User blog:Cooksey.michael/Community Connect: Our Inaugural San Francisco Admin Gathering Sept 9 - 11

Hey, everyone! Michael here, from Wikia’s Community Development team, checking in with some fabulous news: In September, we will be kicking off Wikia’s first-ever Community Connect event here in our San Francisco offices!



What is Community Connect?

Community Connect is an invite-only gathering for admins of both new and established wikias to meet and connect with one another, as well as Wikia staff from our Community, Product and Marketing teams. The goal of the event is to facilitate a direct, in-person dialogue with a mix of contributors to get a better understanding of what is important to them, and to share insights to our product roadmap for the development of the Wikia platform.

During the 3 day event, admins will have the opportunity to participate in work sessions centered around Wikia’s plans for the coming year, including product vision, changes and improvements to the site, mobile productivity, community best practices, and more.

Which admins will be attending?

Let me just say right now that we’d love to be able to invite each and every one of you! However, our office can only hold so many people at one time. We’ve done our best to invite a small cross-section of admins representing a wide variety of communities, including many admins from non-English communities. All of Wikia’s verticals will be represented, and we plan on having a good mix of approximately 30 admins in attendance for the event.

How can I learn more about the event?

Our goal is for everyone in attendance to share what they’ve learned, and to that end, we’re keeping the plans for the event as open as we can. We plan on creating a wikia for the event that anyone can access (even if you did not attend). Information from work sessions will be made available as well, so if you didn’t get to come this time, don’t worry! You will have access to all of the information presented at the event, so that you can also keep up with the latest info. We’ll also be sharing news, highlights, and photos live during the event.

How can I get involved next year?

While we hope to make this an annual thing, we first plan on gathering feedback on the event from the admins in attendance this year. We want to know what they liked, what they didn’t like, and what they’d like to see included in possible future events. We will shape our plans for next year based on the feedback from this year’s attendees, including the recruitment process. If you feel strongly that this is an event you or your community would like to be a part of next year, should it happen, then drop me a note on my message wall, and we can chat more.

We’re working hard to make sure that Community Connect goes off without a hitch, and we will check back in soon again with more details about the event. If you have any questions or suggestions about the event, let me know in the comments of this blog, and of course, feel free to share this blog with others to spread the news about our event.

And, for those who will be in attendance, we look forward to seeing you soon in SF!