On 2 Nov 2008, at 18:23, Thomas Dalton wrote:
2008/11/2 Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net:
A proposal that I brought up at the in-person meeting, and which I plan to raise at the next Board Meeting, is for us to set up a newsletter to be circulated by a bot to interested people on-wiki say every fortnight or month. This is the kind of thing that could go into that. What do people here think to this idea?
It's a great idea. We may want to consider an email version or even a snail mail version, it might make people feel they are getting more for their money. How often we do it would depend on how much there is to say. I doubt we'll have enough to do a fortnightly newsletter and monthly may be pushing - quarterly would work.
I was thinking fortnightly to start with, to keep people up to speed with the formation of WMUK2 and so that the Board could ask questions of the community beyond this mailing list fairly easily. After that, it would depend on how much actually happens with WMUK as to how often we want to send around a newsletter.
Technically, I was thinking that we'd set up a page on Meta which would hold the newsletter (probably using a formatted template), then use a bot to push a link to that page to everyone subscribed. Sending around an email with this link would also be do-able. The alternative is something like WP Greater Manchester's newsletter on the Signpost Spamlist, where a copy is pasted onto the subscriber's talk page. That makes it a bit more challenging to put it in an email. Which would people prefer?
We may eventually want a snail mail version, but I would be surprised if many people wanted to subscribe to it - if you know Wikipedia, then you have internet access, as a rule.
Mike