Submissions/Brainstorming Wikimedia and social media

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.

Title of the submission: Brainstorming Wikimedia and social media

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): workshop

Author of the submission: Florence Devouard

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences): Anthere

Country of origin: France

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia France

Personal homepage or blog: http://anthere.org/dotclear

30-word contribution & benefits statement

Discussion and sharing of practices regarding use of social media to pursue our mission
Identification of benefits, opportunites, risks etc.
Hopefully, some seeds for a future strategy or at least discovery of new uses or new tools
involvement of all participants to the workshop

Proposed time frame (1h or 2h or 4h)

2 hours would probably be ideal. Otherwise, 1 hour will do.

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

I would like to propose a brainstorming session related to social media (beyond wikis...) and Wikimedia content, Wikimedia community and Wikimedia mouvement. After reading through the list of propositions, I realized no submission has been made on the social media topic which I consider unfortunate given the increasing involvement of social media plateforms to support the pursuit of our mission. So here is my proposal:

In the past year, we have seen a serious increase in our general use of social media plateforms to disseminate our content (a few months ago the Orange Twitter Feed; a few weeks ago the Facebook community pages). We also have seen a serious increase in our general use of social media plateforms to engage our members or to interact with other people (such as Facebook pages). More modestly, other plateforms are being used to host objects useful for our outreach activities, such as some presentations on Slideshare (1, 2; 3 etc.). Blogs and FB pages are also used to reach out to new participants, to inform (eg, Wikimedia Foundation and various Wikimedia Chapters blogs). Social media is also used to discuss and help fundraising efforts (eg, the publishing of site notice statements). Last, microblogging tools are increasingly used by our community to keep in touch and inform (eg, last year intensive use during Wikimania or during the Chapter Meeting in Berlin).

Still, there seems to be little strategy and certainly little coordination on such matters. I'd love that we use Wikimania to share some of our current practices (at chapter or wikimedia foundation or plain editor level). I would also like to propose that we brainstorm a little bit on what could be useful/cool idea or contrariwise embarassing/annoying/risky at various stakeholders levels. For example, how could we be most useful for an individual end-user ? How could we best partner with public institutions using social media ? Are they some risks in partnering with businesses to publish our content on social media plateforms ? what's the impact of us using such plateforms from the media perspective ?

I'm willing to facilitate this workshop session. Other good will to help facilitate the session would be welcome if others are interested to help.

Attendance should not be too high so that it stays manageable. Walls and right to stick papers on them would probably be necessary. Session could be divided with a short introductory presentation, followed by group break to facilitate brainstorming and discussion and ended up by a short close up. I could not find information about length planned for each type of session (perhaps will only be decided when program is finalized), but I can imagine it would require reasonably at least an hour. I'll summarize the outcome of the session in a written format afterwards.

I love Wikimania, but I often found that it lacked participation from every attendee. It is all too often presentations, presentations, presentations. My proposition would be meant to alleviate this issue and propose some free time and space for discussions and sharing between all participants.

Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure)

People and Community

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).