On 18 March 2014 12:12, Edward Saperia <ed@wikimanialondon.org> wrote:
> Perhaps part of the reason that we struggle to recruit is that we don't
> publicly take part in events in related topics. An event like this has a
> communications budget far in excess of our own, we might as well take
> advantage of it. We should have someone charismatic there to present on
> behalf of the community.

"Promotion" and "networking" is a rationale we have put forward many
times before for paying for conference/event attendees. Often the
money is put up based on commitments to write a blog post or an
internal report. For a speculative, principality social networking
event, the lost opportunity cost of volunteer and employee time and
expenses should be justified with measurable reported outcomes, such
as increased project participation, content creation or productive
long term partnerships with other organizations.

The charity is accountable and committed to transparency, so if money
and time is spent in ways with no direct outcome that benefits
Wikimedia projects or the open knowledge aims of the charity, we
should expect questions to be raised. In my view, and that of several
other members, an example of a poor decision was sending an
inexperienced new volunteer for an all expenses paid weekend at a
Berlin conference last year, there was a blog post afterwards with
ideas, none has provided any measurable outcomes in the several months
since; in fact the volunteer has been completely inactive in terms of
creating educational content for Wikimedia projects.[1][2]

If there were a couple of conference that we could see made a real
difference to finding new active volunteers for Wikimedia projects or
where highly productive long term partnerships with organizations were
started, then I would prefer to see the charity provide scholarships
for several active volunteers to take part or attend. The key here is
measurement of outcomes, something that the new board have made a fuss
about in the new strategy and should be a natural part of the way the
charity works and makes decisions about where to spend its £700,000+;
keeping its active volunteers at the centre of the decision making
process.

Links
1. https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Water_cooler/2013#Diversity_Conference_-_how_many_UK_volunteers_are_going.3F
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Kwaku_BBM

Fae
--
faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae

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