Asaf

This is a very interesting initiative. But can I get some clarification as to the scope of "communities" under discussion here? Having read through the material, I see "Sign up below if you are interested in implementing this in your local community" appears on all 6 pages and there is mention of face-to-face meetings, so I have the impression you mean a geographically-co-located community but I have no real sense of the intended scale here.

For example, in my own case, are you talking about Brisbane or about Queensland or about Australia? Or are we discussing the entire en.WP community here? From the references to face-to-face meetings, I think we must be talking about Brisbane. But if we are discussing policies, traditionally that is a whole of en.WP community issue, so is it being proposed that local communities can adopt their own policies, e.g. notability that applies within their region? If so, that sounds an excellent idea.

In terms of welcoming new users, I am all for this. We already have an Australian template {{subst:welcome-au}} for that purpose already (and of course could easily create more localised variants of it). But can we tell if a new contributor is Australian as new contributors rarely have user pages that reveal such information? At the moment, it's a case of stumbling over them in one's watchlist and assuming they are Australian because they have contributed to some Australian-related article. It would be much more helpful if we could we get some feed of new contributors that appear to be coming from an Australian IP address to assist in this welcoming process. And how do we prevent others from "welcoming" new contributors in a not-so-pleasant way by undoing their contributions or a nasty message? Because I suspect one negative experience can easily outweigh a positive experience.

Could you provide some more clarity on the scale of the communities you are considering as obviously that impacts on the kinds of solutions/proposals that might be put forward.

Thanks

Kerry