Wikimedia Conference 2017/Program/17

17: A quest for the holy grail of the Wikimedia movement: how to get communities and volunteers involved in partnerships[edit]

How to move forward[edit]

group discussion

What was this session about?

Many partnerships between Wikimedia organizations and external partners (try to) include the Wikimedia communities. However, often this doesn’t work. This session focussed on strategies to involve communities better.

What are the next steps to be taken?

There are no next steps planned, efforts will be followed up within the partnerships group.

Photos

see the Commons category

Slides

Audience: Anyone working as or with community/volunteers in partnerships
Session Format: Workshop
Length: 60 min
Description: Many organizations and groups in the movement are already working with partners. Oftentimes, they would like to get more community members or volunteers involved in the partnerships to make it more effective and relevant to our projects. But what to do when you don’t have any community members in your region or you don’t know how to get in contact with any of them? It seems like getting community members and volunteers involved in a partnership is still some kind of holy grail in the movement.

In this session, we would like to collect and analyse some of the strategies that participants already use in their organizations and groups to get more people involved. Participants will be encouraged to share their experiences, successes and challenges. Together, maybe we can come up with a collection of lessons learned and good practices for the wider movement to implement.

The session will focus on getting Wikimedia community members involved as well as non-Wikimedia affiliated volunteers or even doing a partnership project without volunteers. Any additional perspectives will be welcome!

Desired Outcome: An overview of good practices and lessons learned, according to the different types of volunteers getting involved.
Next Steps and Milestones: Share the outcomes with the wider movement and inspire projects to be more strategic when planning community/volunteer involvement in partnerships
Speakers: Julia Kirchner (WMDE), Isla Haddow-Flood (WikiAfrica)

Documentation

There is no written transcript for this session, as it was mainly workshop session with smaller groups. The results of the group works were included into the presentation slides.