2010 chapters meeting/Andrews notes

In a state of development. Been recovering from a flu and also have backed up priorities here in Perth to deal with - should be finished here Wednesday (5 May) morning.

General notes

The first day was almost entirely lectures of some form in the main conference room at Zanox Campus. It had become clear by the middle of the day that this volcano was more than a simple inconvenience - four chapters had incomplete delegations and 5 of the 10 WMF staff were stuck at airports around Europe. Wikimedia DE director Pavel Richter's "travel situation updates" became a regular feature of the event (see picture). Feeling that we should bring something Australian to the meeting, Sarah had brought souvenir pens and I had brought soft toy koalas and kangaroos - they now occupy homes and offices all over Europe and North America and appear to have been well received.

By the second day, the chapter delegates had all arrived, so we concluded the "state of the chapters" briefings before splitting up into Working Groups. There were several available, so Sarah chose External Communications and I chose Educational Institutions, which I served as note-taker and speaker. We both attended the "Outreach Case Studies" stream in the afternoon.

The third day was fairly light on content but I attended a useful group session on professionalisation in the morning. A wrap-up (and a final travel update!) later, we had a group photo taken, participated in the birth of "Wikimedia Asia", and headed back. Unfortunately, I was struck down with a bad flu the day after the end of proceedings - as it seems were a number of scattered delegates, no doubt due to the questionable ventilation in the main room.

First day

Sarah took a lot of notes - read hers for overview/detail, these are additional.

State of the Chapters I

  • Swiss chapter has 93 members split across 3 language communities. This presents its own challenges as each language has a large, mature chapter in a neighbouring country, so the challenge for WM CH is to find a role. They use English as a median for communicating with each other so as to "depoliticise" the issue.
  • Czech chapter has 30 members of whom 7-10 are active. They feel they are suffering burnout issues amongst their active membership. They used a WMF grant to take pictures of municipalities, which included buying a chapter camera. As with many of the language-community chapters, their link to Wikipedia is much more pronounced as is the case with ours. (Estonia and Poland also have municipality projects.)
  • German chapter is board driven not community driven, partly because many of the "community" members are not related to Wikimedia projects. They have 12 "preposterous statements" as goals, with the idea that if you don't have something to aim for, you won't achieve anything.
  • A number of chapters are looking at talking to schools. Different views as to what this means (more WP focussed vs more community focussed).

Strategy Plan Walkthrough

(More impression than detail - refer Lodewijk's notes at [1] which give a good summary of the session, and Sue's slides.)

  • Huge emphasis on statistics from an agency named ComScore.
  • Main emphasis of strategy appears to be to try and consolidate European and North American markets where they are already successful (Australia falls into this) while trying to grow in the "Global South" (ex-"Third World") where they have little or no reach at all at present. English and German Wikipedias, by far the largest, are exhibiting a phenomenon whereby their active contributors appear to be in decline and there are questions of burnout; WMF is unsure whether this represents a problem or just a natural development phase, as there's no precedent research to draw on. Beyond those two, 10 others have more than 1,000 regular contributors, 31 have 100-1,000, whilst all others have below 100. These ones are in the "nascent" or "emerging" category and are vulnerable (burnout can be a major problem on the smaller projects too as a small core of contributors represent almost all of the activity).
  • WMF will commit some pretty serious resources in this direction (developing world) in the 2010-2015 period.
  • Noting many contributors in that region will not be accessing from a computer but from mobile devices, Wikimedia mobile technology will also be a key goal.

Movement Roles

Presented by Arne and Jan-Bart, the idea was to communicate to us how the plans for formally recording roles within Wikimedia's organisation were coming along. However, at times, there seemed to be a distinct lack of clarity and agreement as to key terminology used such as what the "movement" was and who qualified as a "volunteer". As a result, the session was less useful than it could have been, although information about the timeline was conveyed to us.

Volunteer recruitment

(see [2])

Different chapters have different needs. Ours is fairly unique because geographical realities mean we have five (or more) separate communities rather than one community, so each centre needs its own activities. Many chapters have a deficiency in volunteer numbers, or have a central group who are very active and risk burnout while the rest do not participate much. Others have no problem finding volunteers to do specific practical tasks (eg. staffing events), but have real trouble finding leaders or coordinators. There is also the difference in commitment level by volunteering online vs volunteering in real life (the latter is more likely to feel committed).

