Please comment here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/UG_US-CWUG/2015_Annual_Plan
I will set up a conversation with Alex in a week or two to discuss the
plan, including any comments made on the Meta page.
Thanks!
Pine
*This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/>
*One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of
our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we
must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in
which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad
fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not
know.*
*—Catherine Munro*
Hi all,
I've updated the information here with actual costs:
http://wikimediadc.org/wiki/Grant:Cascadia_Wikimedians_User_Group_Quick_Sta…
All receipts have been shared with Brian and James. I'm still waiting on:
(1) My finalized credit card statement that shows the VistaPrint business
card expense. I will scan this and black out everything that's not related
to VistaPrint, and share this with Brian and James as my documentation of
the costs.
(2) Cost of BECU checks to be withdrawn from our online bank account. It
may be another month before we have a statement that I can scan and share
with James.
I believe that we will have enough remaining funds to survive April, only
thanks to Mako's willingness to write us a check. After that we will be
underwater financially unless DC is willing to give us another short-term
grant to keep us afloat until PEG approves our budget, which it sounds like
will happen in May or June because WMF is busy with Inspire until near the
end of April. So, Cascadia board members: you be willing for me to request
another interim grant from WMDC to keep us on life support for May and June?
Thanks,
Pine
*This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/>
*One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of
our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we
must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in
which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad
fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not
know.*
*—Catherine Munro*
*Back by popular demand! *
I am helping organize another round of the Community Data Science Workshop
series with UW professor Benjamin Mako Hill, UW PhD Candidate Dharma
Dailey, and a growing cast of dedicated data science mentorship
professionals.
The workshops will be three and a half day-long workshops in April and May
for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science
tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia,
free and open source software, Twitter, civic media, etc. These will be an
improved version of the workshops we have run in the spring and fall last
year
<http://www.com.washington.edu/2014/03/free-community-data-science-workshop-…>
.
The workshops are for people with no previous programming experience and,
thanks to sponsorship from UW's eScience Institute
<http://escience.washington.edu/> and Department of Communication
<http://www.com.washington.edu/>, are free of charge and open to anyone.
Our goal is that, after the three workshops, participants will be able to
use data to produce numbers, hypothesis tests, tables, and graphical
visualizations to answer questions like:
*- Are new contributors to an article in Wikipedia sticking around longer
or contributing more than people who joined last year?*
*- Who are the most active or influential users of a particular Twitter
hashtag?*
*- Are people who participated in a Wikipedia outreach event staying
involved? How do they compare to people that joined the project outside of
the event?*
Details and dates are online here:
http://wiki.communitydata.cc/CDSW_Spring_2015
*If you are interested in participating, fill out our registration at the
link above before April 3.* Register soon because we have been
oversubscribed both previous times we have run these workshops.
*If you already know how to program in Python, it would be really awesome
if you would volunteer as a mentor! *Being a mentor will involve working
with participants and talking them through the challenges they encounter in
programming. No special preparation is required. If you’re interested,
there’s a link on the page above or you can send me an email.
Regards,
Jonathan
(On behalf of Mako, Tommy, Ben, Dharma, the Community Data Science Research
Group <http://communitydata.cc/>, and all the CDSW mentors.)
*P.S. Apologies if you've received this announcement multiple times through
multiple channels!*
Hi Cascadians,
Here is our calendar of upcoming events:
1. *March 24 (this Tuesday!): meetup at Bellevue Regional Library. *The
library's address is 1111 110th Ave. NE, Bellevue, WA 98004. We will meet 6
PM to 9 PM in Room 4. *Please note that the library requires that we have 4
people present in order to use the room. *I think that we have 4 or 5
people planning to come, so I hope that we'll meet this requirement. If
not, we may move ourselves to somewhere else in the library. You can email
me if you can't find us.
Business discussions (hopefully these will be brief):
A. Washington State Secretary of State registration documents (and
accompanying celebration)
B. New bank account
C. Annual plan updates/feedback
Content agenda:
D. Creation of video about how to use VisualEditor, inspired by our
upcoming workshop at UW and feedback from the last workshop.
E. General editing.
2. *April 19 (Sunday): Privacy and security themed editathon with Seattle
TA3M at the Montlake Library*, 1 PM to 4:45 PM. New editors are welcome as
well. The meeting room has capacity for 47 people.
The library's address is 2401 24th Ave. E.; Seattle, WA 98112
(NW corner of 24th Ave E. and E. McGraw St.)
https://www.spl.org/locations/montlake-branch/mon-getting-to-the-branch
Important note: there are only 13 parking spaces at this library branch, so
please carpool, bicycle, or use public transportation.
Tentative schedule:
*1:00 - 2:00 Introduction to Wikipedia editing and community norms
(possibly using the video mentioned above)
*2:00 - 2:15 discuss list of possible subjects for editing; break into
small groups
*2:15 - 4:30 open editing and discussion
*4:30 - 4:45 wrap up, next steps
3. *April 25 (Saturday): University of Washington Learning Commons workshop
and edit-a-thon, focused on the Learning Commons' labor archives special
collections.*
*(15 min) 10:30 Coffee and check in
*(15 min) 10:45 AM Welcome (Chloe).
*(30 min) 11-11:30 Subject matter introduction (Conor)
*(30 min) 11:30-12 (waiting for confirmation) Representation and Wikipedia:
What’s at stake?
