Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Falanster/Participate in communities/Report

Report accepted with comments

Dear Mr. Zabej,

Thank you for submitting your report and for your work on this project. We're pleased to accept this report with the following questions/comments:

1. Are there any additional on-wiki links you could share from these events or activities? For example, a category on Commons where people contributed photos, or articles that were created or improved as a result of these meet-ups.
2. It sounds like many of the participants in these events are involved in education, or have a related background. Was this what you expected? Does this change your expectations for planning similar events in the future?

It was great to learn that some of the publicity and communication for these activities happened independently from your own outreach efforts. It's a great initial step and we hope to see this develop into something more. We also recognize the value of in-person interactions to encourage more people's interest in editing, or offer them first-hand experience in some newer technologies they may not be aware of or had access. Thank you for sharing your insight and efforts to address this in Belarus, and I look forward to your responses soon!

Cheers, MJue (WMF) (talk) 01:38, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Dear MJue (WMF),

Thanks for the questions they also help us to reflect what we do and how.

About the first question. In the mid of activities we began to use outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org service for organization and tracking participant activities. As I mentioned above, it is not the tool for short-term workshop but it is useful for some long-term (at least several weeks or months) educational programs. You can observe here and here how we worked with universities students. Because of lack of traceability for one-two days workshorp we share articles created by participants in our reports and several of them on outreachdashboard (from Zdzitava, Baranavitchi). Unfortunately, on the Commons we didn't tag images with specific tag (it was usually "Belarus" or name of towns we visited, for example, Kruleuschyna (26th of December) or Baranavitchi (8th of October 2016)). But I keep in mind the idea to tag materials created in some project with a precise tag.

The second answer. Yes, we expected that education both formal and informal was the field which gives connection of our promotional activity with society. For the next step we need to multiply the skills helping us (WM User Group) to develop the promotion and engaging from an insider position. Because in this projects we acted mostly as guests and partners but not a part of a local (topic) community. This year we are going to share societal and organizational skills with active newcomers and they can increase influence on places (universities, schools, informal education clubs). Now we prepare summer WikiCamp where plan to do so and in autumn we will spread our best practice broader.

--Mr. Zabej (talk) 09:11, 2 February 2017 (UTC)