Meet TzuChiang Liou - a key coordinator for this year’s WikiMania conference, held in Taipei at the beginning of August. In this interview, TzuChiang reflects on the experience of organising the event, and provides some tried-and-tested hints and tips for mobilising sponsor and media interest for your Commons gatherings. TzuChiang also gives us some insight into the Free Culture landscape in Taiwan.

1. I see that preparations for WikiMania started in October 2006 - ten months before the event! What groundwork did you do in the first two months of preparation that stood you in good stead for the future?

In short, we secured the most precious assets in the beginning - committed team members.

We initiated a local preparation team in the very first month, most of the initial members were the core organisers during the preparation (these people are THD, Frances, KJ, Mike, Daucter, Apocalypse Now and many others), which was quite important in many aspects. Some team members even successfully persuaded their employers to sponsor this event and to consider the preparation as one of their daily tasks. In my case, Academia Sinica was the local co-host organization - that helped us since I could spend a certain amount of time per week dedicated to the preparations.

Secondly, one of the challenges for us this year was local sponsorship, since the concept of free culture isn't mainstream in Taiwan yet. We spent quite a lot of time contacting possible sponsors in the beginning, filtering out potential candidates, polishing our presentation skills and spreading this event by word of mouth. Expanding and exploring local sponsors in advance allowed us to schedule and maximise our limited human resources.

Lastly, as the programme coordinator, I initiated the programme committee in October. The committee consisted of Wikipedia community members from Berlin, Boston, London, Sacramento, Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The regular meeting among committee members in different time zones was a challenge, but definitely worthwhile. Some of the members were the organisers from previous Wikimanias and all of them are active in the community. They came together not only to organise a great programme, but also to connect and mobilise cooperation between communities worldwide. Committee members were: Phoebe Ayers, Jakob Voss, James D. Forrester, Angela Beesley, Samuel Klein and me. And we also received great help from other programme team members: Andrew Lih, Erik Moeller, Rebecca MacKinnon, Dirk Riehle, Mathias Schindler and Mike Tian-Jian Jiang.

2. How did you manage volunteers for the event? Where did you recruit them and how were they reimbursed for their work?

Like the community, we believe that volunteers should be motivated by passion and commitment. We tried not to manage them but recruited and trained the volunteers to manage themselves.

We recruited our volunteers from the local community and we also got help from other organisations that already had channels to recruit volunteers like the National Taiwan University, AIESEC Taiwan and National Youth Council. With the help from the Association of Digital Culture of Taiwan, we set up some training courses before the conference. The courses focused on three agendas:

1. Free culture: A basic introduction to Wikipedia and its spirit, free content licensing, Free Culture and Web 2.0...
2. Volunteering spirit: Sharing experiences from volunteers. The ethics and basic regulation of volunteering.
3.Hands-on tutorials: Scenario-based training, crisis management and division of tasks.

For the volunteers who weren’t familiar with Free Culture, the value of these courses was not necessarily to teach them about how to do their tasks well, but to invite them to join and discover more about this great movement.

Volunteers were rewarded through their experience, and the knowledge they gained. Though we didn't pay them for their work, we did our best to provide them with resources and make sure they would enjoy the whole experience (they could join any session for free when they were off duty, and could take some souvenirs away with them, of course). Plus, they were given a certificate of volunteering service after they had finished a certain amount of service hours.

3. You were directly involved in coordinating sponsorship and media partners. What advice would you give to people approaching sponsors for their own event related to the Commons, in order to get the funding they need?

(1) Find a dedicated person (i.e. a single contact person) who gives presentations and negotiates with sponsors during office hours, keeps track of all sponsorship and provides an updated status report regularly. If possible, share the load of administrative tasks (e.g. contract, account management, cash flow, etc.) with someone else. There'll always be people who can help with sponsorship, but most of them can only contribute limited time. Having a dedicated sponsorship person means that one person can coordinate sponsorship team members, and follow-up on all sponsorship opportunities.

