Submissions:2015/How we organized a 1500 person meetup (and you could too)

Title

How we organized a 1500 person meetup (and you could too)

Theme

community, outreach, GLAM

Type of submission

workshop, or presentation/panel, pending conference needs

Author

Jacqueline Mabey & Michael Mandiberg

E-mail address

Michael{o}Mandiberg.com

Usernames

Jacqueline Mabey (User:Failedprojects) & Michael Mandiberg (User:Theredproject)

Affiliation

CUNY, Art+Feminism

Abstract

Over the weekend of International Women’s Day, March 6-8, 2015, approximately 1500 participants convened in 75 locations in 17 countries, on 4 continents, to edit Wikipedia articles on women and the arts. During, this day, nearly 400 new articles were created and over 500 articles received significant improvements. 1500 people attended globally, putting this event in line with attendance at Wikimania. The event was covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and ARTnews, among many others. This was a productive and substantial growth from the inaugural 2014 event, which had around 600 participants in 31 locations and created 101 new articles, and improved 90. For our efforts, the organizers of the 2014 edit-a-thon were named to Foreign Policy magazine’s list of Leading Global Thinkers.

We are proposing a presentation and/or workshop that will talk about parts of our process that we feel were most crucial in enabling this outcome. We are flexible about scope and duration: we can give a shorter talk, or a longer workshop. Jacqueline Mabey, and Michael Mandiberg will be presenting, as well as any organizers of Art+Feminism nodes who are in attendance at the conference. This presentation/workshop is meant to be useful both for potential A+F node organizers, as well as Wikimedia organizers more broadly; we feel our techniques and strategies are broadly applicable.

Length of presentation

30-45 min. for presentation/panel (pending number of A+F node organizers), 60 min. for workshop (flexible on timing and format)

Special schedule requests

Prefer not to present Friday because of work schedule.

Will you attend WikiConference USA if your submission is not accepted?

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. (~~~~).

1. Add your username here.
2. Pharos (talk) 17:29, 31 August 2015 (EDT)
3. ParkerHiggins (talk) 20:45, 31 August 2015 (EDT)
4. Smallbones (talk) 22:09, 31 August 2015 (EDT)
5. Samantha (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:55, 3 September 2015 (EDT)
6. Mozucat (talk) 01:49, 5 September 2015 (EDT)
7. Add your username here.