Hey Everyone,
My name is James Alexander, I'm an Associate Community Officer working
with the Wikimedia Foundation on this years fundraiser. Depending on
what other mailing lists you're on or how active you've been on Meta you
may have seen my colleagues and I getting more active as preparations
ramp up. This year we want to focus explicitly on getting as much
community involvement as possible. A big part of that is trying to
engage the community in discussion both on the individual projects and
on Meta to both propose their own banner ideas and comment on others.
With some huge improvements to the Central Notice system recently we
have a lot of new flexibility to target banners and messages to certain
projects, languages or geographical areas (ala geonotice) and are hoping
to have as many localized messages as we can. To do this we need help
from everyone identifying messages that may be problematic and proposing
ones that they think would be good. To help decide what banners to run
we are currently running hour long tests to get real data on how
messages, banners and landing pages work when out in the wild as well as
trying to work out the technical and administrative kinks before we
start the full fundraiser. Right now we are doing these every Thursday
around 22:00 UTC (we are coming up on our 5th week of tests so you may
have seen some of them already). Essentially all the banners we are
testing come from Meta with a lot of weight being put on the comments
made for each banner. Those messages that don't test well just plain
won't make it into the fundraiser.
You can see some of the current suggestions (and propose your own) on
the Meta messaging page
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Messages> but we also
want to encourage people to discuss on their own wiki. I've started a
thread on the village pump (currently under miscellaneous
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28miscellaneous%29#Fundraising_2010>
) and if there is a lot of conversation it may be necessary/helpful to
create a separate page. I want to encourage anyone who has any interest
in this to speak up. We can't address concerns if we don't hear them and
if you say it someone else probably thought it too. Obviously its good
to do as much as possible in the open so that others can see the answers
to their own questions but I'm always happy to respond to questions
privately as well.
I look forward to seeing everyone who joins the discussions and if you
really want to get involved think about joining us on IRC or the
Committee <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Committee>!
--
James Alexander
Associate Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
Jalexander(a)wikimedia.org