I definitely think in-person meetings make sense. As someone who has attended a lot of them, there's definitely a significant difference between what types of people and what is accomplished during in-person meetups vs online ones. The Berkeley campus group was never really active (it was more-or-less Matt Senate and Derrick Coetzee's idea, I just signed to hit the minimum requirement.)
I could probably get a room on UCB's campus (although I won't be a student for more than another couple weeks I'd probably be able to anyway,) but the wifi is a pain to set up which makes it a less than ideal choice for a meet-up location. I suspect the library would be willing to host us given how much libraries tend to like Wikipedia (potentially helped by the fact that we are right next to the WMF.) I would like to host an editathon in the non-student cooperative in northern oakland I live in at some point, but that will probably be a little bit away and not necessarily a frequent event.
I'll definitely show up wherever there is a meetup though :)
--- Kevin Gorman
On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Wjhonson wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
The issue I've always had with IRC is that if you are not a gear-head, you really have never used it. The logs are *mostly* either not indexed at Google, or not even kept at all, so you cannot link to a discussion of what this one or that one said, and you cannot read those discussions.
Yes I'm aware that *some* chats are being logged.
If the community wants to *reach out* to all the non technologists, IRC is not the way to reach.
-----Original Message----- From: Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net To: wikimedia-sf wikimedia-sf@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, Jul 30, 2013 6:27 am Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-SF] Berkeley Wikipedians
On 7/29/13 8:12 PM, Jeremy Baron wrote:
I think IRC's not too scary if there's an appointed meeting time with people that are guaranteed to be friendly and helpful and there's only one channel to have to pay attention to. It's easy to make a webchat link with the fields all pre-filled (e.g. with the channel name. or even IRC nick)
IRC is not scary for you, but it is a significant barrier to anyone who doesn't already know it. So, no, I personally will not be organizing any "meetings" on IRC. YMMV.
kc
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