User:CKoerner (WMF)/Work/Promoting small events

What is a small event? Something that is less than a whole day. IRC Meetings being a prime example. If we were to organize events by the effort and time it took to organize them, it would look something like this:

• Small - at most a few hours (like say a 9am to noon workshop) with a near-zero budget
• Medium - one to two day event with a small (a few hundred USD) budget
• Large - Multiple days, people coming from more than 50 miles away, budgets in the thousands.

Existing Channels

Currently there are a few channels that are commonly used to promote small events.

On-wiki

• Notices
  • central notice
  • site notice
  • geo-notice
  • watchlist notice
• signpost/kurier/etc.
• beta features
• village pumps
• newsletters and usertalk page bots
• Tech/News
• wikiproject talk pages,
• Echo
• Random talk pages
• en:WP:Cent

Off-wiki

• mailing lists
• IRC
• Phabricator
• product/design trello boards and mingle boards
• wikimedia blog

Other/New Channels

Outreach beyond these existing channels

• Social Media
• Meetup groups
• Other orgs (co-working spaces, incubators, Pecha Kulcha, Strange loop,)

Plan in advance

• topic - what do you want to talk about? why now?
• time - who do you want involved? We're international. A large chunk of staff are in SF. What time works best (protip: afternoons 18:00 UTC to 20 UTC???)
• who - related to time and topic, who do you want to show up? Staff from a team, representatives of a community? People with strong feelings about your topic? Make sure they're in on the meeting and are ready to discuss the topic with folks.

Promote

• Mailing lists - all of them
  • wikimedia-l
  • wikitech-l
  • mediawiki-l
  • department-specific (reading, editing, archcom, discovery, etc) - what ever makes sense for your topic

• IRC - pop in to channels in advance or ask to set topic to promote

Suggested timeline

day of

• have an agenda
  • questions to prompt discussion

Other notes

• Where do one-on-one consultations go?
• Re-occuring vs one-time events
• What are the opportunities to mention small events?:
  • Mention in talk page discussions (when appropriate). "This is a good question. If you'd like to know more about what xxxx is doing, join us at our upcoming office hours."

on irc

have a topic

people that use IRC will be there

checklist

timeline

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Calendar/How_to_schedule_an_event#Tech_talks

IRC office hours/Guidelines

Social media & smaller tech events

TC Plan for using MediaWiki social media accounts to promote tech-related events and news.

• Chris Koerner helps to manage the social media accounts for MediaWiki.
  • Post 3 times a week from both the Twitter and Facebook MediaWiki account. Links would include:
    • From existing events and wiki tech news sources:
      • Scheduled events (Tech talks, CREDIT showcase, IRC office hours)
      • Tech News
    • Seek out existing information to share
      • interesting/quirky projects
      • metrics
      • Factoids about MW and related tech
      • new developments as they come along
      • Ask people to send stuff to us to share

Remind folks we can help with the editorial review of events and things to share on social media (like we do with Tech news. Some things fit there, some do not.)

We have other opportunities to help better promote our tech events. His suggestion is to look for engagement with other folks in this area of the world (open source/free knowledge). He also encouraged us to think about using social media to promote more than just our events. As they are frequent, there's an opportunity to draw more visibility and participation with related topics.

Jeff is also interested in us contacting him with something that is big (ops breaking the wiki, deployment of new feature, large milestone, interesting use case, interesting developer story). We can work with him to write up a blog post for these larger items. For smaller 'day-to-day' technical ongoings he's happy to retweet/share with the larger Wikimedia social media accounts.