[Wikimediaau-l] Chapter activity ideas

[Brianna Laugher]

Hi,

So, thinking about this stuff kept me awake last night. All the little
cogs in my brain were churning very busily! I hope by writing it down
I can get some more restful sleep tonight. :)

I hope everyone can see from my list below that there is huge scope
for members to drive most of the items below.

OK, so... Stuff we can do!

* "Editors Challenges": hold regular competitions/contests for
creating and improving Wikimedia content. These could be for
Australia-related content, or just for Australian/member editors. They
could be focused on a particular project. There could be themed ones
like "Greatest improvement to an Australian town/suburb article" or
"Best brand new article developed within 2 weeks". or "Best
improvement to MediaWiki.org documentation" or whatever. lots of
possibilities.

* "Australian content portal": we should start a cross-project portal
that highlights high-quality Australia-related content from all
projects. (portal.wikimedia.org.au ?) Eventually I'd like to see this
develop into a "Wikimedia Australia Live Content CD/DVD" or something
similar. Lots of work in sorting and assessing and actually improving
content. Esp. hook into Australian curricula too.

* Blog! ( blog.wikimedia.org.au ) Not sure if this needs justifying,
but it's a great way to communicate to members, potential members, the
wider Wikimedia community and also the wider Australian community. I
was thinking one thing that might be nice would be little "interviews"
with longstanding Australian editors, about their Wiki*edia
experience, favourite articles, disputes, memories,   that kind of
thing.

* "How to contribute to Wikimedia CD/DVD": For this I would look for
specific funding. But it would be cool to create/collect and collate
introductory "How to contribute" style manuals for each of the
projects, screencasts, video, who knows... Maybe also
audience-specific stuff, like for schools, local community history
groups, businesses/orgs who want to know how they can interact with
the article on their group.

*? I thought of this last night, maybe encourage "Wikimedia Editors
Clubs" in schools/universities? like enable local groups that are
extremely light-weight on the admin side.

*? "Certificate of Appreciation" scheme... so I thought of this last
night too. Let's see what people think. Lots of people spend a lot of
time contributing to Wikimedia, and you typically learn/utilise useful
skills in doing so, but it's not something that sits easily on a CV
(thinking of high school/uni students here). So, maybe we could
develop a scheme where on request we perform some semi-automatic
analysis of a user's contribs, and create a "Certificate of
Appreciation" that mentions the generic skills typically gained, and
highlights strengths of that user's contribs (eg attained admin, has
FAs, dispute resolution). We could then email this nice summary to the
user and they have some useful phrases to use in their CV about their
Wikimedia involvement. Or, for an administration fee (discounted for
members :)), we could print and laminate such a certificate and send
it to the person, + a listing on the website.
There are lots of caveats and details to work out (like, a block
record probably disallows you from using this, and maybe there should
be a edits/time threshold), but at its base I think it may be useful
as a "bridge" of formal recognition between the Wikipedia world and
the "real" world. I just remember when I was a uni student, I spent a
*lot* of time editing Wikipedia and it kinda sucked that I couldn't
really put that on my CV. :)

*? Maybe offer more generic MediaWiki services to companies, groups
etc? I think there is a certain amount of scope, not heaps, for us to
promote MediaWiki and wikis as a generally useful tool rather than
only for Wikimedia. I think that way because the first step to
becoming comfortable contributing to Wikimedia is becoming comfortable
with wikis as a general tool, and the second step is becoming
comfortable with MediaWiki specifically.

Organisational/administration stuff that's important:
* (AGM)
* Setting up the basic website, making it look less like the MW
default would be nice...
* Setting up the members DB and joining procedure, incl. payment handling
* decide what we want WRT state branches
* hopefully helping to institute more regular meetups. events
calendar! (Germany has multiple meetups every month, or maybe even
every week, which is pretty amazing)
* start to explore funding/grants options more seriously

feedback and other ideas welcome...

Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/