 Hello and welcome. Thank you very much for participating in this lightning talk. My name is Oscar Just like my other name. I am a volunteer of the Wikimedia movement since 2005 When I started editing the Spanish Wikipedia. I was the president of Wikimedia Venezuela from 2011 until 2021 and I'm currently a contractor for the Wikimedia foundation movement strategy and governance team. I Come here today to recollect my time as a volunteer in this tumultuous country So let's start about the reason. What is this presentation come to be? The idea is not to highlight the crisis in my country because I think it's already well enough I like it in the media and in the wiki project as well. I Do it because I try to collect how our community has lived and suffered through this crisis and How we can create a better support system both locally and international For those places in the world where similar things are happening right now Of course, it is not my desire that any other country in the world go through this Look, I understand that there is knowledge to recover and try to learn from them So let's talk a little bit about the crisis itself Venezuela has entered his 8th consecutive year of economic recession It is currently suffering the most significant economic collapse in the world outside of worsens The nation's economy has been reduced for more than 50 percent of one producing 2012 This is also the five year that Venezuela has is feeling in pre-inflation We can price variation that more one one million percent accumulators in dense This has destroyed the precision power of people with mostly the pain of earning wages in the local currency the Bolivar So why did this happen? Long story short We leak a poisons combination of economic mismanagement Rampant correction and perfect fragmentation of institutions that click to another telling a state This factor also why six million people as emigrated for a looking better luck in neighboring countries So how do you survive that? How do you able to edit Wikipedia on site that? So living in Venezuela and contributing to Wikipedia in my opinion it is an exercise of peaceful resistance Which doesn't mean that has been easy for them volunteering the country many have been forced as well to leak the country and give up the contribution to the projects When this crisis began along with the worsening economic and social crisis the people went to the street to demonstrate The government responded by meeting processors with fire shooting and killing many of them This is also what make big widespread sensor chick or radio television and also the internet and Wikipedia was targeted as well The censorship was the final blow for people who believe that remaining neutral in situation like this was ideal and This is why as a group we need to be better prepared because the consequences consequences of the censorship was really high So what coming next is my hoc tech recommendation for this survival basic my experience in this past years The first one will be to hide in Venezuela almost always the Bayhawk show is too high in the vicinity of chaos Which means scaling down many of the things we do physically like editor tons and photo contests Because of the difficulties organizing them This is why long before we knew what COVID-19 was in Venezuela. We're already well-looking for ways to do remote balloon theory But we didn't know how to do that Another one will be group support or peer support Getting support group is vital not only for lies, but also for the Wikimedia projects While editing Wikipedia is a solitary exercise. This doesn't mean that support group can be fostered a Cohesive group is more likely to succeed in the long run. Of course, this group is not going to change reality But it can be a better cushion to do catharsis of the situation And if it is editing Wikipedia the better Book the support for local groups sometimes have to be encouraged and financed with the unconditional backing from the global movement This one is stuck living in Iceland. The movement needs to talk a living against both island If we want to change something for 2023 that's in eight years Is the idea that each user group is a Felix is only on alone in the world Group support must be global support during the crisis in Venezuela. We fell alone Isolated and helpless and This not should be the norm If fruit couple volunteers facing a crisis like this needs to be faced with hands Ready to help them and support them Not only we can't worse, but we concrete action to alleviate their pain This one is another one really important anonymity anonymity is key. We learn that in Venezuela the hard way We used to publish all your photographs without any kind of filtering in Wikimedia Commons Most of our volunteers have nicknames attached to the identity that were really matched to the real life personas After the center chick of Wikipedia that turning into doxing of volunteers that it is entity topics like politics So in the effort to attract new volunteers Which you always have like this kebek a warning that it is better to be an anonymous person In the Wikimedia project and knocked another recommendation is to take it slow One of the things that has been more painful for volunteers is their realization that we are not have the capacity to become a Bigger chapter or very affiliate or to continue the pack of professionalization that other affiliates in the region have pursued It is a hard pill to swallow because it's assumed that our efforts should be focused on survival and not immediate growth of the group Taking a slow means applying the serenity project sometimes Accepting the things that we cannot change like a government the crisis how we lose half of our volunteer base The courage to change the things we can like how we interact with the projects how we can do projects without having like a physical venue and The wisdom to know the difference between the two and finally Evaluate iterate and adapt there are many tools from other communities and contexts that we didn't know about it And we should be able to attack or own and vice versa In the end. I think we it is a nurses psychosocialized information Just like the free encyclopedia does With the hope that the next the next iteration of crisis brought the censorship or whatever that happening in the world I am a quick volunteer better prepared with more of our strange and fewer our witnesses to be more confident far-seeing Capable and prudent. Gracias for listening to this presentation. It's been a pleasure