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@wikimedia.org