Hello Colorado Wikimedians,

Here're highlights of the sessions from day 1. I have tried to distill each one to a few succinct points but will be glad to expand/clarify on any of them if needed.

1. Increasing Wikipedia awareness and forging Partnerships

   a. Stop using the word edit-a-thon. It tends to intimidate potential newcomers into thinking it's going to be a long, arduous session, everyone glued to their keyboard/screens. Consider using workshops or other names. Sidenote - several people noted that if you're going to provide food/drinks, advertise that. Tends to bring more people in :)

   b. Use swag in non-meetup events. While we use our Wikipedia t-shirts, hats and other gear when we attend WM events, consider wearing them to other events, even non-technical ones. That brings out curiosity out of onlookers and has attracted users/editors in many cases.

   c. "Challenge" the "Wikipedia is wrong" folks. Ask them what they think is wrong and nudge them towards correcting it themselves, with proper citations of course!

2. 99 Dimensions of a Community event

   a. In person meetups foster trust and understanding. One aspect (that I had overlooked) is that everyone knows who's speaking and who's listening. People tend to be less hesitant/tentative in front of "known" audience.

   b. Encourage secondary aspects of a meetup. If your event is for editing, encourage someone that is more interested in commons curation or categorization, etc.

   c. Make contact with users a few days after an event either on-wiki (established user) or off-wiki (new users.)

   d. The Foundation may be able to grant a few $$$s for groups such as ours (this was my question :-}) to cover mileage expenses for events, if applied in advance and properly documented. Make sure none of the expenses are outside the 501(c) 3 framework or even *appear* to be outside of that (e.g., alchohol.)

3.  Participatory/Collaborative Communication

   a. Make it easy to join. Use established channels

   b. Provide multiple channels for feedback, both synchronous and asynchronous

   c. Keep the diversity (of topics) to focus ratio in mind

More interesting sessions planned today. Report coming tomorrow.

Cheers,

Abhay

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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:24:06 -0600
From: Abhay Natu <asnatu@gmail.com>
To: wikimedia-us-co@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikimedia-US-CO] Checking in from Berlin
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Hello Colorado Wikimedians,

Trust everything is well in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains.

I reached Berlin yesterday in the afternoon for the Wikimedia Conference
2017. I won't bore you with the details of my travels but suffice to say it
was long, tiring but uneventful (which is good :-}).

We kicked off with a meet-and-greet last night. It was good to say a number
of wikimedians I have interacted with in person over the last many years,
others that I have interacted online and yet others whom I met for the
first time yesterday. This is a passionate and (mostly) lively group. Some
are more outgoing than others but all of them are very much convinced about
the work they do for Wikimedia projects.

Both my 'buddies' in the Buddy Project were missing but I suspect that's
because of logisitical issues. I hope to catch up with them today.

We have a series of sessions for the day kicking off in about 30 minutes. I
will report on that at the end of the day or early tomorrow.

Cheers,


Abhay


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