you trust to people around you. It's very, very important. So don't forget to trust your teammates. Don't forget to trust your friends. And so it's very, very important. And the last points, what I was thinking is about is about being condescending or imposing. Being condescending or imposing. That thing you should avoid, I was saying. Okay, I think that you can hear me well. And also discuss about the future. Then I'll discuss about our future and so on. So we have discussed so far about the little history of the group. And we've seen the present, where we are. And some amazing things that we learned so far. That was very important. And I try to share with you what we learned so far so that you can get inspiration, what worked for us. And I think it can also work for you. So now, what is the future? The future of the user group in the country. The first thing we want is to be present and more visible in the whole country. This is what we want to be visible in the whole TRC. Everywhere you go, they talk about Wikimedia TRC. That's what we are trying to work with some guys. It's not that easy, but we are trying. We are trying. So a future goal, we needed, when you travel everywhere in the country, when you speak, you reach out to someone and you say, hey, do you know Wikimedia TRC? Yes, it is what we want. And then we need support, we need patience. Because I told you patience is very important. And then we try to trust each other little by little will become big and big. Another goal, future goal is to be incorporated as a national nonprofit. We are already working on this, on by laws and so on. At the beginning, we were trying to think of just a local city, but afterwards we said no, as we are available in more than three cities already, so we need to do an incorporation of, a national incorporation so that we can be free to work everywhere in the country. So we have to think about it, to work again hard and remember it's important to, we need time to work on. But I think that's a very, it's a future, a future goal and amazing community around in DRC. I want you to help so that we can be incorporated. Wikimedia can be available where you are. If you're in this talk, try to reach out, be available so that we can run some activities so that we can make Wikipedia, Wikimedia available in your city and in the whole country. And the last amazing thing that we are thinking of is to organize a national or even a great leg wiki conference. So we'd like to have something national, say wiki conference, DRC, where we can try, we can invite people from many cities in the country or we can take conference. I think that, I don't know if people from Burundi are here or Rwanda, because a great leg is a Burundi, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo. So we'd like to have a wiki conference for great leg, great leg, so it should be amazing. We started to discuss with the community from Burundi to see how we can help so that they can be recognized. It should be very important for us because if we have an official Wikimedia community, Burundi should be interesting for us. And even apart from Burundi, we can also have a Wikimedia community in Rwanda. We are trying to reach out to people in Rwanda. So if you guys are here, reach out, ask questions, and we're gonna help so that you can have a community and so that we can run a great leg wiki conference. So these are some future goals that we have in the user group. And I think if you have a user group in your city or sorry, your country, try to think of great goals you might have in the future in two years or five years. What would be the goals? So these are our three main goals and I can't thank you so much. I thank you so much for attending this session. I thank you so much for your attention to my session. So what can you get? What things I want you to understand in this presentation because I've discussed about main thing. In short, in this discussion, in this presentation, I wanted you to get our experience, to get inspiration from us and to build your own community, to build your strong community. This is what I want by sharing this. So we try to navigate everything from the country, what we've done so far and where we come from, where we are, where we're going, what world lessons we learned on the way and so on we try to share with you all those amazing things. Guys here, people from Africa, even from the world, Wikimedia from the world, we need your help. You can see here, we don't have so many communities. Can you see? So I'd be happy that after this talk, after this presentation, we can start building communities in those countries, remaining countries here. So that after five years, I can see this map, I can have another look on this map. So it's very important for me to see this, in five years, if I can see this, or green, or even blue, because guys from Côte d'Ivoire, guys from Nigeria and so on, we want you guys to help, so that we can have chapters, so that we can have user groups recognized by the foundation. It's amazing. So I can't thank you so much for all what you've done so far and it's amazing. It's very important for me to share with you. Thank you. Now, if you got questions, if you wanna reach out to us, you can find our mailing list below. Yeah, on Twitter too, you can reach out to us and we can speak, you can share and so on. So thank you for joining the session. Now, if you have questions, over to you. Now I can see some questions. The first one is, can you hear me? I cannot, no, no. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The first question, I don't know, is Nixon Moukoko meant to be here with you, Abin? Not at all, we didn't discuss that I could join me in this session. Okay, say that we can just wait for people to, in case there might be some questions. I don't see questions from people. Let me just see questions from people. What do they say? Can you tell us, oh, okay. Oh, Amir, thank you, Amir, for joining the session. I know that Amir did help us or so for local languages. So as I can see, can you tell us about the local language of your country, Lingala, Kikungo, Chilobah, Swahil, et cetera? How much are they used online? How much do people already Wikipedia it? Yeah. Okay. Yes, thank you, Amir, for the question. Let me see the question. I want to see. Yeah, about local languages, we have four main local languages as Amir has just written them. We have Lingala, Swahil, Chilobah, Kikungo. So on internet, people are using mainly French and sometimes English, but mainly French on internet for research, for official communication, and so on, but on social media, people are using whatever language they want. So as Lingala is the language from the capital city, so people try to use it more Lingala and it's Swahili people are using. And Kikungo, Swahil, Chilobah, yes, they are spoken to on the media, they use it because every day you'll have a new news in those four languages. So these are the use of the language in the city. The second question is from, how many members do you have in the group? Okay, Basak, oh, thank you. From the WhatsApp group, because WhatsApp is where active people are joining, I can say, because we can have the mailing list, people can join, but the most active of them try to join WhatsApp group. So WhatsApp group, we are around, yeah, say around 50, 40 or 50 on WhatsApp group, and sometimes we use Telegram, but among all those 40 or 50 people, the most active are not more than 10, because sometimes you see people try to contribute, so many people contributing, and then apart from that, you'll see that in some periods they don't contribute, they are not active anymore. So the most active of us are less than 20, sorry, 10, less than 10. So Harit Bayele, thank you for your question. Thank you for your question. What has been the strategy to maintain new volunteer aside offering words of encouragement? Okay, I can see that at the time. The discussion is very interesting for me. The strategy to maintain, it's not easy, let me tell you the truth. It's not that easy to maintain volunteer, but creating awareness in the Wikimedia movement is not that easy. So what we've done so far apart from encouragement, we tried to give award to award some internet packages to people, if for instance in the month, we see that you've done a lot in terms of edits. You can say, okay, you have this internet package. That's so it can help you. Thank you. We will have a big answer.