(2) Make a general sponsorship programme, mainly focusing on the benefit of promotion and media exposure. This should be announced publicly and used in most cases.

(3) Figure out your own "currency". Communicate with team members and define the priority list of resources you need (e.g. cash? meals? venue? media exposure? etc.,). Separate case sponsorship from your other resources; unify the value of the currency (to what extent you could accept resource exchanges, what kind of exchanges are preferred). Set up internal rules before you negotiate with sponsors.

(4) Keep the programme customized, yet deliverable and fair when negotiating with specific sponsors. Sometimes the sponsors would like to change the programme according to their own interests - you should keep the flexibility by default, but follow some principles. Make sure the customised programme is deliverable for the preparation team (do not over promise), and fair in relation to other sponsors and consistent with your own "currency".

(5) Let go of some opportunities if sponsors ask for too much and you can't afford it. Sometimes you need it but you might not want it.

(6) Take advantage of connections within the community - finding the right person to contact will save a huge amount of time.

(7) Try to secure as many sponsors as you can in the first round - secure at least one to two major sponsors if possible.

(8) Encourage sponsorship rather than subsidising, to avoid administrative efforts.

4. You were also involved in coordinating media partners. What advice would you give to people approaching the media for coverage of their event?

(1) Big names always work - pitch famous speakers to the media.

(2) The local press carry local agendas - find out what the connection is between the event (either the topic or the concept) and the local community, not only within the community you know, but also others (e.g., education, the music industry, knowledge management, etc). Identify speakers for the media as potential interview subjects.

(3) Launch a press conference a few months before the event if possible. Raising some media exposure before the event could help promote it and facilitate sponsorship opportunities as well. For Wikimania, we launched a press conference using the name of our major sponsor, this way you could utilise the media resources and reputation of that sponsor, and satisfy them as well.

(4) Draw up media strategies at least six months before the event. Be sure to explore the focus and characteristics of different medium, schedule the appropriate exposure timeline for magazines, newspaper, TV/radio stations and online media. Starting with some in-depth articles on magazines would be nice, then follow up the discussion online by the community.

(5) Ask the preparation team members to write articles regularly.

5. I read a comment about the choice of Taiwan as a host for Wikimania. The author wrote: “it is a destination hard to reach for the majority of Wikipedians, who are either in the United States or Europe. The largest potential base of computer users nearby - in mainland China - are largely blocked from reading Chinese Wikipedia, let alone contributing articles to it. And yes the climate can fairly be described as tropical.

Why do you think that Taiwan was the best choice to host WikiMania? Sure there might be all these draw backs, but what did Taiwan offer in terms of location, culture and technology?

The goal of the Wikimedia Foundation and its sub-projects is to build a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. This is an inter-cultural, multi-lingual online community and I think the geographic boundaries should not be the major concern. Put it this way, no matter where the event is, there will always be an inconvenience for some people.

For Taiwan, the community’s promising growth trend and the energy/commitment we demonstrate is our strength; cultural diversity and a leading IT environment are a plus. And by the way, Taiwanese cuisine is attractive for some.

And yes, it's really a pity that people in many places can't connect to Wikipedia, but look at the bright side, it's because there are still places that can't use Wikipedia or join the Free Culture movement in general – that gives us reason to promote these concepts. We have also established a local Wikimedia Taiwan chapter, which is dedicated to promoting these ideas. In fact, we did have some friends from China as speakers like Isaac Mao and Haidong Pan, there were also around ten users from China attending WikiMania. We hoped that this event facilitated the Free Culture movement in China and across the Asian community.

6. A blogger made this statement regarding Taiwanese involvement in Wikimania:

“When it comes to social issues like citizen journalism, sharing economy and Creative Commons, participants from Taiwan have far less feedbacks than they did in those technology-related workshops. In fact, the number of bloggers, community workers and academics from Taiwan attending Wikimania 2007 is actually relatively small. In Taiwanese blogosphere, Wikimania 2007 is not a hot topic before or after the conference. It reflects that Taiwan, as a hub of global IT industry, is still an engineering-centric society. The social awareness that wiki promotes is quite new, or even alien to Taiwan.”

