CIS-A2K/Pilot Designs/Storytelling

Storytelling for community building involves short profiles in the form of stories of editors - covering their life as well as their wiki stories. The intent is to reflect the diversity of our community - language / age / profession / project / etc.

Storytelling is a form of in-reach and outreach. It will help to recognize the good work of our community members - and hence motivate existing editors as well as support editor retention. It will also serve to illustrate and "humanize" the community to the outside world - which will help attracting newbies.

Context & Objectives

There are approximately 1000 active editors on English Wikipedia in India and approximately 500 active editors across 20 Indic language Wikipedias. Profiling such members and giving them an anchor within the community through inspiring stories about each other can

Keep them motivated
Motivate other editors
Encourage people to approach the profiled editors and start collaborating more actively.

Pilot

What: One profile of an Indian Wikimedian every month starting April 2012
Where: On Chapter and India Program blogs (with links to respective mailing lists and village pumps), and where possible on WMF's blog
How:

Identify potential stories for telling:
Post on mailing lists, village pumps, talk pages and offline emails and ask for community volunteers who could be profiled and suggestions for who could be profiled - based on special stories. (The constant endeavor will be to make every story special - which it inevitably is.) This will be done on mailing lists as well as offlist.
A public table (on meta) will be prepared of those who have volunteered and are therefore scheduled to be profiled.
(Try) and prioritise projects where volunteer profiles can help energise a project
Interview members and publish concise posts w/o pictures.
Attempt to get local press coverage of these profiles. (Needs to be tried for 3-6 months to see if there is genuine media interest. Intuitively, local language media have special interest in local profiles.)

Who: Users of different profiles: language / age / profession / project / etc.
Also: The Chapter blog and personal blogs of users are at two different ends. Chapter blog mostly portrays stories of projects or announcements while user blogs have many interesting personal Wikipedia stories. The storytelling initiative can try and be a mid-point.

Learning points

How do we make the constantly improve the quality of the storytelling format to support community collaboration, editor retention as well attracting newbies? (This is ongoing and will become clearer only after 3 months of this effort.)
Can media interest be generated and / or improved?

Measures of success and outcome

Process

Measure	Objective	Baseline	Actual	Assessment / Comment
Number of stories	1 story each month	na	to be filled in every month	to be filled in every month

Outcome

Measure	Objective	Baseline	Actual	Assessment / Comment
Profiles covered	1 story every month with diversity of language / age / profession / project.	na	List of people covered - by language / age / profession / project	To be filled in every quarter starting Jul 2012