Yes, agenda need not be fixed. Generally agenda too is decided in Wiki-way, no restrictions / no co-ordinators to arrange talks.If someone has something to share, edit the page and talk / even have an open discussion at the meetup. Alternatively the possibility of remote presentations via Skype can also be explored. We do this in Bangalore once a while inviting people from various parts of world to do a Skype session. If the meetup is on same day/time with other cities, we could even do a inter city connect over skype. In short, Agenda is flexible and decided on the fly mostly by those who attend.Newbies will eventually learn on the session / during the breaks. Infact we never had newbie oriented sessions in Bangalore meetups for long time now. We can have newbie focussed sessions once in 3 / 4 months (During which we shall do extensive publicity and get more people like we did in Nov meetup). Other meetups though open to all, shall be primarily focussed on knowledge / update sharing rather than introduction talks.

2010/12/9 மணியன் <manimalar.blog@gmail.com>

Greetings to all,
Thank you srikanth for kickstarting this mailing list. The Nov meetup has really created great expectations and hope it is sustained. As I have moved to this city recently, I am getting my bearings. But surely will contribute to whatever extent required.

Surely I would like to meet experienced Wikipedians on using the various apps and tools provided by wikimedia. Presently I do most of the jobs using basic editing tools.

Another thought that crossed my mind is that every meet we need not start from fundamentals..for repeat audience it may be boring. The agenda shd be flexible.

Will be in touch through this mailing list.

Cheers,
Manian

2010/12/9 Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak@gmail.com>

Greetings,

We had a fairly successful meetup in November and wish its just the begining. The purpose of the mailing list is to get together and discuss on wikimedia activities around Chennai. To start with, it would be great if there is a regular meetup among wikimedians in the city. Meetups need not necessarily be like the one that happened with 40 people turning out. It could be even meeting of 3-4 Wikipedians and share something. As always there would be another 3-4 newbies attending the meetups and getting to know more about wikipedia / wikimedia.

Can one of you take a lead(Mahir / Manian / Amog / SuryaPrakash only currently reside in the city i guess) in helping out and making this happen regularly. As such we dont have a problem with venue, just that we need to book in advance with Thoughtworks. If you have a better place to meet and suits best for attendees, its fine too!. It could be even Marina beach / some other open space, but a hall with projector helps in sharing what people have done. Bangalore meetups typically have 1 or 2 talks every month by one of us on what we do in Wikipedia / How we do. This knowledge sharing helps in getting to know what can be done / how it can be done and also get updates across languages.

Meetups also help in creating a community bonding which would definitely help in outreach activities. We could do something for 10th birthday of wikipedia / say put a stall at Chennai book fair. While it might be too late for us this time, having the meetups will help not miss these opportunities in reaching out to larger public in creating awareness.

Looks like we lost the list of email addresses we collected on the day of meetup, If you know anyone who would be interested, please pass on the email ID to me / ask them to subscribe at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-in-chn

Looking forward to see an active Wiki community in Chennai.

PS: Am currently residing in Bangalore, might be able attend some meetups if they concur with my travel plans to Chennai.

Regards
Srikanth.L
http://srik.me

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