Hello dear Wikidata community,
After the success of the first WikidataCon in 2017 and many conversations regarding the future of this conference, we are now ready to announce that the WikidataCon 2019 will take place on October 25th-26th 2019 in Berlin.
Apart from this first piece of information (save the date in your calendars!), there are some important changes regarding the goal of the conference that we would like to share with you.
After its first iteration, the goals of the conference will evolve. The event will be more focused on networking and strategic discussions. The target group will of course include the Wikidata community in its broad sense, especially people and organizations who are already involved in editing, structuring and reusing the data, but will also reach further the organizations who may be interested in using Wikidata and Wikibase, or contributing in various ways to the evolution of Wikidata.
The program will be adapted to this new goal, and organized around different levels of involvement for the participants: from being inspired (with keynotes, success stories, vision of Wikidata’s future) to diving deeper into the hot topics, but also action: the participants will have the opportunity to work on projects during the conference.
Besides many possible topics that will be submitted by the participants, we plan to have a dedicated track about lexicographical data, discussing the perspectives for further reusing data about words within and beyond Wikidata.
A lot of space will be left for discussions, networking, building connections between the different stakeholders and members of the broad Wikidata community.
The conference will be hosting at least 250 participants. In order to make sure that the access to the conference is fair and to not reproduce the issues of last year (rush to get a ticket and long waiting list), we will set up a more streamlined registration process, where a committee made up of both staff and volunteers will make sure that the applicants will contribute in one way or another to the goal of the conference. I will keep you updated for the next steps of this process.
You can already see Wikidata:WikidataCon 2019 which will be improved step by step over the next months, and you can already use the discussion page. If you have any question, you can also contact me on my talk page or by email: lea.lacroix@wikimedia.de.
We're looking forward to a great WikidataCon 2019, together with you!
Thanks for your attention,
Léa Lacroix (WMDE)