 Hello, wikimedia. Welcome from Poland. The group you see here is a small part of wikimedia Poland. My name is Wukasz Garczewski. I am the executive director of our chapter. And we're here today to talk to you about what we've been up to over the last almost two years. We'll present three topics, but they are interconnected. And a task for you is to find the connections and look for them. We'll try to do a good job to highlight them, but think about how the different things we do all around the world connect with each other. And that's going to be a part of the conversation today. So we're going to talk about how to animate and take good care of our community, mostly based on our experiences with the Polish wikipedia community. We are going to talk about how to introduce young people, students into the wikimedia movement, how to develop within them the passion for sharing and make them really feel the idea that is behind free and open knowledge. And finally, we're going to talk about how to be data driven and actually look very objectively at what we're doing and what the effects are. And the need from us behind these presentations is to inspire you, but also to test our ideas and our concepts in different environments. So you are more than welcome to grab the ideas and test them out within your communities. And the third need we have is to actually edit our ideas. And we welcome edits from everybody who may want to improve how we do things and what we've come up with so far. So all of this, everything you see in this presentation is under a very special license. I call it Creative Commons. Attribution is welcome, but please try this out and tell us how it goes. And with that, I will hand it over to Natalia, who's going to talk about our community support efforts. Hello, everyone. It's amazing to be here on Wikimedia. And I've seen so many amazing faces already. I will be sharing my screen in a moment. And OK. So I'm a volunteer support officer in Wikimedia Poland. And I will be talking about something that I'm super passionate about, which is the Wikimedia community. The community that creates the largest source of knowledge in the whole world and the whole history, probably. And in order for this community to grow and thrive, this community needs to be constantly capable of inviting new people and new voices. And as a Wikimedia movement, we have come with a lot of ideas how to bring people into the movement. We have all those outreach activities like editor tones and writing competitions and the educational projects. But when the new people who are successful in inviting join the movement, there are in many times difficult interactions between them and the existing community. New commerce field, that they come into the movement, they want to give something, but they're in many times treated harshly and unwelcome and unsupported. And the question is why this amazing community with so much passion, sometimes so unsupportive for the newcomers and the answer is burnout. Burnout is a condition in which you have given something you care deeply about so much that you at the same time feel that you cannot give anymore and you feel the obligation to give more and more. And burnout, people suffering for burnout suffer from emotional exhaustion. They lack energy and motivation and they are very easily stressed and they feel like in a Wikimedia context that they cannot really give anything more. Also they feel like they suffer from the personalization. So they lack empathy and kindness and they really cannot support newcomers because they're burnout, they cannot give. They feel cynicism and in the end they feel the reduced personal accomplishment which in a context of Wikimedia kind of shows that they lack the feeling that they can achieve this mission. And the whole irony of burnout is that people who are at the highest risk of burning out are the people who care the most. So people who are really passionate about the mission they start with a great enthusiasm and they engage so deeply that in the end they become exhausted and cynical. And then they unwillingly harm the mission they so very much cared at the beginning. So I really feel that if you want to bring new people and if you really want them to join the movement we need to put as much effort in protecting our existing community from burnout as we put in inviting people in. So I wish to review three strategies that Wikimedia Poland uses to prevent burnout and hopefully those strategies can be usable in your context. So the first one is super counterintuitive because its Wikimedeans need to do less because in our movement we value productivity, we value engagement, we actually admire people who spend so much time editing that they have you heard this joke that in Wikimedia context I've heard it a lot that sleep is for the weak, we need to edit more. So yeah, sleep is not for the weak, sleep is for everyone. So they edit a lot until sleep deprivation. They do so many volunteer hours for the affiliate that they don't rest that the volunteering becomes a second job for them. And we sometimes forget that we are not only minds and editors, we are actual human being who live in human bodies which needs a sufficient amount of sleep, which need nurturing movement and joyful movement to address stress which rest in connection with other people. And at some point we discovered that our volunteers give so much to Wikimedia Poland that they're at the risk of burnout. They want to give, we don't force them, but they department so many activities that's actually not serving them very well. So we opened a system that tracks volunteer engagement for Wikimedia Poland. We tracked how many hours people put into the project. We are using a tool called Salesforce but actually can use any tool to do that. A Google doc would be just fine. The idea is to track how many a given person has engaged in activities and to see whether this person is not engaging too much and to react on that. And we put some of our volunteers onto volunteer breaks. So we don't invite them to volunteer for our activities because we want them to rest. And at first we were afraid that those people will feel like they are rejected because they want to give to Wikimedia Poland to Wikimedia Poland that's saying, hey, you gave so much, please