The Wiki in Africa team flew to Rwanda last month to Wiki Indaba, where some team members met in person for the first time after working together for almost a year. Although the team has a wonderfully synergistic professional relationship, bonds of friendship were cemented over wine from Cape Town and Tunisia, and project ideas for 2022 were ignited.
While at Wiki Indaba, the African Union approached Wiki in Africa to collaborate on a climate awareness project in 2023. The team has already started formulating plans on how our existing projects can highlight environmental and sustainability issues, and also plotting out new projects to create a wide reach for the messaging. We’ll let you know more as plans develop.
Wiki in Africa also had the honour of partnering with Wiki Indaba to stream the remote presentations from the conference to your laptops. We offered our invaluable support and knowledge to the wonderful Rwandan team, who planned and executed an incredible conference packed with informative talks. “It was an amazing conference, and the Rwandan team managed it with aplomb and grace,” said Isla Haddow-Flood, Wiki in Africa’s co-founder. The streamed presentations are available to watch here.
The team presented two talks at the conference. Afek Ben Chahed and Nonny Ntlahla (who presented remotely from Cape Town) delivered a talk on the Wiki Loves Women Focus Group and the #SheSaid campaign, highlighting leadership in action, the gender gap and capacity building.
Florence Devourard, Isla Haddow-Flood and Ceslause Ogbonnaya gave Wikimedians at the conference an informative analysis of the best tools to use for collaboration, from Wiki in Africa’s own award-winning ISA tool, which takes the slog out of uploading metadata to images on Wikimedia Commons, to Hootsuite, a popular social media scheduling platform. The Google presentation is available for reference here.