Hi Brianna,
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Gosh, it would suck if Wikimedia slowly died in the arse because of a lack of decent communication tools. That would be tragic, but that does seem to be what we are missing. The right tool is like a bullet. I don't even have an easy way to, say, contact all the Wikimedians in my home city. Sure I can edit a city wikiproject page, and a meetup page, but relying on the right people to be watching them is a bloody long shot. And that's just people I would probably be familiar with. Or I could somehow construct a list of users and then contact a bot operator to leave them all a message?... ugh. What if I wanted to reach a X-language speaking admin in two different projects? Probably impossible. Too much effort in the face of very likely defeat to even be worth trying. Is it too much to say we need our own Facebook? If only Ning was open source.
We've actually been using some tools like this for not-yet-official Wikimedia New York City on the English Wikipedia.
Here's a fantastic tool for contacting local folks by IP address called "Geonotice":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice
It's currently not operational, but we have plans to revive it soon.
We've also been putting messages on talk pages by bot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BrownBot
thanks to Cbrown's help.
These may seem like awkward or unusual channels for communication, but I think we really have to be creative in building broad communities for local chapter work.
Thanks, Pharos