I've been thinking some about community-building in Wikibooks - I think it's among one of the more important tasks we need to face. To get the ball rolling somewhat, Whiteknight and I were tossing around some ideas earlier - one that we agreed on was that having a meeting to get wider input and brainstorming on issues of community-building would be beneficial for Wikibooks. I had suggested either setting up a Skype conference, or we could just organize a time to get people together in #wikibooks on irc.freenode.net. We'd set up a roster of topics to cover and just fire around ideas for a while. I'd like to invite anyone interested in particpating to do so - including people from outside Wikibooks: if you're involved with a like-minded organization, or if you're involved with community-building within Wikimedia or related projects, or if you're just interested in listening, it'd be great to have you join us. If you're interested, please reply with any comments, but in particular include: * Whether you'd prefer to have the meeting via Skype or in IRC * What timezone & availability you have (I'm thinking next Friday or Saturday, probably) * Any further ideas you have for community-building in Wikibooks

To get us started, Whiteknight and I were discussing reaching out to universities and other charities for book donations on specific topics (such as a book on cancer from an organization which deals with breast cancer) as well as recruiting editors from their volunteer pools. Suggestions for similar topics to discuss would of course be welcome. I hope to hear back from some Wikibooks regulars, but also people from the wider Wikimedia community. I've sent this to both textbook-l and foundation-l and (I hope) I've set reply-to to textbook-l. Thanks, -Mike.lifeguard ---- Mike.lifeguard mikelifeguard@fastmail.fm