[Wikimedia ZA] Outreach to people interested in the chapter?

[Achal Prabhala]

Hallo,

I was just looking at meta, and while the page on the South African 
chapter has a list of names of people who are interested in the chapter, 
my feeling is that it is incomplete. For instance, many of our 
colleagues who attended the chapter meeting in August in Joburg are not 
on that list. In other cases, I went to look at Northern Sotho Wikipedia 
after Ian brought it up - or any number of other South African language 
Wikipedias, and there are several users listed there (many of who appear 
to reside in South Africa) who are similarly not reflected.

Under the circumstances, would it be a good idea to carry out some mild 
online outreach in parallel to chapter startup efforts?

- For community members in the free software/ free knowledge space who 
are not yet registered Wikipedians, could someone volunteer to help 
start this up, so that they are signed on, hopefully to continue 
editing, and so that their interest in the chapter is reflected on meta?
- For community members who are active Wikipedians but are not yet 
signed on to the chapter effort, would it make sense to compile a 
longlist and put it up on meta? (As potentially interested in the 
chapter). And for someone to contact these Wikipedians, to see what the 
chapter can do to interest them?

The reason I suggest this is that, given the Indian experience, three 
things seem to happen that are worth taking into account: (1) Not all 
Wikipedians are automatically interested in or aware of chapter efforts, 
(2) Not all Wikipedians or potential Wikipedians get to know about 
organised chapter efforts, and (3) For free software/ free culture 
allies, often all it takes is just some help to complete the first step 
of registering in order to become more familiar with the process of 
editing and for participating in the process generally.

Some kind of outreach would seem in order, and this might be the ideal 
time to do it.

Enjoy the summer! (As Bangalore becomes more grey and cold, progressing 
towards winter)
Achal