 Hi everyone, my name is Candi Trescia-Colfiue and I am part of Wikimedia Community User Group for Botswana. I'm a long-term editor with Wikipedia and I'm also one of the co-founders for Wikimedia Community User Group for Botswana. So today my topic will be about the challenges and opportunities for building a community. So I'd like to share my experience about building my community that is Wikimedia Community User Group for Botswana. So this is currently an affiliate that was formerly active and now it's currently inactive. So we're still working in the, we're still in progress, well with the reapplying for it to be recognized by Wikimedia Foundation and we're hoping this will be approved hopefully nearly soon this year. So what we are currently doing is early in 2019 we started running on individual grants that is holding projects such as Wikilabs Women, Wikilabs Africa, Out in Feminism and all the other projects around the Wikimedia Foundation project. So our community is mainly made up of university students and that is mainly females and males that is women and men. What we usually focus on is to build content about women and also build content about our country Botswana in different aspects of it. We're just trying to create a localization or should I say create content about our local country and have it up there being shared by the international platform or international people to have access to our information about Botswana on the Wikimedia space. And our community is also not really just shared. Well, it's not only joined by geeks but it's open to anyone who's willing to learn. And so we don't kind of like discriminate. So we, we open our arms to have anyone who's willing to learn and also be a part of this and volunteer and contribute to this beautiful community. So here are some of the pictures of our successful or should I say just our journey as a community we have hosted a number of projects that is Wikilabs Africa. What you see right up there is WLA, and then we have WLW, which stands for Wikilabs women sorry, and then we have art and feminism which is mainly around the gender gap articles, and then we have wiki data. And we have panel discussions where we usually talk about the gender gap, having women included or having them more, having more representation of women online. And we usually also have extra funds around these projects so here are the pictures that we usually take, or just to share our experience of what we have done so far, how far we've come. We have done, of course our success stories and also our downsides. So I'll further on, go on to share the next slide. So our journey wasn't quite easy. It's been a roller coaster ride for me I'll say the times where we'd have events and we really have a low turnout rate. So with me realizing this I realized like that downsize to it, it depends on what people are interested in. Most of the times when we have something like Wikilabs Africa you'd see like the turnout rate will be a lot of participants on that, and mainly men. Sometimes when we have like Wikilabs women, there's mainly women who are inclined to share to come and participate for that. And then our largest rate or should I say the largest group that we have is mainly the photographic side there's a lot of men who are really interested with contributing pictures about our country when we have such a competition. The turnout is really gradually growing and it's quite impressive to see. But we would like to have that kind of like diversity and inclusion, where we have a good representation of women and men, of course to be balanced out within this project that we currently hold. So, I'll further on like to share the challenges that we have that we have experienced in our community. So, I realized that we have like a very volunteering kind of like missing culture of volunteering people really don't understand what it means to be a volunteer, they would prefer being paid kind of thing. So it is really important to to share what our mission goal is mission and vision of Wikimedia Foundation, what we want to achieve as a community. So it's worth kind of like coming up with these campaigns I feel to share more information of what the community is all about and what we're trying to to share to make free accessible knowledge for all to empower people across the world. So, so for the internet access, we have a problem with internet access because students don't really have enough finances to get accessibility to the internet. So hence, there's a problem with them being able to participate freely as much as they can. So we have identified this as a problem that we have within our community. The next point there is rare knowledge of copyright. So I've realized that a lot of people would try or they haven't understood what it means contributing things that are authentically maybe created by themselves. Somebody could share, for example, we come up with a competition maybe to share images about animals and then somebody would go into the internet and try and maybe screen grab one of those animals that they want to think the picture is beautiful and they try to upload it to the competition that we're currently running that could be about animals at the time. So there's really that kind of like lack of knowledge of how people should participate in such competitions, especially when they're learning from their friends and they don't come to the event or they just see our posters out there on how they can participate but they don't really follow the steps or guides on how they could participate in the right way. So with that being said, we need more participation for people to come and learn when we hold such events. And then there's a really low or should I say we need help with convincing local officials that is partners to help us to try and share what we do as a community to the national scale. We need more support isn't like people who can help us maybe with the lab to host our events or anything that could be