Appropedia Initiatives are parallel to the Wikipedia concept of Projects. These are coordinated activities promoted to the Appropedia at large with the idea of generating momentum and critical mass such that they "take on a life of their own" after the initial surge of effort. In that way, Initiatives can "kickstart" an important topic, or activity or policy.
Guidelines
One Initiative will be promoted as the "Highlighted Initiative" for a certain period, perhaps two weeks. Past initiatives will be tracked below (potentially broken out to separate article at some point). Past initiatives should be linked from highlighted Initiative.
The following should apply to Initiatives:
- They should have a "steward" that can answer questions, provide some wiki-management, do prep work (if applicable)
- If no steward can be found for an initiative, there must be some question about whether there is sufficient support for the effort
- Has someone (possibly steward) who commits to blog (at Appropedia?) about
- They should be narrow enough that something useful can be described in ten articles
- So that during the focus time of the Initiative
- They should be broad enough that perhaps one hundred or more useful articles (counting in one language) can be written on the topic and subtopics (ensuring that the Initiative has ongoing activity).
Questions about these guidelines
- Should there be a "prep period" preceding an Initiative?
- Initiatives are meant to generate a flurry of activity. Perhaps there should be some pre-coordination / groundwork / framework so that the flurry of activity is more effective.
- Given that a flurry of activity is desired, there is value in informing a bunch of people, and in giving folks some notice so that they can allocate some time on their calendars
- To that end, upcoming Initiatives and their timeframes should be "pre-announced" to enable awareness building and identification of the work to be done. Or perhaps this "pre-work" is really the body of an Initiative?
- Things that could be done in advance might include
- Contact potentially interested people (experts or amateurs, especially with collaborative orientation)
- Identify good candidate content (especially if public domain or CC-BY-SA) and gather links to that
- Work toward category structure
- Seems like initiatives have "phases"? How does Wikipedia handle Projects? Do they focus on just one at a time?
- Perhaps the whole idea of Initiatives should have a promotional phase, so that we can get good candidates with stewards etc.
List of candidate Initiatives for consideration
- Course-based translation
- This activity has been underway, led by Joshua Pearce and Eleanor ter Horst but has not been promoted broadly. User:Curtbeckmann is working toward that.
- Percussion well drilling
- Practical rope pumps
- Low cost school construction
List of past Initiatives
None as yet.
Contact
User:Curtbeckmann is the driver behind the Appropedia Initiative initiative.