TAO/Persona Guillaume Jacquemin

Persona description of Guillaume Jacquemin, project manager at Wikimedia France.

Personal Characteristics

Guillaume is 30 years old. He has accomplished his studies in social sciences half a year ago. One of his hobbies during his study years was journalism – he loved to contribute texts to a students’ magazine and acted as a member of the editorial board during 2 years. A second important hobby is his engagement for Wikipedia. He made his first steps on the platform almost 8 years ago. He got quickly engaged as a regular contributor, making a lot of mistakes at the beginning, but getting more and more experienced over time, also thanks to feedbacks from the community. This positive experience, coupled with difficulties he experienced in his studies at that time, motivated him to consecrate more and more time to his hobby – to a point where he ended up spending entire nights on the Internet, contributing texts and photos to Wikipedia.

Around five years ago Guillaume also started meeting other Wikipedians in real life. Together they founded the association Wikimedia France. Thanks to his language skills he got involved in the translation of the association’s bylaws which needed to be approved by the Wikimedia Foundation. Around three years ago, Guillaume started to get further involved in the association’s work, first as a secretary to the board, and later as an elected member of the board. Within the management board of Wikimedia France, his area of competence comprised the management of relations to cultural institutions as well as members’ management.

During his time as a board member, Guillaume learned about the existence of the project TAO in which Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Switzerland were already involved and the goal of which was to include more older people in Wikipedia and its sister projects. After consulting with the German and the Swiss Wikimedia chapters, Wikipedia France decided to join them in organizing outreach activities aiming at the inclusion of more older people in the French Wikipedia community. The board decided to hire Guillaume as project manager for the Seniors Project. That’s why, around three months ago, he resigned from the board to take on his job as a paid project manager. Together with a part-time managing director and a project manager of another project, he is one of the chapter’s first employees.

Guillaume’s professional goals

Guillaume wants to get more older people to contribute to Wikipedia and its sister projects. He is convinced that more seniors would choose contributing to free knowledge as a hobby if they were aware of this possibility and if they could see that this is actually an enriching activity. After getting acquainted with the outreach activities of the partner chapters, he is eager to find out which approach would fit most for his country. He worries a bit that he might not be able to mobilize a many of his peers at the beginning and that it will be quite tough and lonely task to get things going. He sometimes feels a bit lost. On one hand, he is really eager to contribute to a thriving chapter by carrying out this project; on the other hand, he is not so sure yet how well it will work out in practice. He therefore hasn’t completely abandoned his original idea of becoming a journalist and keeps writing articles as a freelance journalist beside his half-time job for Wikimedia France.

Key Stakeholders in Guillaume’s job

Members of Wikimedia France

• The money needs to be spent reasonably (with regard to Guillaume’s project, spending the money well mainly means to increase the amount of volunteer work and to contribute to the improvement of Wikipedia contents and therefore to the promotion of free knowledge)

Management Board of Wikimedia France

• The board also sees the project as a means to attract more funding (mostly in form of donations, but maybe also from foundations)
• Appointing one of its former members to the position of project manager also puts the board under a certain pressure to prove the legitimacy of its choice

Seniors (target group)

• They want to be shown how Wikipedia works, before they decide whether they want to contribute in the longer run (the training needs to be interesting and adapted to their learning pace)
• Most of them enjoy being in contact with other seniors
• They want recognition for what they do

Wikipedians (volunteers)

• Only a few volunteers are ready to get involved in Guillaume’s project
• Most of them want to be sure first that want they do is going to be effective
• Some of them are used to working with older people, other lack this experience
• They want recognition for that they do within the community; most of them are only interested to participate in activities if they contribute to their pet project on Wikipedia (topical interests, improving photographs, working with cultural institutions)

Guillaume’s challenges

• Together with his two colleagues, Guillaume needs to prove that the association is on a good track as to ist professionalization.
• He needs to “sell” the project to the association, to the volunteers and to the target group, which is not easy at the beginning when he basically has spent all his time doing preparation work and only few concrete mobilization activities have taken place so far in France.
• He needs to get the project going as quickly as possible, at the beginning relying mostly on himself.
• He will need to acquire partners to implement mobilization activities at a larger scale. He is already in contact with two seniors organization; they seem to be willing to enter a partnership if only they knew how to address the financial problems this poses.