Hello Cascadia,
It's great to have a way to communicate with the Oregon and Washington groups together!
The Washington group has interests in global health, motorcycling, technical work, and editor growth. I hope that we can grow our group of Seattle participants.
What has Oregon learned about how to attract participants? It looks like Oregon attracts participants to cultural documentation and edit-a-thon events.
Thanks,
Pine
Greetings, Pine, et al.
Glad to finally have a mailing list up and running!
Portland has had the most success by riding the coattails of major campaigns such as Art+Feminism and Wiki Loves Libraries (WLL). The 2012 WLL event was held at the Central Library:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Portland/Wiki_Loves_Libraries...
In 2013, I helped organize WLL events in both Portland and Vancouver, Washington: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Portland/Wiki_Loves_Libraries... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Vancouver,_WA/Wiki_Loves_Libr...
In these cases, organization involves reaching out to libraries (or, in case often they reach out to me directly), setting a time and date, then spreading the word via talk page invitations and WikiProject notices. These three events have each attracted roughly 10 participants.
A "non-Wikipedian" (meaning someone who does not contribute to Wikimedia projects often) proposed a local Art+Feminism event at PSU (she teaches art) as part of the national campaign. She created an event page on Facebook and I helped by distributing invites on-wiki. The event attracted around 40 people and was covered by local press. Using social media can be a great way to get Wikipedia events on peoples' radar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Portland/ArtAndFeminism_2014
The A+F event was so successful, that one attendee volunteered to organize a follow-up event at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which attracted at least a dozen participants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Portland/Feminist_Art
Apologies for the many links, but they can be helpful as examples of event pages. I think it is very important to create separate pages for each event, to archive the activities and results of each meetup.
WikiProject Oregon remains an active project, Though weekly collaborations have slowed, project members are still creating great content, but generally on their own. We do still have some collaborations, and we also host two themed photo campaigns each month. We assign two themes such as "Coffee Culture" or a specific neighborhood and try to leverage picture-taking. So far, most of the work has been done by me and one other photographer, but I find they are easy and enjoyable, and if they happen to leverage work by others, great!
You can think of the photo campaigns as "Wiki Loves Monuments", but for two different themes each month. If you have Seattle Wikipedians who enjoy taking pictures, I would highly recommend starting these as low-maintainence, opt-in projects that don't require much organizing. Participants can take pictures on their own, or propose group walking tours. Examples of photography projects at this template: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Meetups_in_Portland,_Oregon
As for Wikimedia Cascadia, I think it would be very helpful if we had a Facebook group/page, so that people can follow activities and have dates added to their online calendars. Other chapters/thorgs have pages.
If you need an idea for a project to support locally, consider an LGBT edit-a-thon or LGBT photography project as part of Wiki Loves Pride. Following are links to the Portland pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Portland/Wiki_Loves_Pride_201... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Portland/Pride_PDX
It would be great to have Seattle residents upload photos of the city's LGBT culture and history.
I hope this helps! Sorry so long. Thanks for contributing to the mailing list.
Jason (Another Believer)
On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 12:27 AM, ENWP Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com wrote:
Hello Cascadia,
It's great to have a way to communicate with the Oregon and Washington groups together!
The Washington group has interests in global health, motorcycling, technical work, and editor growth. I hope that we can grow our group of Seattle participants.
What has Oregon learned about how to attract participants? It looks like Oregon attracts participants to cultural documentation and edit-a-thon events.
Thanks,
Pine
Wikimedia-Cascadia mailing list Wikimedia-Cascadia@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-cascadia
Hi Another Believer,
Thanks for the info.
Outreach to libraries, women, and photographers seem successful. I was invited to a feminist event but I had other activities that day. Blibbet is making a list of FOSS groups in Seattle, and a few that sound like possible groups we could collaborate with are OpenStreetMap [1], Code for Seattle [2], LocalWiki [3], and Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays [4].
[1] http://www.meetup.com/OpenStreetMap-Seattle/ [2] http://www.meetup.com/Code-for-Seattle/ [3] http://localwiki.net/seattle/ [4] https://wiki.openitp.org/events:techno-activism_3rd_mondays:seattle
We have also discussed having a meeting or some other event at Google's offices in Kirkland, and next month we might meet on the University of Washington campus where we might be able to do some outreach to professors and researchers. I would be in favor of outreach to Seattle GLAMs and cultural groups if we can get people interested and active in editing and organizing.
Cheers,
Pine
Blibbet is making a list of FOSS groups in Seattle, and a few that sound like possible groups we could collaborate with are OpenStreetMap [1], Code for Seattle [2], LocalWiki [3], and Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays [4].
[1] http://www.meetup.com/OpenStreetMap-Seattle/ [2] http://www.meetup.com/Code-for-Seattle/ [3] http://localwiki.net/seattle/
PCS is a professional tech writer group, not a volunteer/community group, but it might be a source of local writer contributors. http://www.stc-psc.org/wp/about-us/ http://www.stc-psc.org/wp/the-stc-puget-sound-chapter-meeting-minimalism-in-...
There's also many writer-related Meetups: http://creative-writing.meetup.com/cities/us/wa/seattle/
Seattle Tech Wiki should probably be on this list of local tech wikis. It mostly targets tech startups, so a lot of entrepreneural focus, including a lot of blank pages in these areas they wanted to have filled in. Still, some useful links on that site.
http://www.seattletechwiki.com/index.php?title=Home
It's sister site, SeattleTechCalender.com, is very popular for event exposure. Wikipedia Seattle should consider getting a recurring event listing their monthly meeting on that site.
wikimedia-cascadia@lists.wikimedia.org