[Wikimediaau-l] Activities & direction

[Brianna Laugher]

Hi,

I have been thinking about how we will plan and map our activities. I
can see basically four strands for activities:
1. Outreach
2. (WMF project) content focussed
3. Community-strengthening
4. Support/admin tasks

1: Outreach
Primarily aimed at increasing the awareness of people outside our own
community of the Wikimedia projects and free culture concepts. These
activities can be targetted at specific audiences (eg educators) or
the general public.
Could be public events (Wikipedia Academy, talks, publications) or
private (talking to particular groups at their request). Lobbying
activities might fit under here too.

2: Content focussed activities
Primarily aimed at improving and expanding content of one or more
Wikimedia projects (or MediaWiki development).
Could be online only (eg "Australian Collaboration of the Fortnight"
on enwp, although this is not a WMAU activity), or in real life events
such as Wikisource scan parties, attending events to write about for
Wikinews, photography events for Wikimedia Commons, booksprints for
Wikibooks.
Could also include partnering with appropriate groups to push their
content into Wikimedia.

3: Community strengthening
Primarily aimed at increasing goodwill and sense of community among
Australian Wikimedians.
eg. Meetups. Lots of content focussed activities can also have a
community-strengthening component (just by working together).

4: Support/admin.
Keeping up with legal and WMF requirements, responding to members and
potential members, press, merch, fundraising, legal (hopefully not
:)), producing publications.
Obviously some of these also cross over, eg press and fundraising can
also be outreach.


The good thing about content-focussed and community-strengthening
events is that they can (and IMO probably should) be mainly driven
just by one or a few people's enthusiasm. WMAU can assist where events
need to intersect with "the real world" (eg organising a venue,
possibly advertising).
So I guess our role there is to try to encourage and empower people to
organise such events, in a bottom-up fashion. As well as reach out to
institutions where appropriate.

I would also like to see us set up a small grants scheme, for members
to get reimbursement for concrete Wikimedia-beneficial activities, eg
printing brochures for a stall, travel costs for speakers.
For this I think we can basically copy the approach of Linux Australia
<http://linux.org.au/projects/grants/> although probably revise down
their $ limits. I imagine this would get looked at after the AGM.

So I guess I see a lot of our tasks for the next few months being
support/admin tasks, setting up things like accepting donations,
?organising merch, getting all the basic kinds of documents we need
written.

There are heaps and heaps of great ideas already at
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Australia/Activities> and I
am sure there are more out there in people's heads. My question is,
how can we know where we should begin?

My personal preference is for activities where members are willing to
contribute time/effort to make them happen. :)

cheers
Brianna


-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/