Ideas raised to deal with these issues included:

  • Finding ways to portray the chapter as something other than a "club of Wikipedians" - design events which draw in more widely
  • Make specific calls for leaders and working group heads, don't just assume they'll turn up
  • WM Indonesia had the idea of awarding diplomas for completion of workshops - this is a strong motivating tool in their culture.

Grants

Erik Moeller gave a very useful presentation on how WMF allocates grants. The most interesting thing from our point of view is that they have a large amount of money to allocate, and are happy to fund reasonable projects within Wikimedia's mission which are set out on the required form and which undertake to complete reports on how the money is used. A failure in one project by a chapter is not taken into account when considering whether to award other grants. Non-financial requests, such as participation or involvement by WMF head office, will be considered provided sufficient notice is given.

meta Grants:Index will be used as a central information point. Successful grants last year, among other things, covered a project for the Czech chapter to buy a camera and take photos of municipalities; for the NYC chapter to run an internship program (more on this later) and Indonesia's "Free Your Knowledge" project.

Grants for 2010-11 close on 15 May but applications will be considered out of remaining funds after that point on a case-by-case basis.

Second day

Education working group

Sarah went to External Communication while I went to Education, a group I ended up note-taking and speaking for. My full notes will be published elsewhere. A lot of the discussion related to Wikipedia and Wikimedia generally, and I understand the Usability people are interested. The secondary stuff is probably of most practical application to WMAU.

  • Tertiary and secondary education require different approaches as it's not simply a level difference, it's a cultural difference. Staff at tertiary instutions are often subject experts and researchers in their field while staff at secondary institutions are more focused on the teaching itself. There is a level of politics in the outcomes of secondary education which doesn't really exist at tertiary level.
Tertiary
  • The group considered mainly the topic of how to make Wikipedia a more congenial environment for subject experts to edit, and bridging cultural gaps. The relationship can be collaborative if we get it right, but mostly, we don't - many first experiences are negative. A lot of this is that WM volunteers don't understand the needs of experts (they're busy people, they're working for free, they know stuff, why are others so hostile?) while experts may not understand the Wiki culture (research work != good Wikipedia editing, not much room for originality or nuanced expression, occasional "mess-ups" such as getting students to edit Wikipedia for a grade, etc).
  • One interesting idea raised was a "checkpoint" review system similar to Featured Article, but externally driven by experts, who could nominate a diff on the talk page as an expert-reviewed version. This allows Wiki editing to proceed regardless but provides a service to readers. Another was to get experts to review weaker articles, submitting a list of lacking or missing areas or areas needing work, which Wikimedians could engage with and address.
  • Inter-chapter collaboration - different people are trying different things and we can share successes and lessons learned. (A section on Outreach Wiki has been opened up which will give this a space in which to occur.) Some good work is occurring in non-English languages (Polish was mentioned in particular) - we should endeavour to get translations of these resources.
  • An understanding of the hierarchy in tertiary institutions and how staff rise within it (reviewed works, a sort of "point" system) may be of use to Wikimedia - can we help them reach their goals in return for them helping us? For example, inviting them to be keynote speaker at conferences so they can get their conference papers published in specialist magazines.
Secondary
  • The poor reputation of Wikimedia projects needs to be addressed. This has arisen due to both adverse media coverage and adverse coverage within the educational sector of what Wiki is.
  • Key points to establish to schools - we are not trying to replace the library with a website. We are a good point for starting research into an area. Quality does vary, but there are reasonable rules of thumb for identifying good and poor articles (referencing and structure mainly), and it shouldn't be forgotten other sources have flaws too. One big difference - if teachers or students come upon obvious mistakes on Wiki, they can fix them! Plagiarism from Wikipedia is like plagiarism from any other source and should be regarded the same way by teachers. Also value of other projects such as Wikisource (esp to social science or languages students).
  • One interesting idea (probably the most practical) to come out of the session was the idea of running Professional Development (PD) days for teachers on Wikimedia projects. Teachers must attend a certain number per year and these get reported back to the schools so any information we can convey may have a "magnifier" effect in that it reaches many people who don't go. These would be chapter-run and either part of a bigger PD on technology in the classroom (saves us admin costs but gives us much less time) or run by us (admin costs, but the fees paid to attend will almost definitely result in a profit for the chapter after deducting costs and speaker's fee). I am thinking of drafting a proposal for this and running it past some educational people here in WA - the other chapters are very interested in this but obviously we don't know whether the same system applies in their jurisdictions.
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