Dear All, I am delighted to invite you to a dedicated mailing list which shall serve the purpose of bringing together Wikimedians from Central and Eastern European countries (that is, to say, east of Germany, including Austria),

On August 6 at the 2011 Wikimania in Haifa we have decided that a meeting for Wikimedians from CEE countries, of which an idea has been floating in the Wikimedia world since 2005, shall take place in the next year; Wikimedia Czech Republic has generously volunteered to investigate the possibility of organising such a conference in Prague in February 2012.

Beside organising a CEE Wikimedia conference, we have also agreed that we're in need of a closer and ongoing cooperation, e.g. by having regular meetings between a local Wikimedia community and a Wikimedian from another country. So if there will be a local Wikimedia meet-up in your area, please share the news on the list and try to invite a user from a neighbouring country to share your experiences and thoughts.

There is a dedicated Meta wiki page for a meet-up which may be used for gathering ideas for a future cooperation; it's located at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_Central_and_Eastern_Europe. It's a wiki, so feel free to edit it. A good idea would be for us all to put it on the watchlist so we could easily keep track of changes.

More information on the list as well as a subscribe form are available here: http://tools.wikimedia.pl/mailman/listinfo/wmcee-l. For now, the archives are available to the list members only, but this might be changed in the future.

Please share the news of setting up the list in your local Village Pumps, Information Noticeboards and other mailing lists. Invite your friends, and don't hesitate if you want to share an idea or just say hello.

Thank you!