I think Jay had the most-correct answer- -- campus
associations are our best bet. They work for organizations like Mozilla, and there's a
natural constituency for us on campuses: students and professors. Plus campuses are really
good at hosting small/impromptu/semi-official events. And I know that in university towns
I've lived in (Peterborough, St. John's, Fredericton, Halifax, Toronto),
there's usually good free event listing sites that lots of locals read, including
non-university people who care about cultural stuff.
I wonder if the McGill group hosted an event, or the U Michigan group?
Sent from my phone: please forgive any typos or terseness.
On Jan 19, 2011 3:33 PM, "Michael Peel" <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:
I wonder: how many how many events are being
organised by chapters, how many by the Wikimedia community, and how many by Wikimedia
readers? Where is the bottleneck here - is it a lack of a US chapter, or does the
community not feel 'empowered' (or insert a buzzword of your choice here), are we
not communicating effectively to the US reader community, or is it a simple geographical
issue? Put another way, how do we encourage the US community to be even more active with
offline activities?
The same questions apply globally. Everyone's been doing fantastic things over the
last month, but how do we turn that into something that is sustainable and can grow over
the next [5 years/decade], in time for the [15/20]th birthday celebrations? In the UK
(where I've been active), there have been three fantastic events (Bristol, Jimmy's
party, and the British Library event - organised by three different people) - but
that's a tiny number compared to how many events could have been run across the
country if there had been more people engaged in organising them.
Mike
On 19 Jan 2011, at 22:09, Sage Ross wrote:
On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 8:58 PM, Rob Schnautz
<schnautzr(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There were no more than 40 states which attempted
to hold events. These
amassed to around 50 events, but most of them (from what I could tell)
were merely callouts to see if anyone was interested in doing something,
usually with no more than five respondents if even that many. The only
ones that appeared successful at all were very large metro cities.
Taking these facts into consideration, most American Wikipedians would
have needed to travel several hours to get to an event that was most
likely no more than a small group get-together, and much further to get
to an actual large celebration.
The Pittsburgh party was pretty successful; although only a small
number of people signed up for it on either
ten.wikipedia.org or the
Pittsburgh meetup page on Wikipedia, many more signed up on Facebook.
It was held at a sports bar during a Pittsburgh Steelers (American)
football game, which wasn't scheduled until after we had picked the
time and place for the party. There was actually a 15-minute wait to
get in at some points. Nonetheless, dozens of Wikipedians and
Wikipedia supporters showed up over the course of the evening. We
only gave shirts to those who had registered (either on Facebook or a
wiki) and we gave out all but (I believe) 4 shirts out of the 50 in
the box.
Some people did, in fact, drive hours to get there... and are planning
to do so for some regular meetups now!
Here are some pictures and a bit about how the party was, for those
interested:
http://ragesoss.com/blog/2011/01/17/wikimedians-are-awesome-and-wp10-pittsb…
But we do, definitely, need better tools for gathering people
together... the US, in general, doesn't have nearly as many meetups as
it ought to.
-Sage
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