Archive:Workgroup Weeks/We can do this

Dear Citizens,

I am officially announcing the Workgroup Weeks (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Workgroup_Weeks) initiative. Workgroup Weeks will promote a workgroup for a week: each week, we will be promoting and highlighting a different Citizendium workgroup. For example, we'll have "Biology Week," "History Week," and "Music Week." There will be a major headline on the front page, and other internal and external publicity for the event. Leading up to each week, we'll be doing significant recruitment. This is similar in concept to the Write-a-Thons, but extends across the entire presence of a single discipline on the Internet.

Workgroup Weeks is the biggest initiative we have planned so far, in terms both of the amount of labor needed and of the potential positive impact. It has the potential not just to raise our participation rates by double or triple, but by orders of magnitude. We have never done a massive, concerted, ongoing recruitment effort. I know from experience that when we do this, we'll reap enormous dividends.

I organized Nupedia and then Wikipedia by doing the sort of recruitment I am inviting you all to do. In fact, I've done this sort of thing many times. I know it works. If we follow this plan, we will get massive numbers of excellent new participants. It's not a question of whether the plan is sound, it's a question of whether we have the will to do the hard work to make it happen! If we do it, they will come, and in droves.

Now, if we were to leave this hard work to one person--me, say--I estimate it would take that person about a year of full-time work to get it done. We can't afford to pay anyone to do that, and I personally don't have the time to do it, with everything else I must do for the project. But if we all get together, and spread the work out over many weeks, we'll require relatively little work from each person, while the concerted, collective impact of that work will be tremendous.

But, to have that impact, we must get organized.

(1) Recruitment works. We'll get lots of new people this way. Cf. how Nupedia and Wikipedia got started.

(2) Limited-time "events" work. We'll get lots of activity in a particular workgroup this way. Cf. the Write-a-Thon.

(3) This is the single best idea on offer to "kick-start" work in workgroups.

(4) There's no need to get this approved.

(5) You're needed. You don't have to do it all yourself, but if we come together, we'll accomplish huge things.