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Submissions/Outreach CAN work

From Wikimania 2012 • Washington, D.C., USA

This is a rejected submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.
151
Title of the submission
Outreach CAN Work! : Best Practices from >50 Outreach Sessions in India
Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)
Presentation
Author of the submission
Hisham Mundol & Nitika Tandon
E-mail address
hmundol@wikimania.org, ntandon@wikimedia.org
Username
User:Hisham , User:Nitika.t
Country of origin
India
Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)
Consultants to WMF, India Program
Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Outreach is hard work. Very hard work; and often with terribly uninspiring results. WMF has been supporting the community in India to make outreach more effective - and to build capability, confidence and interest in community members to conduct undertake more outreach. I'd like to present some real-life stories as well as tips on how outreach sessions can drive conversion from close to 0% to closer to 5%. There are 5 broad sup-topics:

  • Before: How do we identify the appropriate audience? What should the right number be for an audience? When to say no to an opportunity?
  • During: What are the absolute essentials to cover? How long should a session be? How do we make sure it is actually hands-on? How do we get the quiet folks in the room to come up?
  • After: How can we stay in touch with participants? What are the typical mistakes that newbies make and how do we help them? Where is the greatest need to help out a newbie? What can we do to nudge newbies to become active editors?
  • Later: How do we track and measure impact of outreach sessions?
  • Next: How do we constantly improve? What innovations have we tried? How do we transfer these tips to the larger community?

Every community needs to attract newbies and outreach represents the single most powerful way of doing this. Over the course of the past few months, there have been a nearly 50 outreach sessions conducted by various community members in India. We have tried to study as many of them as possible and put in place a constant and rapid improvement system. This presentation will present lessons which we believe have global relevance - for large and mature community as well as tiny and more nascent ones. We’d like to share our learnings, best practices and challenges of attracting newbies with the global Wiki community.

Track
  • WMF Outreach
Length of presentation/talk
60 Minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
Yes
Slides or further information (optional)
Slides and maybe videos
Special request as to time of presentations
None


Interested attendees

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  1. Interested, but should this be merged with Submissions/Best practices in mentoring programs? Sumanah (talk) 17:58, 21 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I agree this can probably be merged, and probably a good idea to do so to accommodate other presentations. SarahStierch (talk) 22:11, 21 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Rangilo Gujarati (talk) 17:53, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]