[Wikimedia-l] Board vote on narrowing focus

[Matthew Roth]

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Bence Damokos <bdamokos at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > Do you have an example in mind of a recent press release that took
> > advantage of this support?
> > How useful to you find ComCom, as a list and network, compared to direct
> > personal facilitation by WMF staff?
>

I spent a fair amount of time supporting Lodewijk and the international
team with press work around Wiki Loves Monuments, drafting press releases,
communications strategy, etc. When I couldn't continue to spend time in a
staff capacity given the many other demands for time, I did other work as a
volunteer, much as I did for other elements of organizing the U.S. version
of the contest. It was a great deal of fun and I look forward to helping
again next year, in both capacities.


> >
> While not recent or international; I have taken advantage of both personal
> WMF staff support and ComCom in the past, in slightly different
> circumstances. For planning a communications strategy, the direct input,
> coaching and concentrated involvement of a Comms manager of WMF was
> instrumental; while ComCom in my experience has been useful in providing
> advice on how to react to a situation, which required  less time of any
> given participant. In the former case the help might have been an
> "unmandated task", and the person providing the help did not need to be WMF
> staffer (after all, Wikimedia Deutschland also had similar levels of
> communications expertise at the time, though still no mandate to be
> available to the global community).
> One important result of this interaction (and also other similar
> interactions in other fields of expertise, as well as that of the
> WMF-funded organizational development pilot) was the transfer of skills,
> ways of thinking that has been useful beyond the one project in question,
> and has perhaps resulted in not requiring to contact WMF again.
>
>
In addition to working with folks on ComCom around reactive situations, or
PR training/planning, we continue to seek out material for the
communications channels that we manage, including the Wikimedia Foundation
blog <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blog> and several large social media
channels <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_Media>. Several chapters
and many individual Wikipedians have taken advantage to contribute material
to blog.wikimedia.org. We're working on a process to re-design that blog so
that we can better incorporate more voices beyond the Foundation and in
many more languages (think more of a news magazine format and not just a
chronological blogroll). We've been expanding the number of multi-lingual
posts <http://blog.wikimedia.org/tag/multilingual-post/> and utilizing the
great translate extension as much as possible. We'd welcome many more posts
about movement activities from chapters or other event and activity
organizers. The best way to do that is to contact me or anyone else listed
under the guidelines section of the Meta page for the blog here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog

We can get you help with editing the posts and put them on the calendar.
We're also happy to help share/re-tweet/further spread the word on social
media channels where applicable.

So hopefully the changes you see coming from the WMF communications team
include more support for the work you do, a more robust infrastructure to
make it easier to publicize your work, and much better multi-lingual
communications across the many channels available to us. Please feel free
to reach out to me directly or anyone at communications at wikimedia dot
org for any reason.

Matthew

-- 

Matthew Roth
Global Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
+1.415.839.6885 ext 6635
www.wikimediafoundation.org
*https://donate.wikimedia.org*