take some rest and get back in a month and then engage. And actually the result is that when people feel like those rejections come from place of care and kindness and it's really about them and not about us, they react very well on that. So I really encourage you to track how many time your volunteer community is putting in and to sometimes say no to your best volunteers. Of course, it means that some things won't happen, some activities or some edits won't happen. But in the long run, it is so much more important to have those volunteers who are amazing and engaged for a longer time with us than to do a specific activity. Okay, but this was the people who volunteered for the chapter. And what can we do for the editing community? Certainly we cannot say to the editing community that they should stop editing. So what we did is we invited the media for a mindfulness training. And mindfulness is great for two reasons. One of them is that mindfulness is a great tool for stress reduction. So people get less tense, but the other thing is that mindfulness keeps us much more connected to how we feel at a given moment and how we are and what our body and our mind needs at a certain moment. So people who practice mindfulness are very much aware that they need to rest because they feel it in their body. They need to step down for a little bit. And we really hope that by giving this tool to Wikimediants, we keep them much more connected to their needs. You can read much more about this mindfulness training on a blog post that we did and then you can learn more how to bring mindfulness training to your context. I really encourage you to, if you don't want to have a tracking system or you cannot do a mindfulness training, to just be mindful about the people around you and respect their need to rest and support their need to rest and sometimes react when you see that people are taking too much, giving too much. So this is the one thing that we are doing. The other thing is recognition. We are trying to bring more positive recognition into the Wikimedia movement. Recognition is one of the universal human needs. We are born with it. We are born with a need for other people to acknowledge our existence. And it is so strong in us then according to some psychological theories when people don't receive any recognition and they don't feel acknowledged as human beings, they start to act in a destructive way because negative recognition is in fact better than no recognition at all. And you can see it sometimes in a project that someone was kind of constructive editor at some point starts misbehaving and breaking the rules and acting hostile. Maybe this is their way of being recognized because in Wikimedia movement, we have a lot of ways to show negative recognition. We criticize what's done wrong, we point out mistakes and reactiveness behavior and we should be, but there are not enough ways to show positive recognition to people. So what we did and especially in a way that we recognize them not for certain achievements, but for the very fact that they're a part of our movement. So what we did as Wikimedia Poland, we did a lot of things during the last two years. So last year we started sending out those beautiful medals for people who are creating Wikipedia for 10, five or 15 years. I know that Wikimedia Germany is doing something similar and Wikimedia Austria might do it in the Switzerland. So the German editing community also can get things like that. Just to acknowledge the fact that people have been a part of our movement for so long. The other thing is that we started sending out admin packages for the admins because admins are a group which is at a very high risk of burning out because they deal with many difficult situations. And also if they made mistakes, those mistakes are very quickly recognized and criticized. And also if admins burn out, the costs for the projects are quite high. So we sent out admin packages with a T-shirt saying I'm an admin of Wikimedia and with a calming T. But what is most important, we sent out the diplomas. This is my diploma saying how many times this person has spent in Wikimedia, how many edits they made and how much engaged this person is and a handwritten card in which we wrote exactly why we value this person as a part of our movement. And this of course, if you feel like, okay, this is very nice, but we don't have financial resources to adapt those strategies in our context, you don't have to worry because as I said, what was the most important was the personalized message attached to admin package. So what you need to do is to remember to say to people that you are happy that they're a part of our movement through giving a banster or sending an email or contacting them in other way or leaving them a message on the talk page, but just to show those people that you see them and what they are doing. The third thing we are doing is bringing some more joy and fun into the Wikimedia. The thing is that we as a movement are doing super important things. We are on this large mission of bringing knowledge to every person to the planet. We are now like a very important player in a war against fake news, which was very much seen in the pandemic. So we're doing all those serious and important things, but that doesn't really mean that we don't, that we shouldn't have fun while doing it. Fun actually is a way to, it's great in building sense of connection and fun is also a great way to reduce stress. And as Wikimedia Poland, we are doing a lot of things to keep editing fun. For example, we are doing virtual races of Wikipedia speed running where editors are racing who will reach, who will go through from article A to article B, just jumping through the links the fastest. We're having trivia and meetings and so many more. But one thing I would like to tell you about are the cascade prizes, which we adopted in the Seaspring Contest this year. Seaspring is a writing campaign in which Wikimedia's write about countries and communities of Central and Eastern Europe. And it is held in many Wikipedia's. It's one of my favorite projects in the Wikiverse. So go help Seaspring in your community. And this year we brought a bit of different kinds of prizes to the contest. We wanted to try out the prizes, which will not base on