Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2013 07:31:59 +0800 From: Josh Lim jamesjoshualim@yahoo.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Are chapters part of the community and board seats for affiliates? Message-ID: 56A3C552-D6ED-47BA-8EA2-E56F9A1B833B@yahoo.com
On Feb 23, 2013, at 4:27 AM, Fae faewik@gmail.com wrote:
The vast majority of volunteers like the idea that there is a Chapter they can turn to to ask for help, or to get their idea for a project reviewed, funded and looking "official". If a volunteer came to a wikimeet with a brilliant idea for a project, but said they could not stand the stupid bureaucracy of chapters, I'd say "excellent mate, you go for it and I'll see what I can do to help with funding if you need it."
I'm inclined to believe that bureaucracy exists despite, not because of, chapters. As it is, volunteers, especially those from the Global South, can be classified into two types:
- They're "detached": they're part of the community, but they don't know about the support options open to them
- They're so involved in the community, they could care less about the "bureaucracy" (in my university, this is called "going down the hill", as my university is on a hill)
Chapters aside, I'm in fact curious to know how many volunteers do know about the Foundation's grants system, or the research program, or heck, Wikimedia User Groups or Wikimania scholarships. Granted, it's a good thing that volunteers have options open for them whether or not they want to deal with the bureaucracy, but it's all for nought if they're left unaware of those options.
Josh
JAMES JOSHUA G. LIM
I just wanted to follow up on this and reinforce Josh Lim's point.
Yesterday, I spent several hours chatting with volunteers, seasoned and new, at the Wikipedia Day that the New York City chapter put together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Wikipedia_Day (thank you, volunteers of New York City!). I was dismayed at how few people knew about the Participation Support subsidies that they could apply for to help them do outreach (more on that & related opportunities at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start ).
In my role helping MediaWiki sysadmins and developers, I often ask whether they've heard of our conferences, our paid internships, our online events, and so on. More and more of the undergraduate students have heard of Google Summer of Code https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013 , but graduate students often don't know that they're eligible, and students in North America and Europe often haven't heard of it.
I don't know the answer. Like Josh, I don't know how well our publicity about these things is penetrating our volunteer communities, and I don't know what level of penetration I would be satisfied with. I suspect that others have better answers regarding what we've tried, what works, and what we're doing next, and I'd love to hear them.
Sumana Harihareswara, 24/02/2013 16:07:
[...] I don't know the answer. Like Josh, I don't know how well our publicity about these things is penetrating our volunteer communities, and I don't know what level of penetration I would be satisfied with. I suspect that others have better answers regarding what we've tried, what works, and what we're doing next, and I'd love to hear them.
This is a general problem and (in my experience) always a very distressing one, but there's no amount of communication that can fix it: you have to live with the defects of human nature, you can't assume information symmetry and rationality. In the end, you can only assess if your program has increased equality or actually reduced it, and move your eggs to another basket in the latter case. (The tragedy is when you're not able to assess.)
Nemo
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