Campaigns/How to Organize
Organizers have been the lifeblood for growing the communities that support Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia projects rely on a network of volunteers (community) built around them to ensure contributions from every single person in the network.
Organizers, be it local or international (meta), have been leading this space and filling knowledge gaps by inviting, training, and retaining new people through campaigns, and partnerships. However, the organizing landscape leaves a lot to be desired, from the lack of capacity-building opportunities for these frontlines to proper documentation around the work to provide recognition or create a clear pathway for how people can become.
The Campaigns Program team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been working to help grow the entire ecosystem by organizing and working closely with the campaigns product team to ensure the development of an ecosystem that is conclusive for campaign organizing within the Wikimedia space.
In the interim, we are building bridges to ensure our community of organizers is ready when this ecosystem is fully developed. This page will focus on curating research, documentation, and capacity-building opportunities that complement or enhance the work of organizing.
What have we been working on?
We have been working on a beta version of a 9-week online course dubbed the "Organizer Lab" to train organizers about topics for impact organizing. This response to several calls from organizers for capacity-building opportunities also addresses prioritized discussions from our communities as part of the movement strategy process. The first iteration of the course will however focus on climate and sustainability organizing following recent trends and interest from the Wiki4humanrights campaigns.
We have also been collecting and curating information about how organizing has been done in our movement. The first draft of an Organizer Framework to support folks who are interested in organizing content campaigns and contests in the Wikimedia Ecosystem is ready for your consumption. We are still gathering information and documentation so if you find something that is missing you can always share it with our team.
