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