Talk:Wikimedia United States/2005

Notes from DC05 meetup

begin notes

Reasons for local chapters

• Organize meetups: More effective communication and organizing
• Independent budget: Fundraising, discretionary spending for meetups, advertising/postering campaigns
• Local contacts
  • Training: Newbies could get started sooner and be more productive if they have local mentors
  • Libraries and other data sources: Local chapters can respond to requests for physical information sources that can't be loaned out, like Library of Congress document repositories at universities.
  • Media coverage: Newspapers and other media will bemore impressed if there is both an international (meaning big) and a local (meaning pervasive) component to an organization.
  • hosting of events
  • Wikihostel: Support for travelling wikipedians, enabling research projects, crash houses for meetups

Reasons for meetups

• Focus/Relieve social energies: people will get along better online if they have a sense of another user's offline personality and personhood - become less anonymous and therefore less "dehumanized" in eyes of others
• Organizational power: leverage the "international+local" structure
• Special focuses
  • Physical localized resources (embassy photos, Museum of the American Indian, etc.)
  • WikiProjects (Anatomy, Stamps, etc.)
  • Organizational (new chapter, thinktank, etc.)

Legal issues

• Libel and whatnot
• Passing the buck to the international
  • As long as we follow the rules of the international organization, we can be shielded by their legal structure - probably.

What will it involve?

• Financial structure/Financial aid (e.g. scholarships for wikipedians to come to meetups)
  • Financial aid is important - we can't discriminate against those don't have the means to attend

end notes -- Phyzome is Tim McCormack 16:05, 2005 Jun 29 (UTC)

Discussion of main points

Geographic scope and granularity

Not only should it include the 50 states and U.S. territories, but US citizens (including military members) living overseas. Anyone should be able to join from anywhere. Cla68 01:32, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

This page and Wikimedia United States Chapters Council

I would like to suggest that perhaps this page be redirected to Wikimedia United States Chapters Council, because that effort is currently active, while there has not been any work on a single centralized US chapter for a number of years.--Pharos 15:56, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

If there are no objections, I think I'm going to go forward with the merge in about a week.--Pharos 17:51, 31 January 2010 (UTC)