I thought a thread on Wikimedia-l might be useful for folks to share
feedback and their experiences, good or bad. I understand there is a
survey which we should remember to complete, and there has been a lot
of chat on Facebook, but I have a natural aversion to that space. :-)
My tuppence worth of feedback is that volunteering is fun, I encourage
others to offer to help out with future Wikimanias.
I was on helpdesk at the start of the hackerthon, meaning that for
around 5 hours I sat in the main foyer at a well signed desk wearing a
red volunteer shirt and helping people find things (a great way to say
hello to many old friends arriving at the event), answering all sorts
of questions. This ranged from helping BBC journalists meet up with
their team and work out where best to go to find the action (this
turned into the Newsnight feature that evening), to helping older
ladies find out about the Barbican fashion exhibition. At the same
time I was logged in to the official help desk phone number through
Skype, and keeping an eye on the official twitter, email and IRC
channels to be able to respond to questions from attendees (my puny
netbook was struggling). 5 hours was a long time, but by the end of
lunchtime I had helped a lot of people, which is immensely rewarding.
Tip for the Mexico conference team - I was *very* impressed at how the
conference staff changed processes on the fly (great Agile processes
Ed), so based on me mentioning that people were finding it hard to
find free drinking water, a massive supply of water bottles were
ordered and appeared in the main hackerthon space that afternoon, and
a casual mention that helpdesk folks had varied technical experience
so many would find IRC etc. a struggle, resulted in a change to who
was placed where, so there was always a "brain" handy on each
helpdesk. I guess I was the default brain on the main helpdesk. :-)
All Saturday morning I was officially the "host" for the GLAM stream
of presentations. It was a great excuse to met my friends on the GLAM
network, and having someone with a GLAM background was appreciated, as
this helped me negotiate slight changes to the schedule and put
presenters at their ease, even when we were scrabbling about getting
laptops to display properly on the main screen. The wifi had some
problems late morning, so the IRC channel where volunteers were
coordinating was dropping out, however the "control room" was
responsive to the problem and my "team leader" was physically checking
in with me to make sure I had everything I needed.
On Sunday I was on the other side of things, giving a presentation on
the GLAMwiki Toolset, and the volunteer hosting my session was on the
ball, spotting that my netbook was running out of battery during my
presentation and sorting out the power supply before I had even
noticed myself. What an impressive service!
I was invited to join in with a volunteers party at the end of Sunday,
but after a late Saturday night with the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group on
a gay pub crawl in Soho, I was totally exhausted from several long
days and short nights, so getting home and crashing out on the sofa
with my husband was a treat.
I like to personally thank Ed for pushing and staying incredibly
positive for so long. Back in 2012 Ed was enthusiastically approaching
the Wikimedia UK board when I was a trustee, and I was one of those
giving him a hard grilling on plans and financial controls. I think
the governance structure that resulted from those discussions, along
with feedback from earlier proposals from the Wikimania bid review
team helped to ensure everyone was confident and well prepared for the
2014 Wikimania. It worked, it was a brilliant experience, and when the
final statistics get published, I expect it to be a case study of good
value that we can all learn from.
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae