Hi all,
If the plan is to have us focusing on developing a volunteer base, I think that natural places for us to start would be UW (including UW libraries, archives and museums), the Seattle Public Library, and the King County Library System.
To that end, how would people feel about making some of our editing workshops more externally focused on training new editors, probably with the use of VisualEditor from the start? For example, we might consider having one social unconference type meetup like we have had at Cafe Allegro each month, and one outreach-focused editing training and editathon combination event at an institution that is well placed for recruiting.
I am also thinking that we could have one event each month in Seattle, and one event each month on the eastside, with the locations alternating for the unconference-social and the workshop-edititathon.
We could also try a variety of focuses for the workshop-content contribution events. For example, instead of or in addition to content improvements on English Wikipedia people might be interested in photo uploads or editing for Commons, technical events such as the CDSW events, or subject-matter focused events such as highlights of particular subjects at libraries or museums.
What do you think? I'm brainstorming ideas here. I think some variety would be good, but if we're also interested in recruiting new long-term contributors then we might also want some continuity, so I'm trying to find the right balance, especially with our limited volunteer resources. If we expand our volunteer base then it will be easier for us to have a broader range of events.
I'm cc'ing Alex and WMF Evaluation here to see if they have suggestions.