On Jan 19, 2011, at 9:16 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
2011/1/19 Steven Walling <
steven.walling@gmail.com>
2. Even if Wikimania is not relatively big when it comes to technology conferences, the problem is growing a strong local team of volunteers in a new place every year. That's very, very hard. We're not unique in having that difficulty as a movement, but I don't think it means we should abandon volunteer-based organization for the event.
This is an important point.
It's hard to grow such a team in a new place every year, but if you
do, then after X years you will have grown X strong local team of
volunteers, ready to take on new challenges and to teach their
experience to other teams. This may be a worthy goal. It would be
interesting to check previous Wikimanias and to see whether the team
that organized them went on as a team.
I believe that hosting and organizing a Wikimania should be a stepping stone toward professionalization and development for a chapter or group of emerging volunteers. One would hope that hosting Wikimania in your region would allow a chapter or group to pull from outside the editing community and to engage local individuals to volunteer who may not wish to edit wikipedia but might wish to advocate for our projects and organize events. Both skills sets are vital, and different types of people require different types of work to keep their interest in the movement. For example I have often said, if I had come to Wikipedia to edit I do not think I would be a strong volunteer or a volunteer at all, but if i came to wikipedia to organize conferences, and to advocate for our projects to local schools and universities that is a way my skills could be utilized as a volunteer and I would feel richly engaged with the Wikimedia projects.
This being said, I do not know if we have been very good at outreaching and obtaining some of the vital skills to help grow our community and to fill some of the gaps which our core contributors might not be interested. This could be a reason why bids are not strong, the type of individual who is interested to organize and run a conference is not always the type of individual who is interested in editing an encyclopedia. As a movement we need to start to welcome the skills of individuals who might not meet our standard "type" of volunteer and engage them, give them projects let them feel valued.
This all being said I will get back to my point. My point is that I believe Wikimania should be an opportunity for a chapter or group of volunteers to grow, however because we do not always engage with the type of volunteer who likes to organize and develop conferences we find Wikimania becomes a huge energy drain on a local community. Most locations which have hosted Wikimania (Boston, Gdansk, Alexandria, Taipei) all from my understanding had a group which was emerging maybe thinking of creating a chapter, they won a Wikimania bid and worked for a year to organize a conference, and after the conference the work stopped. The volunteers did not organize more events, they did not engage with local schools or create chapters, the energy fizzled. I know this is a generalization and I know Boston and Alexandria might be special cases. It might be useful to know from Argentina how they felt after hosting the conference, did they see a decline in volunteers, did the volunteers who were not editors before continue to volunteer? So I agree with Amir, did former years teams continue their work after obtaining these new skills, or did the community members leave and the skills and lessons learned were lost. For me I hope Wikimania is not a chapter killer but a chapter creator, however the jury is still out. But if wikimania is a chapter killer then what can we do to change that, and how can we create incentives for chapters and groups to want to host.
Again this is all my thought and opinions and I am just throwing this out as the conversation is rich and thoughtful today.
James