competing against each other, but which will show exactly what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia is creating, is going together to a shared goal and being important, no matter how large your contribution is. If you write three articles, 40 or 300. And this is exactly the idea we wanted to adapt. So we created those prizes in which every time the number of articles write in the whole contest passed a certain goal, everyone who has written at least three articles received a prize. So when the number of articles wrote in the Polish Seaspring passed 200, everyone received Wikigumbers. And when the number passed 400, everyone received postcards. And when it passed, do I have it here? No, I don't have it. Okay, when the number passed 1,000, everyone received a physical banstas made of wood, which was super pretty. And it was very Wikimedia because everyone was like everyone was contributed, contributing to this shared goal and were rewarded for what they gave no matter how big it is. It is super, super Wikimedia thing, right? Every contribution counts and we are all doing something together. It was fun. So the surprise was that when we reached 1,000, it happened very quickly and the competition was still on, the campaign was still on and we needed to start with another, we needed to introduce another prize. So we introduced a surprise prize for 1,100 articles, but the community passed this goal super quickly also. And we were out of the budget and we need to introduce another prize, which turned out to be actually the most interesting for the participants, which was the community support team in Wikimedia Poland writing and performing a song about Seaspring. And remember like, keep in mind that the community support team in Wikimedia Poland, especially me, is not very good at singing. So it was something, yeah, it was interesting. And the community was like, was very enthusiastic about the prize. They were the most impatient about getting this one prize and more interested about it. So what I want to say by saying this is not only that everyone can sing good or bad, but also that you don't need to have a lot of money to do something that is fun and attractive and also things that are fun are super interesting. And so those were the three strategies that we have in Wikimedia Poland, but what I would like for you to remember, no matter if you adopt them or think of other strategies or look for your own ways to address burnout, is the quote from my favorite book about burnout from Emily and Amelia Nagoski, burnout. The cure for burnout is not self-care, it is all of us caring for one another. So this is the most important thing that you should know. What we need to do, no matter what way is create an environment in which everyone will feel welcome and supported and cared in which we will actually be interested in how other people feel and how they are and react on that and acknowledge other people for what they do, no matter how small it is and to just have this pure joy of editing and contributing and created a better world because, hey, this is a joyful thing creating a better world. So if you're interested in burnout and think that I said, there are some resources are you gathered, which is one of them is the book of Emily and Amelia Nagoski, burnout, the secret to a looking distress cycle and the amazing book, The Resilience World Book and my not so amazing, that's so interesting blog post on this and you can also contact me so that we can have a chat about burnout. So thank you. Thanks Natalia. Unfortunately, we don't have time within this session for Q&A but you can write all your questions and comments in the ether pad and we will be sure to take a look and answer after the presentation. We will also be present in Remo at one of the tables so you can find Natalia, Clara and Bojek and myself after our talk, if you wanna chat and I'll learn more or give us your experiences. So now that we are de-stressing and helping our community with burnout, hopefully it becomes more open and more welcoming to new convenience including young with comedians and Clara, who is head of our education team is gonna talk about that a little bit more. What was yours, Clara? Thank you. Hello everyone. I'm the Wikipedia since 2015. Not like Natalia and Łukasz. And in Wikimedia Poland, I am like almost two years as a as a medical specialist and I will try to show this my presentation now. So I can't say a lot about two years because I want to focus about last year which was special specific because of the pandemic of course but also very much there were much contribution from the previous years when I was involved in this as a volunteer. Like Natalia was calling me, hey, can you go to the students at the biology department and say something about Wikipedia and so on and so on. So I have unique perspective, I think because I used to be a partner in Wikiproject, a volunteer and now I am the worker and the author of educational strategy for Wikimedia Poland. And some things I want to share with you is about how we try to invite teachers and students to the Wikipedia taking care of them because of course everyone can join in this very moment to the project and be also at the same time teacher or student. But we wanted to, after talking to our support team we decided also to take care about teachers as a groups, as a small teams or bigger groups and wanted to make them feel some kind of unschooling vibes as I call it because they are very connected with school. And in Poland, it is very old type of learning system, I mean mentally. It is still sometimes a fight to go out of the old stereotypes of learning and teaching and the teachers who are coming to our projects very often are happy to join something that is different that they can be more free. And that's what we are talking to them, that come on, join us, it is a free safe space, you will have fun, your students will like you and they are coming and they are at first very often surprised and don't know what to do even if we have first steps to Wikipedia, our animations, instructional videos and so on and they have me, Natalia and our educational team they're still very lost and they are asking is it really this freedom because at the very first moment I edited something, someone delighted