Bolivia to host the 2026 Latin America Wikimedia Conference – Diff

With great excitement, we wish to share that Bolivia will host the Latin America Wikimedia Conference this year. The event will take place between November 19 and 21, 2026, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Eastern Bolivia, a city and metropolitan area that has seen impressive growth and which currently features cultural expressions from throughout the country and the region.

We want to share Bolivia’s ecological and cultural heritage with the Wikimedia community at large. The country expands from the Andean zone – with cities located at 13.000 feet – to the vast Amazon basin and dry woodlands of the Chaco, where 14 ecological levels, 17 ecoregions, and 190 ecosystems meet. In this diversity, over 30 indigenous and Afrobolivian civilizations have flourished, representing our national strength. 

Be part of the Conference

The Conference’s goal is to create structured spaces to share knowledge and skills that will empower the community and support conflict resolution and inclusive engagement. Anyone from Latin America and the Caribbean may apply for scholarships or submit program proposals, even from countries without affiliates. Our objective is to strengthen regional cooperation and foster collective efforts towards knowledge equity and localized content from joint and diverse viewpoints. 

To apply for a scholarship, fill out the following form. You may find the questions in the form here. Applications are open until Sunday, June 21, at midnight in Bolivia (UTC -4). This deadline will not be extended. Any decisions concerning scholarships will be communicated in August. 

The conference will reunite people who are new to Wikimedia with organizers, members of the technical community, experienced editors, and users with extended rights. We will seek to establish a healthy balance among people with diverse skills and levels of experience, who may collaborate and inspire one another. 

A call for volunteers is also open to form the organizing committees of the Conference: scholarships, program, communications, and technical community. This call will be open through Sunday, June 7, at midnight in Bolivia (UTC -4). Each committee will be in charge of specific tasks.

• The scholarships committee will set the evaluation criteria for the selection of candidates. 
• The program committee will evaluate proposals and contribute to setting up the time slots in the conference.
• The communications committee will broadcast the event and design the documentation strategies that will be implemented.
• The technical community will find a venue for a hackathon and support creating a space for discussion on the reimagining and strengthening of our social and technical infrastructure.

Members of the committee may apply for scholarships and submit proposals, but membership does not guarantee access to a scholarship or approval of proposals. Members will only be exempt from evaluating their own submissions. Further information about committees may be found in the following Meta link. 

Building the program

The Conference will focus on three program tracks:

• Internet self-representation: a track for initiatives, projects, experiences, analytics, feedback, ideas, and research regarding how Wikimedia projects may or may not be used to build on the ability of historically underrepresented communities to tell their own stories online, with the goal of closing gaps while keeping the focus on the communities themselves, their knowledge, and the capacity for self-determination through collectively built information. This includes experiences linked to local history, minoritary languages, communal heritage, citizen memory, indigenous knowledge, rural and Afro communities, sexual and gender-diverse people’s forms of producing, expressing and broadcasting knowledge from their territories. 
• Social and technical infrastructure: a track with a strong, practical orientation which will feature a Conference hackathon. This track will gather the Wikimedia movement’s technical community with users with extended rights, technical agents (such as developers, sys admins and data scientists) with an interest in Wikimedia projects, organizers and users who may wish to strengthen regional cooperation around technological Wikimedia tools. Proposals in this track may approach subjects like open technologies, Wikimedia tools, automation, AI and Wikipedia, open data, overall social and technical infrastructure, and social and technical engagement barriers. 
• Innovation for open knowledge: this track includes proposals, analysis, research, opinions, ideas, and points of view exploring new ways to build, share, and maintain knowledge free in diverse contexts. We expect to foster creative experiences for implementing and approaching Wikimedia projects in areas like education, culture, heritage, and indigenous languages, among others, through thematic tracks and participative methodologies, workflows, collaboration formats, and innovative partnerships. The goal in this track is to share learnings, experiences, and approaches that may inspire new practices within the Wikimedia movement that will allow us to undertake the engagement challenges that characterize the region. 

The call for program proposals will be open from mid-June through this form and will be communicated through various channels. It is not mandatory to propose a session to apply for a scholarship.  

What we expect in the Conference

The main goals of the conference are:

• To foster a more solid regional community through the promotion of collaboration between peers and shared trust and responsibility.
• To exchange knowledge among experienced users, including users with extended rights, newcomers, and organizers. 
• To enhance participation and renewal tracks within Wikimedia communities in Latin America. 
• To approach key challenges in Latin American Wikimedia projects, such as the promotion of inclusive communal dynamics, proposals, and examples to promote generational renovation and an improvement in policies and processes that may provide clarity without widening the participation gaps of Latin American communities in Wikimedia projects. 
• To strengthen and expand the technical Wikimedia community in the region, thus contributing to the diversity of the global community.  

From its inception as a grant proposal, this process has been the result of the efforts and the cooperation that the Wikimedia movement is known for. We wish to honor the support, cooperation, and disposition of other regional groups for this Conference: Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedistas de Bolivia, Wikimedia Brasil, Wikimedia Chile, Wikimedia Colombia, Wikimedia México, WikiAcción Perú, and Wikimedistas de Uruguay.

Since this event seeks to be a space for bonding and communal growth, we also intend to be as inclusive as possible: anyone from Latin America and the Caribbean may join the committees, apply for scholarships, and submit proposals for the program, regardless of affiliation or lack thereof. Along with the groups of organizers and the community at large, we hope to put forward a Conference to remember. 

Keep updated

We will publish updates on the event page on Meta.

You may also follow Wikimedistas de Bolivia on social media:

1. Facebook  
2. Twitter
3. Instagram
4. Web

If you have any questions, you may contact: [email protected]

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