Talk:Affiliate-selected Board seats/2016/Nominations/Siska Doviana

Individual endorsement

• I individually endorse siska's candidature. I'm sure she can bring new perspectives that lack in the WMF board. Especially, I think the WMF board suffers from the lack of perspective from Asia, and volunteer culture in the associated countries. Our mouvement, in a volunteer movement from all over the world, and I hope we can have more volunteer perspective than the only UK and US one's. --Chandres 14:46, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Question to the candidate

Content adding

Do you think the interesting kind of initiative for distributed content addition/edit drive, that you run in Indonesia, could/should be exported in many other languages? If so, how and what role should the WMF have in it? Nemo 10:11, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi Nemo,

Thank you for your question.

TL;DR

There are two kind of edit drive in Indonesia, the one that WMID lead/ driven or the volunteer driven ones. To answer your question, I'm going to assume the edit drive is the WMID one.

Q: could/should be exported in many other languages?

A: Could, yes, absolutely. We tried with many different languages Wikipedia (in Indonesia) and it keep having the same outcome. So result can be calculated even before you start the project with strict assumption that the organizer follow the "competition system" instruction with discipline. The process is so systematic I could franchise it.

However, should it be exported? Perhaps yay or nay. In my effort pitching the "competition system" to other Asian chapters for example, the process is so "resource heavy", it's scary, a lot of the chapters leaders politely decline, even though successful result is guarantee.

Q: If so, how and what role should the WMF have in it?

A: Well, short answer when I said resource heavy, some of these resource needed are funding.

However, do allow me to elaborate and detour in answering "role". In chapters, it is known that there are volunteers and there are professional. There are boring professional role, a.k.a accountant and there are exciting professional role a.k.a executive director, managers, talent officers, event managers - you name it. These two creatures are difficult balance since Wikipedia content are made by volunteers, and in the presence of funding and where there are non-wikipedian professional handling it - there will be some kind of jealousy of "Your money comes from my work." Or, "You don't respect me enough as a volunteer". To restore the "balance", I usually put limit on where your volunteer works end and professional begin, and reverse it as well to where your professional works end, and you gotta do this voluntarily since this is a voluntary movement.

The same happens with content competition that requires, in 2014, cost 45 thousand US dollar to roll. Jaimee, a WMF employee, who run a volunteer "Wiki Education" in Berlin at one point hold her breath and go, "Wow, that's expensive, ours are voluntary and free...". It's different. Our program had a guarantee result, hers, you gotta pray and pray hard to reach the level of result that WMID gets in three months. Should the volunteer effort stops? Absolutely not. Different goals. In Wikipedia Asian Month, the writing competition and participant get postcard. It is a feel good experience from one volunteer to another - from wikipedian to wikipedian. But this wikipedian to wikipedian program or volunteer to volunteer program can not be done if there's no volunteer in the first place, like, Sundanese Language Wikipedia, for example, who had 0 very active and 1 active in April 2014. This is where the "expensive" program steps in.

So you have this writing competition with grand prize equal to USD 3,000 for one winner if they wrote content for Wikipedia for 3 months straight. The participant is non wikipedian, never wrote wikipedia, and perhaps not interested in volunteering. Let's imagine this wikipedia writing competition as if it is a singing contest like American Idol (or Euro Star), where they go through stages, and they are not "singer". The grand prize is a car, an awesome awesome car. As a participant, you probably can sing, don't like to do it under pressure, but ... you want the car. You're not the only participant, and along the way the organizer and the platform receives lots and lots song being sang from participants.

If you don't like to sing, once you get the car, you stop singing and start driving. But if you like to sing, whether you're in competition or not, once you get the car, you're singing and driving. This also rings true in our competition for content. The competition train you how to write in Wikipedia in certain (high) standard, you win, you don't like editing wikipedia, you stop. But if you like doing it, believe in the effort, you keep going. Our winner in 2010 still edits, but a lot have stop. She also WMID Board of Trustee now. We got a spanking awesome next generation wikimedian because of that expensive program, who would otherwise won't be caught in the radar.

