Topic on Talk:Wikimedia tech swag program

An old idea worth revisiting:

Events always have a use for swag of all sizes – for organizers, for small prizes, to stuff gift bags to attendees. It would be great to have standard event-boxes (perhaps small, for a ~30-person event, and large, for a ~100-person one) that include a mix of broadly useful swag!

High priority: easy bulk gifts w/ icons that are easy to make by the 10k but hard to make in batches of 50 – stickers, buttons, pins, erasers, small toys, postcards, wikidice. Med priority: things that never go out of style and that we use a lot of, like sticky pads or sharpened throwing-barnstars or realistic stroopwafel-coasters. Lower priority: language-specific designs; reusable, collapsable event items like table- and floor-stand banners.

Event organizers may run a number of smaller events each year, and local communities often attend conferences thrown by others [and may have tables there], so when planning for volume, it may be good to ensure every group of whatever size has at least a small box on hand. Warmly, SJ

@Sj Thank you for sharing your amazing idea!:) Something like this would be nice, and from at least my understanding, there isn't any process yet to request swag for event organizers. There are a few ongoing discussions about "swag for the broader movement" internally, where I will point folks to this discussion thread to see if it picks momentum.

I'd love to see a measure of stock that we produce to give away (as we used to when we the community was more actively running booths at other people's conferences, to get the word out). It's good to think about our presence in different physical environments.

I reckon we've hit the 2004-era aspiration of "100,000 items w/ WM logos out in the world" :) but not by a lot.

Related: an event organizer that comes up with great swag for the event should have an easy way to a) generate some quantity at reasonable bulk pricing through an in-network distributor (say, up to a default cap of total cost per event), and b) offer some for sale at reasonable unit pricing (for anything beyond that).

An easy step would be allowing community swag stores. Right now, some of the coolest tech swag designs and ideas are unavailable because we're making it difficult to distribute them!