New subject: Greece - urgent

27 Feb 2013

Hello Asaf.

To keep you informed, there is a conversation about your visit in Greece,
in Wikipedia's Agora (Village Pump): http://goo.gl/k9xRo
So, it is not that we are not interested for your visit, but we still talk
if a conference for the general audience should be organised on the
occasion or just do some community meetings.

A question I have: Since you will be in Italy at 18-21 April, you must
extend your trip for some days to be in Greece for at least a weekend. Can
you extend it for enough days to be here at 13-14th or 27-28th of April?
 Any community meeting should be on a weekend.

I'm posting this mail to WikiEL mailing list (I think you are already a
member) so that it will be more open, and we can link to your mails.
I suggest that all cc'd users subscribe to it.

Konstantinos Stampoulis
geraki(a)geraki.gr
http://www.geraki.gr

2013/2/20 Asaf Bartov &lt;abartov(a)wikimedia.org&gt;

...
  Hi, folks.

 I haven't heard back from you in a while.  What are your current thoughts
 about my proposed visit to Greece?

 As a reminder, I was thinking of visiting for the following goals and
 activities:

 1. to meet with as many of you as possible and learn from you about the
 state of the community, your personal projects and plans, the obstacles you
 face.

 2. to do one or more development workshops for the community in Greece --
 i.e. discussion and (two-way!) experience sharing toward growing the
 Wikimedia community and its reach in Greece.  We could discuss whatever
 problems or challenges you feel would be most valuable to work on.  Some
 examples might be: representation (who gets to speak for Wikipedia in
 Greece? How?); creating partnerships (how? when? with whom?); how to live
 with (and without?) community conflict, etc.
 (I have extensive program experience in the movement, including as a
 former board member of a local chapter, as well as experience with
 volunteer recruitment and management outside the movement, from other
 projects I've been involved with as a volunteer over the years.)

 3. to help your group secure meetings with potential partners, in case an
 official representative of the Foundation, or just "a visitor from the US",
 would help get a first meeting with people like university rectors, mayors,
 etc.

 4. if helpful, do public speaking (in English, unfortunately) about
 Wikipedia in general public occasions or at universities.  In general, I
 think it's better for local volunteers to do public speaking, but again, if
 an international guest would bring a larger audience or something, I'm
 happy to help.  We can also think about a joint presentation -- one of you
 speaking in Greek about the Greek community and about Wikipedia
 particulars, and I giving a broader view of the movement, international
 activities, and maybe one or two of the sister projects.

 All of this is just an outline of what a visit _can_ be.  What it _would_
 be really depends on planning work we'd need to put into this (i.e.
 actually securing meetings, lectures, picking dates, etc.), and most of
 that work would best be done by Greek-speaking locals...  So it's really up
 to you.

 Concretely, I am traveling to Milan, Italy for the Wikimedia Conference
 2013 in mid-April, and would be able to come to Greece before/after it,
 _but if so_, we need to start making arrangements for this very soon.  If
 you'd like me to visit but can't spare the time to prepare, or just want it
 to be later, that's fine, and I can make a separate trip to Greece later in
 the year.

 If, in the meantime, you have come to the conclusion a visit would not be
 very useful or appropriate now, that's fine too, and please don't hesitate
 to say so if that's the case.

 Cheers,

     Asaf

Re: [WikiEL] Greece - urgent