Documentation and learning/Wikimania Team

For a successful Wikimania, the local team is extremely important. The local team does the ground work, and becomes the familiar faces and ambassadors for the event for many of the attendees.

This page aims to go through a few takeaways on what it means to find the right team, how to communicate within the team and and how to set up a working team structure.

Main takeaways:

The central roles within the (local) core team include:
- The conference manager or coordinator, with overall responsibility of the local responsibilities.
- The chairs of the program and scholarship committees. One of the two co-chairs of the scholarship committees are usually from the hosting chapter, and the work of the program committee chair affects and is affected by the work of the local team.
- The volunteer coordinator, whose job it is to propose a volunteer strategy, recruit leading volunteer roles, find a way of attracting and selecting a large enough pool of volunteers, as well as managing and coordinating volunteers during the conference.
- The communications coordinator, who is responsible for the work with social media – externally on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, internally on platforms such as Telegram and the Wikimania Wiki.
- The community village coordinator, who proposes and develops the idea for the community village, makes sure to get what is needed, and coordinates it during the conference.
- The documentation coordinator, who coordinates the work with recording, documenting and spreading the outcomes of Wikimania.
The central roles in the core team are preferably handpicked based on quality, experience and geographic and time availability. It might be a good idea to do interviews for the roles, if they are not chosen on beforehand.
The roles vary in terms of when and how they have to be performed. Some roles need to be carried out for a long time, but possibly remotely, whereas others need to be done for a short and intense time but on the spot. A core team member should however be able to spend a couple of months, approaching half a year, on hard work and intense efforts, whether in a volunteering or staff role.
The ideal situation is if the local core team consists of a mix of staff members and volunteers; if only staff members are involved, it might be harder for the community and local volunteers to feel included, whereas if only volunteers are involved, the central volunteers will bear a heavy burden.