[Wikimedia-l] WMF's New Global South Strategy

[Asaf Bartov]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:51 AM, Anders Wennersten <
mail at anderswennersten.se> wrote:

> Thanks for sharing this, giving me an insight into an area where I myself
> have little first-hand experience
>
> [..]

> But what about the key issue: What are the parameters that makes a active
> community to be created and also be sustainable? We have a lot of anecdotal
> stories and a lot of subjective opinions, but have there ever been done a
> professional study taking an analytical approach, using many different of
> our communities as input to find the critical parameters that creates
> success or hampers/disintegrate active communities?
>

Not to my knowledge.  I explicitly state that this is a tough nut to crack,
i.e. that we don't yet know how to create that sustained core of
self-motivated active editors.  It's very much worth studying, but I don't
have a research department at my disposal.  If and when research brings us
some proposed solutions (we must not assume in advance that there is
precisely one way in which such cores come into existence), I'll be first
in line to listen and learn.  For now, with so much work to be done where
we _do_ have a core of active editors, we'll focus on working with those.

As stressed in the presentation, while we won't _actively_ try to make
something happen where there is no active editing community (e.g. Namibia,
Suriname, Botswana, Afghanistan), we remain open to experimentation with
_community initiatives_ anywhere in the world, via our grantmaking programs
as well as any advice, networking, etc. we can extend to support such
initiatives.

   Asaf
-- 
    Asaf Bartov
    Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>

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