I was wondering whether you agree or disagree, and why?

I mostly agree with the author, and I think it's probably because some active bloggers come from the Open Source community (after all, they stand a better position to catch up with network trends), naturally they are more concerned about the technical aspects of such a movement. But I think that will change very soon. In fact, more and more bloggers are concerned about the inter-disciplinary nature of Internet, and writing about the social impact of technology.

On the other hand, Wikipedia or the wiki-based phenomenon has already been discussed within some business, academic and educational spheres in Taiwan. So perhaps it's just the difference in interpretation of the term "social awareness". Wikipedia or it's social implication is relatively easy for people to understand and implement, sometimes they'll just adopt the concept and practice it without actually using a wiki-engine or posting their thoughts on blogs. So I'm positive about the future of Free Culture and it's social awareness in Taiwan.

7. What effect do you think the Wikimania conference has had on furthering the community, and the Free Culture movement in Taiwan?

The Free Culture movement has been established in Taiwan for years, it's transited from a small community to larger user-bases in the past few years. But the movement has not managed to reach the general public with a systematic approach. Thanks to the work and strategy of our media team, Wikimania 2007 successfully attracted public attention for a few months. Conservatively estimated, we had over 40 mentions and interviews regarding the event (even growing after the event), and around four millions page hits to our online advertisement (sponsored by the largest portal and newsgroup in Taiwan). I'll say that Wikimania connected the online community with those who might only have heard about this movement before.

Of course, with the exciting speeches by speakers around the world, participants could learn a lot and accumulated abundant experiences. Even better, some might cooperate with each other in the Commons movement. In sum, Wikimania motivated and attracted more users to contribute to the movement.

8. In an interview with the New York Times during the WikiMania conference, Jimmy Wales told this story:

“There was a young man who was assigned to drive me around when I was here in Taiwan last time and he told me that he had been raised in a very Taiwanese nationalist family. He told me he was raised with the very basic belief that the mainlanders had been brainwashed and had all the wrong history and he told me that now that he has been working on Wikipedia and he has met a lot of them he said, I still think they are wrong about a lot of things but I can kind of see they have a point here and there. And it was interesting to me because this was a young man who has moved from thinking of the other as some sort of mysterious, brainwashed masses to going oh, actually, these are people like me. That’s just one person, but this spirit is reflected, hopefully, in Wikipedia. And that is kind of a microcosm of what is going on bigger picture around the world. There is a real spirit of global humanity that begins to transcend other things.”

How has Wikipedia changed the way you see the world both in terms of reading pages and editing these pages?

People like to talk about the ‘correctness’ of Wikipedia, but I think the multiple points of view and the debate among people with different cultural backgrounds adds to the benefit of Wikipedia. Limited by technology and distribution channels, what people learn from traditional encyclopedias is the consensus among certain groups of experts within a certain period of time. If I just read but don't know how to learn, sometimes the knowledge could become disinformation and result in prejudice. That's especially true in a culture that doesn't encourage people to question authority.

In fact, many tragedies have occurred because of arguments about truth, people fight for the authority to interpret information. The fact is that there are many blurry areas and uncertain issues of many so-called truths. With the mechanism in Wikipedia, people can not only gain knowledge from an article page, but be aware that the articles might have been discussed and might have evolved from many different points of view, through the "history" and "discussion" pages. Most of all, this project encourages people to respect different opinions and cultural perspectives.

I think the virtue of respecting different perspectives could be regarded as a kind of ‘correctness’, and that'll change the way people see the world.

9. What kept you motivated during the ten months of preparations?

The pleasure and challenges of working with the great local preparation team members and global programme members.

10. Did you take a holiday after WikiMania?

Basically I keep myself away from Internet for couple of days after this event - that's sort of holiday for me, I guess.

tags: Taipei Taiwan media-events wikimania how-to wikipedia volunteer sponsorship commoner-profile

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