I would only suggest mailing list for potential organizers. It's not really suitable for participants. There is no way to subscribe to our blog right?

The call to action should be simple enough that everyone can do it, and ideally should have some sort of social multiplier. I'd rather have something that's actually useful (as opposed to just a passive gesture).

What if we encouraged everyone to make one edit on Wikipedia or Wikidata tagged #wikilovesmonuments that they share for the year, similar to [#1lib1ref](https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/04/25/engaging-librarians-1lib1ref/)? We can suggest a few options—add a WLM 2017 photo to a relevant page, update something about a monument nearby, or find a monument in another country that you can bring to your language—and then declare it on social media. I like asking for more than just enthusiasm. It's still a good way to get people to look through the cool photos (starting with the international winners, but encouraging people to dig into national winners too) and to spread the word. More importantly, it's using the attention from the end of the campaign to put all these great results from 2017 to use!

Bear in mind that the audience you get next week may not be ready for immediate action, i.e., they land on the blog to see the results not to be shown a way to get engaged. So the best way is probably to drop a hint that there are ways to help and just try to engage their interest. I like the idea of asking people to help in adding the photos to Wikipedia but there needs to be clear and easy-to-follow instructions on the blog. Perhaps, you can write a separate blog post on "what next?" where you'll explain what will happen till next year's competition. There you can say there are two major activities: organizing next year's competition and adding this year's photos to Wikipedia and explain how people can get engaged in each of these activities. Then in the blog post next week you can include a link to that post.

In the spirit of tuning to people's enthusiasm right around the announcement time, I would ask them to nominate a country to be part of WLM2018 and give us their email address so we can let them know if that country will be participating next year.

Also, feeling somewhat opportunistic here :) please mention in the blog post that people can follow WLM news here on the blog or from our varioius social media channels :) and encourage them to follow us for news throughout the year.

@Effeietsanders I updated the bullet point in description to reflect that.

@Slaporte I like the idea, though we should be aware of what m.hekmat says (it should be easy and the audience may not be ready to engage in that level). The other thing I want to add is that we should plan for this very tightly to make sure we don't create a lot of work for ourselves and/or other editors/admins in case we get a lot of edits that need some fixing. The easiest thing I can imagine is contributions to Wikidata. For example, we can create a step by step guide (and this won't be very long) on how to add labels for monuments in Wikidata. Another way to do this is to experiment with it at the national level, i.e., work with a local organizer to do this in their country and we see, at a smaller scale, how this can work.

/me thinks.

In T182283#3820703, @LilyOfTheWest wrote:

@Effeietsanders I updated the bullet point in description to reflect that.

@Slaporte I like the idea, though we should be aware of what m.hekmat says (it should be easy and the audience may not be ready to engage in that level).

I think we can make it fairly simple: ask everyone to make one monument-related edit, and announce it on #wikilovesmonuments on facebook, twitter, Wikipedia, or anywhere else. It's a way to get people to share the best photographs of 2017, and show we all <3 monuments. I don't mind writing a short listicle with simple suggestions on what people can do for monuments on Wikipedia and Wikidata. We can also have a mailing list, and social share buttons on the page of winners too -- we should make that easy to do regardless. Sharing is so natural that I expect people will do it (if it's easy) whether we ask them or not.

The call to action should itself be interesting and notable enough to make this blog post worth sharing.

In T182283#3820668, @m.hekmat wrote:

In the spirit of tuning to people's enthusiasm right around the announcement time, I would ask them to nominate a country to be part of WLM2018 and give us their email address so we can let them know if that country will be participating next year.

I like this idea as another option, but I'm wondering how many people who sign up now will become contributors in a year? It seems likely as effective as re-promoting the 2017 winners in the weeks leading up to September 2018. These aren't mutually exclusive though. Asking people to sign up seems more passive though, and I think our strengths are in asking for active engagement (even if we don't get it from everyone).

I'm always a little hesitant to emphasize too much that we want them to organize a competition - if you push that, you must be confident that there is sufficient infrastructure available to support such efforts (handholding included). Nominating a country to participate sounds also a little as if they need our permission, I'm afraid that may carry the wrong message :) However, I see the spirit as a good one: if people are planning a holiday in another country, they wouldn't see the banners, so they may want an email reminder.

What about asking people to share their personal favorite photo of built heritage through Twitter? I love the idea of having them edit, but we may want to provide an alternative for the edit shy people :)

! In T182283#3821260, @Effeietsanders wrote:
What about asking people to share their personal favorite photo of built heritage through Twitter? I love the idea of having them edit, but we may want to provide an alternative for the edit shy people :)

I'm hesitant about this since they technically need a permission from the photographer if they're posting/sharing photos of of the monuments on Commons.

hmm, good point. They could link to it, but who'd realistically do that...

We can ask them to share, repost and retweet their favorite photo. It solves the permission issue and also makes it easy for us to find how many people have re-post/shared/retweeted the photo.

I just saw Flickr announced their top 2017 photos, as reference: http://digg.com/2017/flickr-top-photos

We decided to go with a simpler: follow us in places x and y.