From afar *(do not know all details) Wikimedia Foundation is spending funds on both producing and globally distributing swag.
I appreciate the idea (and love swag) but if it is local-regional and not if WMF adds to globalization, economic and climate crisis acceleration. If you want to establish regional productions or distribution centers I am happy to help with advice for my region.
@Zblace Great question and thought! So based on what I gathered from folks, there seem to be no initiatives ongoing to accelerate local swag distribution, and I see no plans as such to address this complex problem in the future. Besides WMF, Wikimedia Deutschland also has a program to share swags, and they can consider areas in and around Germany. In several event guides, organizers are encouraged to handle swag creation and distribution themselves. Typically, affiliates use WMF's grant funding to create swag and share it with community members: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/Requesting_swag.
@SSethi (WMF) thank you for follow-up on this. I will consider and think about it as potential capacity to develop in the initiatives I am a part of (primarily it seems relevant to CEE-Hub)
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!