PortlandWiki:Barnraising

This page is a brainstorming page for a possible upcoming "barnraising 2.0" event in early 2011. (Proposed date: Wednesday, February 2, 2011.) The purpose of this event is to draw upon our existing group of wiki enthusiasts to become or return as contributors to PortlandWiki. A possible second purpose is aimed at improving PortlandWiki for presentation to the Meier Memorial Trust for possibly hosting future Wiki Wednesday meetings, and to potentially assist with introducing PortlandWiki to others engaged in Portland's non-profit sector. The goal is to encourage greater participation from this community.

considerations for venue

• AboutUs
  • may encourage participation from original crew
  • may be difficult to ensure accessibility due to doors locking at 5:30?
  • would need approval from Ray King
• Backspace
• Meier Memorial Trust?

what to do during initial barnraising meeting

• have fun
• have drinks/snacks
• give brief overview of PortlandWiki and/or its history and/or how it is different now than after launch in Sep 2009
• identify what needs to be done
• secure activity commitments from attendees
• if time, have collaborative editing session

ways to prolong and promote activity after initial commitment

• nagging
• frequent follow-up meetings of an appealing nature
• rewards (mentioned below)

(good) reasons to edit

• enjoyment of discussion and debate
• the fun of creation/improvement
• tangible rewards
  • peer-given badges, awards, barnstars
  • reward board (monetary, tit-for-tat, badges)
• civic/altruistic/educational (the satisfaction of creating something useful)
• egoistic
  • knowing your works are viewed by others, perhaps a large community
  • respect of one's peers
• getting one's name out, furthering one's career
• personal education (researching and formulating one's ideas in words)

ways to edit (or, what we need)

These include long-term as well as short-term goals.

• creating new articles and improving existing ones
  • goal: 10 impressive articles, worth showing anyone!
  • goal: 500 very basic articles (descriptive sentence or two, a url or two, perhaps a few standardized section headers [history, etc] a few categories)
• adding categories to articles
• creating [[wikilinks]] from one article to another
• great freely licensed images, video, audio, drawings, other art and creative media
• content that is useful or interesting that unique to the Portland community and to PortlandWiki
  • example: How to contest a parking ticket
  • example: Google map of Portland neighborhoods (with borders defined)
    • Like this? But, maybe OpenStreetMap instead of Google? -Pete (talk)
      • Yeah Pete, that's the idea! -WikiMaster (talk) 06:18, 21 December 2010 (PST)
  • example: Google map of all articles' physical locations automatically created by street data in their articles
  • example: Portland history articles
  • example: superb and thorough listing of Portland music venues and/or musicians and bands
  • example: ? (you add here)
• giving awards, compliments to other editors that are doing good work
• organizing exciting/fun events/meetups
• improving technical infrastructure, graphics (interface, awards, illustrations, etc)