Wikimedia Fellowships/Project Ideas/Occupedia
OccupediA is: regular gatherings of people whose input is missing from Wikipedia. Activities include editing, meeting up to generate content, and learning to be a wikipedia contributor in a safer space, creating the space and time to focus on participation to the larger project.
Rationale[edit]
Recent statistics showed that not very many Wikipedia contributors were women and this project aims to address that in a documented way that attempts to be sustainable. As "Unlocking the Clubhouse" demonstrated, women sometimes need that extra step of a direct invitation to participate. The meritocracy model often finds people contributing to open source projects on their own time, randomly and sometimes late at night. This project will create a dedicated time (and provide childcare) that invites women and other groups of persons who are not represented very evenly in Wikipedia contributors statistics to put aside time to come and contribute with support and a safer space for learning, asking questions, and connecting with others. If the model of 'individual at home' doesn't attract certain populations, let's turn that around and create a social gathering with the intent of generating content and maintaining the ecosystem we create together.
Targeted - addresses strategic theme(s) or goals
This project directly addresses the theme of gaining and sustaining new editors to the project
Actionable - has concrete deliverables and outcomes
This project will create a branded event that can be held regularly and will be developed with sustainability and community building in mind so that it can carry on indefinitely.
Impactful - can have impact on a large group of people, articles, projects
The impact will be in several places. There is the serving of a relative few (ie: people who show up to physical gatherings) and at the same time there is the serving of many because these gathering will create new content that is currently missing due to lack of diverse input to the wikipedia commons. Hopefully this project will have lasting impact in filling in some of the gaps of what we can't see yet.
Sustainable - builds volunteer-driven continuity over time
This project is about creating and promoting the project, developing guidelines, training and encouraging community members to take on leadership roles and also about building a way to measure the participation of this particular effort. It will be sustainable in that there will be a focus on building physical and in-person community space & time for these events to continue to occur on a dependable schedule indefinitely.
Scalable - has the potential to transfer knowledge or approaches to multiple languages or projects
Everything can be documented and promoted to encourage replication of this initiative in other cities, in other hackspaces or even living rooms.
Measurable - can demonstrate impact
Attendance, participant survey, tracking the contributions of users who attend and the retention over time. This area is of most interest to me but also where I need to learn the most on how to get valuable information that can be analyzed in useful ways.
Submitted by[edit]
Lukas Blakk @lsblakk on Twitter
Endorsements[edit]
This section is for endorsements by Wikimedia community volunteers. Please note that this is not a debate, vote, or poll, but is rather a space for volunteers to describe in detail why they think a project idea is of value. If you have concerns or questions rather than an endorsement to make, please use the idea Talk page. Endorsements by volunteers willing to work in collaboration with a fellowship recipient on a project are highly encouraged.
- Nice idea ZeaForUs (talk) 18:31, 25 February 2012 (UTC)