2019:Community Growth/Designing for Organizing in the Wikimedia Movement

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Community Growth/Designing for Organizing in the Wikimedia Movement

Szymborska · Saturday 14:00 - 15:30

Notes · Live stream

Recorded session

Description

Over the last 18 years, the Wikimedia Movement formed organically, allowing for a diversity of motivations, ways of working, and desired impacts that reach far beyond measurable pageviews and content pages into many different parts of society. Yet at the same time, this diversity has also created a shared community of practice that spans many parts of the world, and does many of the same things: convening different stakeholders, with different goals to create educational content and educational communities around the Wikimedia projects. Ultimately organizers are the front door for achieving the aims of the movement direction.

During the first half of 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation completed a generative study, following the earlier examples of New Editors or New Readers. The new Movement Organizers research seeks to understand and articulate the shared challenges across the global organizing community. This research can help staff at the Wikimedia Foundation as well as community leaders see and evaluate these challenges and then build local and international collaborations to design support for existing organizers and better welcome new organizers into the community.

During this session, we will

• share key findings from the Movement Organizers research in an introductory presentation (30-40 minutes);
• then invite members of affiliates and other community groups who have run programs for supporting organizers, to talk about their experience designing for growing and developing organizers (25-30 minutes);
• 20-30 minutes for questions, feedback and thinking about how community members can provide organizer support to their communities.

If we have interest at the end of the session, we will find one of the empty meetup space classrooms to further discuss findings, and provide space for folks to talk about the various components of the research

Relationship to the theme

The organisers of the community growth space believe that the space will address the following Sustainable Development Goals:

• 9 Industry, innovation and infrastructure
• 10 Reduced inequalities
• 11 Sustainable cities and communities
• 16 Peace, justice and strong institutions
• 17 Partnerships for the goals.

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner: Organizers are the lifeblood of the Wikimedia movement and any and all attempts to include new voices and diversity, approach allies and partners for introducing the Wikimedia movement to new groups of allies and participants rely on the work of organizers at some level -- addressing the SDGs requires a pipeline of organizers in the movement

Relationship to the space

The organisers of the space and the community have identified a number of topics they wish to address in this space. Please explain how your proposal its into these topic areas.

As a reminder, the proposed topics are listed at 2019:Community Growth

This session will address the topics o f the Growth space in the following manner: Organizers are part of growing healthy offline communities that bring awareness, education and access to the online Wikimedia communities.

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:

Participants will have:

• A thorough understanding of what to expect from the findings of the Movement Organizers research
• Exposure to community experiences in supporting and training community organizers
• Generate ideas for applying the insight from the research for supporting organizer development in local communities
  

Session leader(s)

• Alex Stinson, Wikimedia Foundation
• Maria Cruz, Wikimedia Foundation
• Potential invitees for the community panel and workshop portion of the program include the following (We are not reaching out for preparation on the session until we have a firmer idea of the format and time allocated for the session):
  • CIS-A2K in India (Train the trainer programs)
  • Wikimedia Indonesia (New Organizer Programs)
  • Wikimedia Argentina (Activist Organizer Support)
  • Wikimedia DC (GLAM Wiki Bootcamp)

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

• Lightning talk
• Workshop to identify and try to solve problem
• Roundtable discussion forum
• Panel with audience Question & Answer session
• Teaching session
• Conference presentation
• Poster
• Other

See format discussion above in the description of the session

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

• Room: Room with space for clustering into groups, preferably with tables or sheets of paper to work around.

• Audience: Community members interested in growing the community of organizers in their contexts or interested in better designing support for their existing community of organizers.

• Recording: Yes

• Time requested: 90 minutes

Relationship with the organisers of the space

The organisers of the community growth space wish to provide any necessary support to presenters and participants that they may need and also wish to have an active role in shaping the content of the space to maximise the benefit of all attendees. Please let us know if you would appreciate any help, and if you consent to constructive suggestions from the organiser team that would allow the largest amount of people to share and benefit from each other's contributions.

• I would be interested in receiving help in shaping my submission: YES / NO.
  • In particular, I would need the following type of help or advice:I don't need support but am happy to collaborate to help it fit better within the Space
• I consent to the organisers of the space contacting me to discuss alternative ways to present my knowledge (for example, merging two proposals into a common presentation, a panel debate instead of a lightning talk, etc.), or ways to modify and improve my proposal (for example by ensuring a gender diversity on panels) : YES / NO
• If my proposal is not selected for a presentation, I would be interested in presenting my proposal in the form of a poster in the Community Growth space: YES / NO -- this content is best delivered as a conversation with multiple communities.
• I consent to my proposal being proposed to organisers of other spaces if it would be a good cross-over topic or if it fits better into the other space's scope: YES / NO