Hi,
First of all please accept my apologies for the delay in replying to this.
I started the online meetup from the begining of this new year. Our very first such event was planned for the new year day. I had total 5 confirmations, considering a small community of Gujarati Wikipedians this was relatively a large number. As it happened with you, we had 2 unexpected drop outs, 1 user confirmed just before the start of conference that due to the loss of power supply at his side, he wasn't able to join, 1 user replied a couple of days back that he had to travel due to emergency and hence, I ended up with just 1 user online for the session. This person had made special efforts to join the session despite having guests waiting for her. We discussed some of the dos and don'ts for the Wikipedia, and some other question/answers.
With this mixed response, I was initially disapointed a bit, but when I received other's responses for not being able to join it and willingness to join future sessions, we decided to carry on with the online sessions once every month, and fixed up to have it every first sunday of Month. We had 3 more sessions since, 1 in Feb & 2 in March, as some users were nnot comfortable with either first or second Sunday in March. We had 4 attendees in Feb meetup, with 1 busy with other tasks at the same time, so didn't participate in discussion actively. March sessions were also having me plus 2 more users. We discussed mainly the isses related to gu.wikipedia. In last meeting we even decided to take up a project of clearing up some articles, and all three of us choose 1 article each to work on. When we have our next meeting in April, we will be reporting the progress of our tasks and based on the experience, we will be taking up more projects.
To me and to the users who joined these, they seems to be quite helpful. Looking forward to have more users joining it and ways to spread them to make them the outreach events at the same time.
Instead of having IRC Chats, we decided to have skype as it is more userfriendly and can have voice conf as well. You all are invited to join our next event in April, on the 1st April at 11 am IST. If you are joining, join us on skype username gu.wikipedia.
Regards, Dhaval
From: wheredevelsdare@hotmail.com
To: Wikipedia India Mailing List wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: wikipedia-gu@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:33:24 +0000 Subject: RE: [Wikimediaindia-l] Report on online outreach event Very good to know about outreach by yourself and others from Gujarati Wikipedia. Would appreciate if you could post a small note reporting how each event went, so that the rest of the community in India is abreast with your activities and can learn and replicate the good work your doing/avoid repeating any mistakes you may have made.
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:16:42 +0000 From: dsvyas@gmail.com To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org CC: wikipedia-gu@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Report on online outreach event
Hi Swaroop,
This is quite common phenomenon for the new beginings. I have started online meetups/sessions for Gujarati Wikipedia since the begining of this new Year. Have held 4 sessions so far. Had similar experience in my firstever planned event. Users are showing interest, and I am sure, if we continued it as a regular event, people will be regular to attend as well. Those who couldn't join the meetups/events online, have shared their apologies and have regreted for it, which shows that they genuinely missed, and that is enough for me to carry it on.
Simply wanted to say that you are doing a nice job, please "Keep Calm and Carry On". People will join and number of participants will increase slowly.
All the best! Dhaval
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 3:59 PM, Deepon Saha hideeponhere@gmail.comwrote:
Thanks swaroop, you really have done a brilliant job.. Lets hope next time we get more participants..:)
Deepon
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 7:19 PM, Swaroop Rao raul.swaroop@gmail.comwrote:
Hello everyone,
You've probably heard about the online "Wikiacademy" that Nitika announced around a week ago; we recently conducted that session on Saturday (10 March 2012) on Google+ Hangout.
Six participants signed up - one informed day before about her absence, two did not show up at all, one could not log into Google hangout, one was able to attend the first part of the session but then lost his internet connection and eventually we had only one participant who attended the entire session. That's what happened at the online outreach event organised last Saturday, 10th March.
It wasn't particularly an impressive session in terms of turnout - we were expecting all six guys to show up and take part. But even if these 2 participants show interest and edit on regular basis I'd call this event a success - a success rate of 33%.
I'd like to discuss few things that we should definitely keep in mind before we organize similar events:
- Request only those people to register who are sure to have a stable
internet connection. Some students were trying to log in for the session but their hostel/school connections was extremely unstable. Im not sure if there is a way for making sure that they have stable connections but it is really important. (I can also see where this might be difficult, because not many can give any guarantees on the reliability of their net connections)
- Invariably we'll have few people who'll drop out at the last moment or
are not able to join leaving room for someone else to join in. Hence for such events we should probable overbook a session. If one drops out, another one could attend the session instead. This will make sure that we're utilizing our resources and time to the fullest.
- Ask the participants to do a test google hangout a day or two before
the actual event. This will make sure that the participants are not facing any technical issues and can attend the session seamlessly.
- Maybe at the time of registration we need to ask participants for their
phone numbers. We sent reminders to the participants by way of email but yet 2 of them did not show up. It could be that the didn't not read the mails well in time. If we had their phone numbers we could have messaged/called to send them a gentle reminder.
- We could also send across some useful links and videos for the
participants to go through before the session. This way participants will be warmed up and more informed for the session. It will also give the participants enough time to jot down all their queries and get them clarified during the session.
From my personal opinion, online outreach is something that can definitely work. Sitting in Bangalore I was able to train guys from Nepal & Mangalore. I'm hoping that they'll become active editors in English and in their respective native languages. Im really happy to note that at least one of them has already edited several articles in the medical space - which is his field of study.
I'd also like to thank Deepon - he'd put in a lot of time and effort for helping us conduct this session.
Many thanks of course to Nitika, who requested me to conduct the session, and who was omnipresent throughout the session, and took over from me whenever my net connection gave way (Another point: we need to somehow make sure that the instructors themselves have a good net connection).
Hoping to conduct more sessions like these.
Thanks
Swaroop Rao (MikeLynch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3aMikeLynch)
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