Talk:Wikimedia Fellowships/Project Ideas/Local Community Fellow

Why it cannot be a volunteer

A lot of the things you are describing are done by volunteers in the most Wikipedia-active countries, although perhaps these things are not being done by Italian volunteers. Suppose there was a local community fellow somewhere in Italy - what would happen after a year? Would the project be self-sustaining without further funding? How is this project a necessary step on the path to permanently increasing volunteers without funding? Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:02, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your kind question. Before I answer, can you please list for me these activities that other volunteers do in the most Wikipedia-active countries, just to make sure we're talking about the same things? :) Thank you! --Elitre 22:49, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Everything you list in the "what a fellow does" except for writing the weekly digest, committing daily activity, doing meta-research, and being a multi-project expert seem to be the kinds of things which volunteers do. I live in America and many big cities here have regular meetups - see here - coordinated by volunteers. Most of the people who go to the meetups are committed enough to be involved in the big discussions and debates and almost always they are aware of and contribute to the Wikipedia articles and resources which are relevant to their home geographical area.

The surveying and data collection on usage patterns would be nice, but research is not easy to coordinate, make reliable, interpret, or publish without institutional backing, and that hardly seems like a single-person effort and more like something which would need to begin when an established group grew enough to start wanting it. How would this work?

Would the local community fellow be someone who rises from an established volunteer base and takes on a leadership role? Would the fellow create a volunteer base? In either instance, what would the fellow do that would affect more than just a single geographical area?

I certainly think there ought to be something like a community fellow in every region of the world, but I am not sure that there is funding for such people to receive a stipend indefinitely especially when much of the community-building in the position is done in other places by volunteers. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:22, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply! I actually think that some answers are already on that page, maybe scattered.: plus, I want to make clear that this is still a draft, things might still be added or deleted, but I think I'm going to focus on this if and when the Foundation declares the project is feasible.

However, this Fellowship is not about setting up ordinary meetups, filling a page with some news from time to time, writing local articles or anything that a volunteer has already done in our community. It is about establishing a bond between a specific linguistic community (people from all the projects in that language) and the Foundation. It's about spreading correct information about WMF, it's about getting people aware of opportunities, grants, fellowships, jobs, it's about getting volunteers involved in community life by keeping them updated about what is going on around them; because their volunteer time is precious and not infinite, and they have the right to focus on what they want but will also be provided at least with a choice, the choice of being more involved in our greater community. I can understand you don't see the need for that in the USA: you should walk a mile in our shoes. Although we are talking about one of the biggest Wikipedias and you might know a few very active Wikimedians (former board members, stewards, translators and so on), I strongly believe this community has a much higher potential, so much more to give and an improved participation from our community can only bring a positive wave of energy and diversity. BTW, the WMF is seriously concerned about how its activities are perceived by the communities and what can be done to engage more volunteers in global discussions and programs: you'll realize this better by reading again questions and results for the April 2011 survey with these lines in mind. In order to reach our goal we need this community (not only the English-speaking ones) to know and face current issues and challenges in the Wikimedian movement, and I am going to provide just a few examples. Did you know we never had a discussion about some major topics, like gender gap? Did you know that many crucial messages we receive via the Global notification system, like the one about the Fellowships itself, just sit there unnoticed? Did you know that the fracture among the community, the chapters and WMF is so deep that there is a bid for a Wikimania in an Italian city that is not supported by Wikimedia Italia nor by any “prominent” Italian Wikipedian? Do you think this is going to get better anytime soon thanks to volunteer work? I am a Wikipedian and I "know who I am dealing with": I know that they might do more, but they need coordination, and someone to show them a path, before they do. Good luck finding a volunteer for that: I know people who would not consider undertaking this task, even if paid, because of its complexity. Good luck also trying to measure his/her impact for a task done on irregular basis in time and effort, without coordination with WMF professionals who might have helped :)

What you need in every project is enthusiasm, and devotion. This is why (just further examples) Wikimedia Italy, which can now rely on 400 members or so, has AFAIK diminished its activities in time, although they could now provide some refunds to people organizing them, and only 2 bulletins were written about them last year (they will hire someone for PR activities sooner or later). Again, just my POV here, this is what happens when enthusiasm is gone, since devotion can only be focused on few things at a time. The point of my proposal is you will no longer need “staff” once you have a bunch of volunteers who can take care of something because they realize it is crucial to do that. We are at a point where that group needs to be found and put in conditions to keep working and foster enthusiasm in fellow wikipedians autonomously, because, alas, time has not managed to make that happen in a spontaneous way - it.wiki was not born yesterday... After a while it will be only a pleasure for me to be able to say “Nothing to do here”. Hope this helps :) --Elitre 23:23, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

I think that this, although it's not strictly related, is an interesting reading confirming some of my worries. --Elitre 13:30, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

That is interesting. When donors in language-specific regions would prefer to make a region-specific donation but that region is not set up to receive localized donations, then I am not sure what should happen. With targeted donations, the populations which are most interested in developing a community base could develop proportionally to their interest. A counterpoint might be that WMF might be expecting communities to reach a certain level of self-organization before it can start doing high-level collaboration with them. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:39, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Alignment with Community Liason role

I this this is generally a good idea - cross-language communication is really important for the movement and I know that many at WMF would love to have more insight into conversations happening in different language communities and develop more channels to share information. The Fellowship Program will be passing on this idea right now, however. WMF has considered expanding its Community Liason roles (which currently are English-focused) to other languages, and we expect a project like this might be a better fit with that than as a fellowship. Let's see how things develop, you would be welcome to re-open this idea again in the future! Siko Bouterse (WMF) (talk) 21:03, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Getting a right person to the right place

This is definitely a good idea. But how will work the selection. I mean how you get the right person to the right place? Have you coined with this question?--Juandev (talk) 19:19, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Juandev, sorry for the delay. Would you please elaborate your question, is it about how WMF should select someone or something else? --Elitre (talk) 12:18, 20 June 2012 (UTC)