*(1 hour) 12-1 (Pine and/or Peaceray): Introduction to Wikipedia community
norms and VisualEditor
*(30 min) 1:00-1:30 Break; people write on a whiteboard to propose subjects
for groupwork based on interest (further training on Wikipedia
mechanics/community, subject matter focus, etc).
*(2.25 hours) 1:30-3:45 Groups get organized; editing
*(15 min) 3:45-4:00 wrap up, surveys, next steps
I hope to see you at one or more of these events!
Pine
*This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/>
*One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of
our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we
must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in
which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad
fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not
know.*
*—Catherine Munro*
Glad to hear of this idea. We've discussed potential collaborations with
OSM in Cascadia Wikimedians meetings.
Pine
On Mar 18, 2015 2:08 AM, "Max Semenik" <maxsem.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, just a quick note: as part of general search and discovery work, me and
> Yuri are resurrecting the project to have OpenStreetMap in Wikimedia
> starting in April. Because the initial part of this work will include
> researching options which will influence precise goals and this is yet to
> be done, we still can't commit to a precise timeline, but as a ballpark
> estimate I personally want to aim for serving PNG tiles at a reasonable,
> though not necessarily "dynamic maps on every WP page" scale by the end of
> Q4. Vector/multilingual maps would be the next stage. We will be mostly
> using Phabricator for planning,
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/openstreetmap/ is my first pass on
> the outline of things to be done.
>
> Your comments and suggestions would be highly appreciated, please share
> your thoughts, ideas of projects that might use these maps, or just
> merciless critique! :D
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Hi Cascadians,
I had a conversation about our draft annual plan with Alex this afternoon.
Alex believes that at this point in our development, our priority should be
expanding the number and the capacity of our volunteers, and that we are
too early in our development for the temporary / part-time paid positions
that we proposed in our budget. This means that our goals to develop
institutional partnerships and to do outreach work must be significantly
reduced in proportion to the capacity of our volunteer network. We know
that we have many opportunities for partnerships and public engagement in
the Cascadia region, and hopefully we will still be able to pursue those
partnerships and engagement opportunities at a low intensity level that our
volunteers can support in a sustainable way. Again, Alex believes that our
first goal should be to expand our volunteer network.
We will need to reorient our plans and our budget to focus on development
and support of our volunteer network. I will work on redrafting the goals,
calendar, plan and budget over the course of the next week, and have a
conversation with Alex about the possible revisions next week. I have also
asked Alex to create a learning pattern that describes the development path
of organizations such as ours; I think that such a learning pattern would
have been very helpful to us when we were first discussing our goals for
this year. After the conversations with Alex have finished, I plan to
re-engage with our Board to discuss the goals and funding that Alex and WMF
feel that they are willing to support.
I am cc'ing this email to Alex and hope that she will add any comments or
clarifications that she has. It would probably be best to direct any
questions or comments from Cascadians directly to Alex, preferably on this
list so that others can benefit from the discussion.
Thanks,
Pine
*This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/>
*One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of
our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we
must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in
which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad
fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not
know.*
*—Catherine Munro*
Hi all,
As mentioned on the Education mailing list, some thematic organizations
have already, or will soon, produce training materials for VisualEditor in
a variety of languages. Cascadia Wikimedians needs at least a lesson plan
for our workshops in April, so I/we will produce materials in English,
probably in video form that includes two major sections: about Wikipedia
and its sister projects, and how to edit Wikipedia with VisualEditor. My
hope is to produce a 30 to 60 minute video that can get new editors to a
basic level of Wikipedia competence in one hour including competence with
talk pages, notability, copyright, plagarism, conflict of interest, and
deletion discussions. I also hope that new editors will feel excited to
participate in the community when they finish watching the video. Stay
tuned for further developments.
If other English speaking Wikimedians are interested in helping with the
production then please email me off list.
Thanks,
Pine
Cascadians and Alex,
I've finished a round of major changes to our annual plan based on Alex's
statements about what WMF is willing to support. If you look in the tabs
designated "old", you can see the highlights that indicate that a goal or
line-item has been modified (yellow) or eliminated (red). There is a lot of
yellow and red. If the revised plan was funded as written, it would be
about half of the previous amount, and our goals are revised downward
accordingly.
In our calendar I did add or note previously planned events and meetings in
blue text.
Because WMF is unwilling to fund my time, I am concerned when I look at
this plan that I may not have the volunteer capacity to devote the time
required to the organizational and financial tasks that are necessary for
the execution of this downscaled plan. I hear that similar problems afflict
other small thematic organizations because WMF is unwilling to pay for the
necessary management work, and not many people want to spend their free
time doing accounting, budgeting, negotiating with insurance agents,
discussing trademark issues with WMF Legal, or writing reports. I am hoping
to hear from Alex and others in the group some creative ideas about how to
distribute the business workload. I'm willing to lead on these tasks and I
have enough experience to feel comfortable with doing them, but I don't
have unlimited free time. I am hoping that Alex and other Cascadians will
provide suggestions about how to complete the necessary work in a way that
volunteers (including me) will enjoy and will respect the value of
everyone's time.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts about the revised goals, calendar,
and budget, as well as how to distribute the workload.
Thanks,
Pine
*This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/>
*One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of
our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we
must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in
which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad
fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not
know.*
*—Catherine Munro*