Hi Mike
This sounds a very worthwhile exercise and subject to comments by D'Arcy
and the staff team I think it's very likely that this could be done
association with WMUK. No doubt the bulk of the work in preparing the
survey and analysing the results would be done by a group of volunteers,
with you leading (volunteers in front, as it should be!). Do you have
an idea of what resources you'd like from the charity? Perhaps WMUK
could use its volunteer and member database to broaden the reach of the
survey by distributing it by email?
Best regards
Michael
____________
Michael Maggs
Chair, Wikimedia UK
Michael Peel <mailto:em...@mikepeel.net>
13 May 2015 22:13
Hi all,
tl;dr summary: I'm planning to run a survey about wikimeets in the
near future. Do you have any comments/suggestions on the draft? See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Peel/Wikimeet_survey
At a recent meetup, a Wikipedian who was new to wikimeets pointed out
that the event had the air of a gentleman's club about it. Looking
around at the high-back comfy chairs, the Victorian-era interior
decorations, the pints of real ale, and the mostly-male (and regular)
attendees, I couldn't really disagree with their assessment. This
started me thinking: are there better venues and times to hold
meetups, or better ways of advertising/inviting people to planned
meetups? What would make them more open and inviting to new editors,
or the many long-term editors that have never attended a meetup?
As an experiment to try to improve the attendance and advertising of
wikimeets in the North of England, a few months ago I posted messages
on the talk pages of previous wikimeet attendees about the last Leeds
and Manchester wikimeets, and the Liverpool wikimeet coming up this
weekend. There was, unexpectedly, a pretty good response, with a
number of people signing up to attend the wikimeets. I'm not sure
whether it was a direct consequence or not, but we had a long-term
editor attend the last Manchester wikimeet who hadn't previously
attended a wikimeet. I couldn't attend the last Leeds wikimeet: was
anyone there and able to say whether it made a difference or not? I'm
hoping that the irregular wikimeet attendees who have signed up for
the Liverpool meetup will be there!
It also started a longer conversation with Iridescent [1], which led
to the idea of having some sort of a UK-wide notifications list.
During that conversation, I started drafting a survey of past and
potential wikimeet attendees with the aim of getting some quantified
and actionable answers about how to improve wikimeets, and also
improve communication about wikimeets. The latest draft of the survey
is at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Peel/Wikimeet_survey
Amongst other things, the survey draft asks about how people get to
wikimeets; when and where wikimeets should be held; what activities
should take place at wikimeets; and how notifications about an
upcoming meetup would ideally be circulated.
I'm hoping to run this survey soon, so if you are interested in
improving the survey questions then please send me an email or post on
the talk page before the end of the month! In particular, if you
currently organise (or regularly attend) wikimeets, then I'd greatly
appreciate your input/feedback about the survey questions before it
goes live. Ideally the survey would be run in association with WMUK,
but given the recent turmoil I'm not sure if this will be possible, so
I'll run it myself unless WMUK expresses an interest in helping out
with it!
Thanks,
Mike
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Iridescent/Archive_17#Next_meetups_in_North_England
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WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk