Wikimania:2025/Meetups/Event:Wiki For Human Rights & Climate change organizers Meetup

Following the Pre-Conference on Information Integrity on Climate Change, we held a specific meetup of organizers from the campaign Wiki for Human Rights in the Latin America and the African region, to discuss the current status of the campaign and next steps.

Summary

We met at Wikimania 2025, on Friday 8th August, for an hour. There were around 18 people, mainly from Africa. People from the Working Group on Climate Justice & Wikimedia projects had an overlapping meeting, so only one person from the WG attended.

There was a first round of introductions and an exchange on some of the “pain points” around this year's organizing of the campaign. Here are the main pain points noted by organizers:

Adaptation of the campaign to their local context: organizers feel the need to make a campaign that they can run in their own local contexts (considering in some cases their own personal safety), without needing to ask permission for this.
Keeping schedule & cadence: organizers expressed in some cases that they felt there was "a gap" this year with the campaign, that the process was unclear, and that there weren't clear timeframes for either this year's campaign or the process for renaming/revamping it.
Flexibility on funding: organizers expressed their frustration with the current grant process, providing specific input on how that process could be improved to match their needs.
More support on training and access to more experts: there were requests for "train the trainers" type of capacity building. People also mentioned the need for more climate change literacy and more access to thematic experts to improve understanding on the topic.
Global coordination: organizers are interested in having an instance of global coordination focused on South-South collaboration. However, organizers mentioned the need for this to be lightweight process and community-driven. A request was made that for the next year, the WG helps with leading the global coordination of the campaign.

There is agreement on splitting the campaigns based on the topics (one on climate change and environmental topics for the first semester, and one on human rights for the second semester).

Next steps

Based on the conversation held, the WG, in collaboration with African organizers and pending coordination with WMF, will help with the following concrete next steps between August-January:

Create a process for renaming the campaign in a timely manner, involving both regions.
Create a calendar with dates & milestones for the campaign.
Secure a global partner for the campaign.
Create a global call for organizers to distribute tasks and assign responsibilities.
Launch the renamed campaign in the first semester, between April-July.

Gallery

Notes

Notes were taken here.

Attending

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