Geolocation in the UK is notoriously unreliable - if you believe mine, my computer has travelled over 300 miles in the last few days (it hasn't moved more than about 10 feet, and the router it's connected to hasn't moved at all!) - so I wouldn't rely on it for anything even as vague as Scotland or the south east. Chances are you'll catch a lot of people who are nowhere near an miss a lot of people who are much closer, so I'd stick to just targeting it at the whole of the UK even if the downside is that somebody in Cornwall will see notices about meetups in Scotland.
 
Phone: +44 (0) 7507 536971
Skype: harry_j_mitchell

From: Jonathan Cardy <jonathan.cardy@wikimedia.org.uk>
To: UK Wikimedia mailing list <wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, 17 March 2015, 10:24
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Outreach question

Hi Rexxs, I use my watchlist and my home pc gets watchlist messages geotargetted to London and the south east. But I don't know what proportion of other editors use their watchlist, or what proportion have an ip address that we geocode to the right region. So yes I would suggest using talkpage messages as well. But i have  no knowledge as to the proportion of Scottish editors whose IP geolocates to Scotland, and without knowing that you can't know how effective this might be. 
Then of course there is the separate argument that a personal note on your talkpage is more, well personal.


On 16 Mar 2015 22:22, "rexx" <rexx@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
Ally, the problem I foresee is that if your casual Scottish contributor doesn't see the notifications because he isn't logged in, he won't see your talk page messages (because he isn't logged in).

The low-tech solution is to collect email addresses of folks who are interested in meetups and make them into a mailing group - then send out a group email with the url of the signup page as soon as you know about a meetup.

-- 
Rexx



On 16 March 2015 at 20:32, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 16 March 2015 at 14:56, Crockford, Ally <a.crockford@nls.uk> wrote:
Hi all,

I've been having a think about meetups and regional outreach. A casual/occasional contributor in Scotland mentioned that he didn't know about the meetups until too late and would have been interested in coming, but as he wasn't always logged in he was missing the notifications and wasn't seeing notices elsewhere.

I was wondering whether it would be possible to track a specific category's newly-added users (i.e. users who add [[Category:Wikipedians in Scotland]], to make it easier to post messages about meetups etc. on talk pages?

I know I've been contacted on my talk page as part of the Gender Gap task force for things, but I'm not sure whether that was someone manually contacting participants or if there's a way to streamline this.

Any thoughts or input would be greatly appreciated.


Two thoughts.

First, going back before the watchlist notices, which in fact were a revolution in meetup organisation, I did leave numerous talk page invitations, based on categories and other indications on user pages. I put in a couple of hours pasting each time.

Second, current conditions are convincing me that I should probably find out about Eventbrite pages, since at least in Cambridge they seem to be part of the expected publicity effort in our general sector. 

I'm actually also using standard techniques - email invitations and a list - which are lo-tech by today's standards. I think there is a point here about diversity of attendance, because one-club golf in publicising events leads to homogeneity.

Charles 

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_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
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WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk

_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk