Annual plan (2014–2015)

This plan documents New England Wikimedians's program and organizational development plans for the fiscal year ending 30 June, 2015. This plan is to serve as an outline for outreach and our activities, as well as provide a written record of our plans in the coming years. This preliminary plan also serves to be an outline to organizing further in the coming years, with the eventual goal of becoming a chapter within the coming years.

Our programs
This fiscal year, New England Wikimedians will align its program structure to reflect the factors that we feel have made the Wikimedia movement successful over the years: content, technology, and community. This also serves in line with our mission, which is to make free content available throughout New England. Through our actions, we believe that we will be able to successfully build up this capacity within the region, and eventually help other user groups and chapters where they need it.

CONTENT

Boston, and the immediate surrounding area, is home to major institutions of knowledge and is known for its highly educated residents. Boston's cultural institutions, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations are the site of collections, archives and artifacts of national and international significance. In the past, multiple organizations have expressed interest in working with us, but on a very sporadic basis. Since then, we have begun to expand out outreach capabilities and have used the user group to expand upon what we have done in the past, but in a more formal basis.

During the past fiscal year, we have worked with Northeastern University, Harvard University, as well as other institutions that weren't in the education group. Multiple edit-a-thons that were run under themes such as Ada Lovelace Day, Women's History Month, and other events helped to raise our profile in the area and provide our members with necessary experience with event planning.

The events planned with these institutions have been fruitful in developing organizational relationships. New England Wikimedians will build on these relationships by starting to plan our upcoming events at meetings so that we start on planning outreach more in the future, instead of present events which are often planned and executed within a month. Additionally, we are interested in beginning a counterpart to the edit-a-thon, the scan-a-thon, which Wikimedia DC has successfully begun, as well as photography blitzes, in which multiple editors descend upon an area and help to increase coverage of images in the area. This also allows for the institutions themselves to join in and increase the knowledge of their collections, which will help them with their outreach.

Over the next year, we also plan to heavily expand upon out outreach to cultural institutions and universities, including doing both the above aforementioned activities and other events which our members decide to execute in the coming years. Part of this includes providing site logistics for WikiConference USA, which we will be hosting in 2015, and continued collaboration with the Wiki Education Foundation and their use of outreach in the classroom.

TECHNOLOGY

As the New England Wikimedians user group continues to expand outreach for improving access to free content within the region, we have noticed that further efforts need to be made between our members of our user group and people who are a part of Wikimedia projects. This includes spreading word of applications that our users have developed, improving MediaWiki software, and allowing for further collaboration in the area.

If possible, we will also plan on holding at least one hack-a-thon to increase community participation of a population of people who generally are never included in edit-a-thons. This includes also improving upon local application initiatives, and for also looking towards other areas of improvement which will help to improve access to our mission within the area. The aim of these events is that people will be better able to access Wikimedia projects and this will further promote our user group as a positive benefit for interested parties.

Analytics and is also key to the success of the work that we provide institutions in the area. Upcoming plans for edit-a-thons include the mining of data presented during them, including user work performed, users who have been created, editor retention over the long term, and making sure that new users know that they are welcome and are brought into the fold of our events.

COMMUNITY

Of course, none of the work that our user group does would be worth anything unless we can cultivate a community of volunteers who will be interested in working with Wikipedia. In addition to normal edit-a-thons, we propose holding at least one meetup where we reach out in the community to help cultivate people's interest, but not in the traditional sense of a tech-heavy edit-a-thon. These light edit-a-thons will be designed to occur in an informal setting, such as a restaurant, and will be easily accessible to others. In the future, we hope to have even more opportunities to diversify our events, but that is something which we plan on achieving in the coming years.

Additionally, not all outreach has to occur on the internet. Last year, we discontinued monthly meeetups, in lieu of less events where we could concentrate on creating meaningful events. This includes networking with previously established meetups that share our mission, as well as the possible creation of social events that are designed to draw in other editors. These could occur at any number of restaurants, but do not necessarily have to involve editing, as useful discussions amongst the community about a shared goal are something which we would like to explore, and this includes holding events where one does not need an internet connection to participate.

Furthermore, we intend to use social media to augment not only our outreach activities, but participation in events, as not every new editor will be able to instantly figure out how to edit a Wikipedia article to sign up, and might be more comfortable with preexisting sites. In addition to this, we plan to use our new website in a greater role so that we can continue the use of outreach in the region behind a unified website, instead of a page on another Wikimedia Foundation project. This will also include using new tools at our disposal, including the automatically-updating calendar of events on our main page, as well as being able to have easily-accessible e-mails on most pages.

Planned projects and events
New England Wikimedians intend to carry out the following projects and events in Fiscal Year 2014–15. These plans are contingent on having adequate financial and human resources.