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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