relative to us kind of like bringing a community together and then we carry out our trainings could be even the internet provision or or anything that could help us just to bring the community together and host a successful event. So there's really an clarity or should I say, uncertainties around our community and what we do. So it would be very helpful for maybe the partners out there who could help us and understand what we do and give us the platform for us to share with them what we really do. And then they could also extend that hand to help us host more events. We have another issue that is. Well, this is what I've also been saying, we need to create more awareness that is people have to understand what we mean when we say we are a Wikimedia community user group of Botswana what do we stand for what do we do, what is our mission. How do we want to drive that narrative or instill the the the the mission of sharing free accessible knowledge for all what do we mean by that. So we need to really when we say who we are people understand exactly what we what we do and how they can also participate so that they are really not lost. So I think more campaigns to do this and instill that awareness would help. And also we have a challenge with retaining participants participants usually, let me say they are more driven by competitions, because due to lack of funds we are, we were unable to kind of like carry out regular workshops or regular workshops of maybe leg of funding here and there to host such events and to keep to keep the community spirit going on and have people really engage and keep contributing to Wikimedia. So retaining participants has really been a challenge for us to keep people in the community for them to volunteer throughout without without having something happening like a competition. It would be really helpful to maybe train and have people understand what the essence of volunteering even on that own free time without maybe even a competition running they can still contribute and know that they are doing it for good well. It will be amazing to have that. And then my next slide here I'll be sharing the impact we're planning to bring to our community. We're planning to share to create more articles that is around diversity and inclusion increase the number of editors that we have because we're really a small community at this time, and we are also planning to create more awareness campaigns on Wikimedia projects, improve and create articles on about our native language that is a donor because that is one of the. Well, that's the first. That's our first language here. So there's a really small number of articles that is written in our native language. So it will be great if we could start having articles, a large number of them on there. And yes, we would also want to have more collaborators partners to partner with when we carry out our events. And then I would also like to mention share knowledge about Wikimedia and sister projects across the country. We just don't want to incline ourselves to have a really recurring the operating or carrying out projects. Within Haburani. If it's just not within Haburani then we're doing online and it's accessible to everyone, but we would really like to carry out remote trainings from time to time maybe in different cities or towns, just to include everyone and make them understand what we are all about. My next slide will be about lessons that I have learned on building a community. So I realized that to build a community you'd have to have like it's very important to have regular meetups that could be in person or online with your community members just to keep the teamwork alive. It's also very important to have everyone included and work as a team, not run as an island type of thing so it's very important to work as a team and include people when you carry out decisions and that makes them feel like they are also part of part of something. It gives them a sense of belonging. It's also very important to know your committee status. As I'm saying, we're currently a very small and growing community. Hence, I know where, how much we can do and how far, well, how far we can go and how far we cannot go. So, and I also understand, should I say the skills or talent of my community members, I know who can help me with this or that if I need digital skills. There's somebody who I can go to if I need maybe an organizer I know who'd be good with that. So it's really good to know what your community members are really good at so that you can know where you can put them in places or they can also just initiate, well, initiate the ideas of them participating to help out when events happen. The next point there is initiate and invite community members to join meetings and activities. This is the same as, well, it's not the same as organizing in person or online meetups, but it's more like planning activities. They should be involved when we plan activities, what they foresee for us, how to carry out the activities that we plan for the year. It's really important to have the community also have a buy-in or they have that voice to say on what they want to see, how they want to see the community run throughout the year. So it's really lovely to hear what the ideas would be from here. Transparency is also a very good point to have when you run a community. It gives people the sense of trust, it builds honesty amongst each other so that there's always that peace and respect amongst the community. And just to let go of egos, I would say is also very important no matter if I'm a trainer or not. It's always very important to know that I'm a volunteer also and it builds that kind of spirit of the teamwork spirit that I've been talking about. One other point is create rules, policies, workflows in the community. So to avoid things such as harassment or any other very disturbing or bad harassment issues from happening, it's really good to have some rules and policies like the Universal Code of Conduct that we