Wikimedia Hackathon 2020/Remote Hackathon/Women tea time

Whatever time it is in your timezone, it is always time for tea! Welcome to our women* tea time during the Remote Hackathon 2020. Take a break, your favorite hot beverage, and join us for a chat!

Description & Conditions

This session is a social event aiming to bring together women* during the hackathon, so we can connect with each other, support each other, ask questions or talk about our favorite projects.

By women*, we understand: any person who doesn't identify as cis-male. Non-binary, agender, trans people are very welcome.

Just like the other sessions at the hackathon, participants are expected to follow the Code of Conduct. We want all participants to have a great experience and to feel safe and comfortable during the session.

In order to have a smooth experience during the call, here are a few guidelines:

Sharing your camera or speaking during the event is not mandatory, if you only feel like using microphone, or using text in the chat, or just listen, it is totally OK. No one will be forced to speak.
When you are not speaking, please mute your microphone to avoid extra noise.
When you want to speak, please raise your hand by typing "o/" in the text chat. This way, we know who will speak next. This rule applies especially as soon as we are more than 6 people in the call.

Link & Schedule

The session will take place on Jitsi at 20:00 UTC+2 on Saturday (click here to see your timezone), for a duration of about 50min.

In order to encourage discussions and give everyone the chance to speak, we suggest a schedule for the first part of the meeting. Guidelines mentioned above will be applied during the entire session.

5min: welcome, waiting until everyone joins
15min: warm up, a few questions like: what are you drinking, what are you working on/do you plan to work on during the hackathon, any question you want to share with the group...
25min: discussions
5min: closing round, sharing contact details & feedback

Participants & follow-up

Participants:

Léa Lacroix [moderation] - favorite topics: Wikidata, organizing events, traditional music from all countries, drawing, board games
Rfarrand (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 7 May 2020 (UTC) - favorite topics: community events, how to improve virtual events, gardening, baking, mountains[reply]
Librarian_lena
Elisha Cohen
Pavithra Eswaramoorthy
4 other participants attended (if you attended, feel free to add your name)

Summary of the discussions

The participants introduced themselves, and presented the projects they were working on: a WikiProject Witches, editing about female mountain climbers, working on reverting a batch of wrong information on Wikidata, organizing a remote social event for the GSOC interns...
We answered each other's questions and exchanged tips, for example: how to get attention of fellow hackers on a Phabricator ticket, how to ask for help on a project, how to organize a remote party...
There were also pictures of Finnish reindeers involved :)

Feedback from participants

I really appreciated this time. It was very helpful (and fun) for the reasons stated in the summary, and also really nice to have this space for women. There are still so few women at tech-centric events that it can be very intimidating to be in those spaces, even at an event like this Hackathon where the men are respectful and pay attention to the work of their female collaborators. So I appreciate the spaces like this one where ingrained expectations aren't costing so much emotional energy to be grappled with, and can be set aside temporarily. --Librarian lena (talk) 15:34, 14 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I really enjoyed this session and agree with Librarian lena that it was nice to have the space for women. It was really unintimidating and friendly. I didn't feel unwelcome at other sessions, but it was nice to have this one hour to meet the other women attending the event and hear what they were working on. Through this I found a project that I thought was really important and ended up contributing to. Thanks to the organizers! Elisha Cohen (WMDE) (talk) 17:10, 15 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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You can also read some of the feedback here.