this, yes. I got a very harsh email. Of course, from our perspective is not harsh, it's just very strict message how to improve something but this is for them, it's again connected to typical school environment because of course we Wikipedians are also with this experience of old type of schools and this is inside us, this is my, I think that this is very important to remember this, to be aware of this, that we are after the same type of school as those teachers and it could be our teachers in the previous months, years. So as Natalia has just said, we know what is, to point what is wrong, red lines below our sentence, delayed and so on and it's hard for the adults who are experts on their field and in the school they are someone important and here they are like the old students. So we are trying to unschooling to make this like democratic schools on Montessori style or unschooling the learning and teaching and to create some dialogue and to find guides for them and this is the whole part that support team are giving us this Vicky trainers and Vicky take care of us for our teachers and first we are telling them a few things. The first one that you will have access to knowledge but different than from the books that you use in schools on when you are preparing to be a teacher. Of course, during the pandemic, most of them are already familiar with the technologies in education and so on but still not to open resources, not to open educational resources and then we can show them the beautiful glam Vicky resources and Vicky and the opponent has a long list of our partners. We created the Vicky school program with the website that have not, it doesn't look like Wikipedia page but then they can find materials and resources, video tutorials and so on and they also put their own lessons, lesson plans which they created after being with us during the year and talking about Wikipedia and how to use Vicky tools, Vicky knowledge in the classroom. So now they can show that they lesson plans are on our website and the other teachers can use it. Of course, we are also training teachers mostly online but also the writing campaigns with teachers in the jury in the jury were interesting experience for us. This is our screens after due to our lessons on Wikipedia. I can say that the most important you can remember use Minecraft article or among us or something like that to show young people how to create Wikipedia. It's really draw attention and they are listening to you and they are asking questions and this is the most important for me that they are asking questions and trying to do something. Yes, in this Vicky school program there were many schools but it was hard for them to create Vicky projects but some of them tried and they successfully created Vicky project with their teachers, uploading photos to Wikimedia Commons or creating some small articles. Even they were 12 years old or 13 years old. So yeah, they got gifts from us at the end of the school year. And the second access to knowledge was first and the second one very important for principals for example is motivation and the job motivation we found this for them is that you can improve key competencies and gather new skills and there will be interesting way to gather new skills. And you can put it in your CV that you made through our training. And the second one important also for the parents and teachers and students is relations motivation that during the Vicky projects when you will be involved in this with your students you will create a different level of this dialogue of this relation. This will be situation that you will learn something from your technology advanced students and they will learn that you can talk with them about fact checking in Wikipedia and about creation of articles and they can go for a photo walk and upload to Wikimedia Commons some photos along with her or she or his student group. And then you can be enjoying this together. And the third one, yes, is recognition. This is the word we have mentioned before but for teachers is very important also because what I have just said that they are important in their schools but not always, sometimes they are very frustrated that the principals can't allow them to join some educational conferences or the school is not funded properly. It's very common problem in Poland especially in the smaller towns but not only. And when they come to us, we can show them to the world and then this local community see them that, wow, in our school, there is a teacher who is cooperating with this big community Wikimedians and we invited them to the debates conferences. We asked them to use the nice words about Wikipedia in official printable, our brochures and so on and campaigns. This is in Polish but really the things that they are saying about Wikipedia, not asked, they are just sending us these emails after meetings and even online are so touching that our fundraiser and also uses this to put it on the banners and we put it in our brochures because this is very inspirational for other teachers to read someone else from the same field told something that nice about Wikipedia like breaking the stereotype of Wikipedia in school. Yeah, we created also some personalized posts about teachers in this pilot program but also anytime we create some cooperation with another NGOs around education, we try to, you know, tag these teachers and schools. And the last but the most important part is a fun and safe space. The fun was very much planned before the pandemic started and it was very hard to put aside all fun summer camps and so on, but now we are trying to make something else and it turned out that it is possible even online to have fun and to talk and networking with the teachers and they love networking because this is something that they usually do in the school, outside the school and during the pandemic they created a very many, many platforms and groups to talk about education and we also created such group on Facebook but also we joined many of them to know them better. And this is maybe, yeah, this is the first time we met this group live a few days ago in Warsaw because all 2020 and this part of 2021, we only contact, we have only been in contact, we had, sorry, we are only in contact online and this was the first time that our