Hi everyone,
In light of recent changes in which Kevin Rutherford will be stepping away from our organization, I wanted to echo Kevin's challenge for you all to volunteer to lead or propose new Wikimedia-related events. SJ and I are unfortunately not going to have the bandwidth to lead as many gatherings as we have in the past, but I would love to help others take on new leadership roles.
For any of you who had signed up previously for the Cape Cod photo blitz this weekend, we are unfortunately going to have to cancel that event. I would very much like to see it happen sometime next year, and I would love to work with someone else on helping make that a reality.
We have a couple of other tentative events on the schedule — an Ada Lovelace Day edit-a-thon in conjunction with UMass Amherst and a Boston City Archives urban renewal edit-a-thon, both in October. If anyone would like to help organizing these, please let me know. Amanda Rust is also still in talks with some extra-NE folks about potentially hosting the WikiConference USA next spring. We will keep you posted on whether that's going to take place in Boston, and if so, how you can help.
Finally, we are trying to streamline our communications channels, making sure they are all talking to one another, so I'd ask that you please bear with us in the coming months. Ideally we would have an email list (this one); a central Wikipedia location for all of our upcoming events (this may be our new Wiki site); and a non-Wiki events portal for those who prefer that type of alert and sign-up mechanism. We've flirted with using Facebook, but we will probably mainly use our
Meetup.com page. I know this is Wikipedia, but when possible, I actually think signing up via Meetup is more helpful because it lets us stay as up to date as possible on whether folks will or won't attend an event.
Anyway, thanks for reading. If you have any suggestions for the group, or any questions for me, I'd love to hear them.