Back to funding, because running something like this is complicated and yes a lot of resource needed. Funding also should be carefully disbursed because this effort need curating, you can't just drop the money, run, return asking for report. Wikimedia Foundation role could also be coaching along with funding.

When I say careful funding, I didn't mean too careful. WMF knows that Asia Pasific chapters spending are minus and didn't get support.

In my experience running content producing programs you need to do a lot of experiment, expensive experiment, and sometimes they just fail (and fail and fail), other time you hit jackpot, but each time it needs funding. In my effort, I pay for the failure, but I didn't recommend this done to other people (and to myself!). Also it need to be understood that a successful content producing effort takes time to be fruitful. Javanese Language Wikipedia Competition take five years to finally show a sustainable volunteer life indicator - imagine if it is being cut off in the first or second year because it looks like it's not going to be successful.

Still about coaching and funding, WMID produce a book on how to edit or contribute to Wikipedia, an Indonesian version of "Wikipedia: A Missing Manual" and put it in commons. In the grant guidelines it says "The WMF does not generally support offline (hard-copy) publishing of materials", and even though I support this - I'm also sad, as I realize that the guide book that we print is needed. WMID probably going to print 500 copies of the book, but the most rewarding experience is not the book in print form, but it is to put your 10 years editing experience in one place that it is coherent enough that other people could understand, pay illustrator, pay graphic designer, pay other writer - and look at the whole process and go, "Yeah, you might not need it in a lot of print, but shit, this thing cost a lot and is needed by the volunteer who do wikipedia training and doesn't have time to make it from scratch".

So WMF role, funding, motivating, and coaching. In the event that volunteer need to motivate WMF staff and coach them instead, just funding would do :D Siska.Doviana (talk) 18:10, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

that it is coherent enough that other people could understand,... at last your wiki is coherent enough to print a book about it. You have no idea how hard is to introduce to newbies incoherent wikipedias where different ways of doing things exist at the same and few people cares. Long-term users lave to newbies the cost of dealing with those contradictions, often ignoring themselves as a sort of agreement when they say one thing or the other to the new users. Soon enough the situation is so convoluted that ignoring the problem becomes the "right way" of dealing with it. I could write a book about the experience, but they might call it trolling. You are more lucky than you think :)--Alexmar983 (talk) 12:47, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

HOTOSM

What is HOTOSM? I was translating to italian your profile and I have no idea what you're talking about. I apologize if it something you can easily find on google, here in China I can't use google :)--Alexmar983 (talk) 12:41, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I believe she refers to Humanitarian OpenStreet Maps Gombang (talk) 14:44, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Gombang.--Alexmar983 (talk) 17:06, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Questions to be addressed

Hi, I've been reading through the answers to the questions that have been posed by the community, and I note that there are several long-standing questions that you have not yet responded to, including my own question on the openness of board proceedings. Knowing where the candidates stand on a variety of issues is important when deciding who to vote for, and if you have not done so recently it would be worth reviewing the questions that still remain to be answered. MichaelMaggs (talk) 17:32, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

SORRY, we just had a annual member meeting two days ago, and I'm wrapping up annual report. I'll address the question tonight. Siska.Doviana (talk) 08:47, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

What to do in these cases?

Hi dear Siska Doviana, Talk:Affiliate-selected Board seats/2016/Nominations/Susanna Mkrtchyan#Questions from 6AND5/2, Requests for comment/Indefinite block the user:6AND5 in the armenian Wikipedia ?--6AND5 (talk) 10:30, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Platform

Hi Siska, and thank you for running for the ASBS process. I personally believe that your candidacy is something we desperately need in these difficult times for our movement.

That said, I would like to ask one very important question: what do you intend to do when you're elected to the Board of Trustees?. We are very aware of what you bring to the table, and we don't question your ability to lead and ably serve on the Board, but it would help us make an informed decision if we have some idea as to what your plans are for when you are elected. :) --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 13:55, 25 March 2016 (UTC)