board say, okay, this spontaneous idea maybe will work clearer and we invited them to Warsaw, to National Museum in Warsaw which is our also Glam Wiki institution and we have such fun also eating great decorative food cakes and during the design thinking workshop about open resources education in New Zealand which is our also pilot project to connect education with Glam Wiki. So it was really fun to hug each other, I really felt like I know them for years and then we recognized now this is the first time we see each other in life. So that's it. I can stop this to comment at the end something. I think I have still two minutes. Okay, one minute maybe. So it is important to say that we work now, we focused on the younger students like primary school and the high schools but also we provide many things for college students like from the universities and it was before this program at the Wiki school started and we were surprised but maybe not that they of course, universities still want to do something with us. So now we are fighting this and planning and how to make everyone happy and of course make it right and make the community from Natalia aware that there are different parts of groups on a different level of editing and knowing our products. So thank you all Wiki media affiliates education if you are here and listening because the cooperation with you for me as a new person was amazing and I learned a lot from you. So if there is a silage or parental someone from you from this community here, thank you very much. Thanks Clara. I wanna highlight just one thing that to me is the most important bit of Clara's work. In Poland, the Wiki media community is getting older with every passing day and we need to get people excited, get young people excited about our mission in order for our movements to be renewed with every generation and keep going because this is unending work and to perform this unending work and to achieve our mission we need new people but we also need to know whether what we're doing is working or not and Wojtek will give a short presentation about being data driven and actually looking at the results of some of our initiatives very closely. Wojtek take it away. Thank you Łukasz. I'm just going to try and share my screen with you or try to share the relevant page of my browser. Łukasz shout out to me if it works or not. Bang, bang, bang. Okay. Yeah, it works. It's working. Guys, I'm actually wearing my anti burnout kit today because I'm wearing the T-shirt which says I'm a Wikipedia admin, what's your superpower? And I was displaying it during an international dog show in the neighboring city of Sopot while taking photos with the use of the Wikimedia Polska's donated telephoto lens. So this is Wikimedia Polska taking care of their volunteers. It all started about two years ago when the board, which I was then a part of, sat down and thought about our future, our strategy for the coming years. One of the things that we wanted to check was we wanted to know, not feel, but know whether we're doing things right and whether we're doing the right things. One of the questions that kept popping up then and which resulted in a project that we did was do writing contests actually make sense in terms of do they bring decent quality content or do they just bring content which is off the template like banging 20 articles about villages in the country or about pop singers of another country. At that time I was doing translation work for two cool academics from Poland and we basically decided to bring them in, release the academics to tell us whether we're actually doing the right things or not. These academics were our Marta Szaluga-Domońska who holds a research position at the Gdansk University of Technology and Anna Modzolewska, a PhD as well who's holding the position at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow but who's also the press officer for the Warsaw University currently. Together with Natalia and together with a person who's not joined the presentation today but who's our volunteer statistician, we sat down and we designed a qualitative study based on two focus group interviews. To try and answer this question, are the contest articles of decent quality, worse quality or better quality from the ones that are created spontaneously? We focused on a narrow group of articles. Those are women biographies of 2020, of the year 2020 and at the end, the results came in just a few days ago. The results of the researchers going through the two focus group interviews, one of them was with Wikipedia editors, the other was with Wikipedia readers because it's for the readers that we create our articles, isn't it? One thing about the report was quite surprising, the other not so much. The surprising thing was that we are actually doing the right thing by creating editing contests and it's not our feeling, it's not our gut feeling that we're doing the right thing, it's what the academics told us. Yes, the quality of articles from writing contests is slightly higher than that of articles created spontaneously, at least in the women's biography category. The other thing was not that much surprising. A few more questions popped up and a few more research projects were born on the same day that I read the report from the focus studies that was sent to us. So I'm quite sure that you will be able to read about our research when it gets published and I'm quite sure that we will be doing more. And I've just probably, I've got 30 seconds or so, so I'm just going to tell you quickly about another project that we're doing together with Marc Miquel, Christian Cunsoni, David Laniado, and of course the indispensable Natalia and Katarzyna. We want to know more about our community. We want to know if the advanced community is staying with us or if it's diminishing or if it's growing and what other things we can learn from the stratification of the experience of our community of editors. So we want to know more and we will be learning more That's the end of my quick talk. Thank you very much for joining in and I'll hand it back to Wokasz. Thanks, Wojtek. This was obviously a preview as Wojtek said, we just got the results a couple of days ago. So more on that to come. Thank you for listening. Have a great day and a wonderful wiki mania. Bye.