Thanks for the email Mike, I was planning to send out something similar but you beat me to it. I definitely would like to have a meeting of Wikibookians and other well-wishers, and I would like to make it a regular thing. Even if we only met monthly or bimonthly for 30 minutes, that would be enough to get some dedicated communication going. Of course, I would like longer meetings more frequently then that, but I'd be happy with anything we could get.
Getting more participants is paramount, I think. Of course, there is a symbiotic relationship between books and contributors. More of one will lead to more of the other, which leads to more of the first, etc. My strategy has been to try and solicit book donations, which will generate press and enthusiasm among participants. There has been only mild success in this area, I think we're limited by a lack of advertising: Not enough people know about our accomplishments, and we need to get more proactive about things if we want to start turning a "profit" of contributors. Working up partnerships with other charitable organizations would be great. We could get groups to donate books to us, or get their volunteers to write books on our website, etc. If we could tie it in to a relevant event, that would just generate more press. One of my ideas would be getting a book about breast cancer going during "National Breast Cancer Month" or something like that. You could repeat this with any other group that has a "...awareness day" or "...awareness month" and information worth sharing. Anyway, I would like to schedule some kind of online meeting. IRC is preferred by me, but Skype works also. If we can't find a single time when many people can attend, we could just schedule multiple meetings and expect partial turnout for each. We just need a way to discuss ideas for growth, concerns about current on-wiki events, etc. I'd love to hear what other people think about this. --Andrew Whitworth On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 7:57 PM, Mike.lifeguard <[email protected]> wrote: > I've been thinking some about community-building in Wikibooks - I > think it's among one of the more important tasks we need to face. > To get the ball rolling somewhat, Whiteknight and I were tossing > around some ideas earlier - one that we agreed on was that having > a meeting to get wider input and brainstorming on issues of > community-building would be beneficial for Wikibooks. > I had suggested either setting up a Skype conference, or we could > just organize a time to get people together in #wikibooks on > irc.freenode.net. We'd set up a roster of topics to cover and > just fire around ideas for a while. > I'd like to invite anyone interested in particpating to do so - > including people from outside Wikibooks: if you're involved with > a like-minded organization, or if you're involved with > community-building within Wikimedia or related projects, or if > you're just interested in listening, it'd be great to have you > join us. > If you're interested, please reply with any comments, but in > particular include: > * Whether you'd prefer to have the meeting via Skype or in IRC > * What timezone & availability you have (I'm thinking next > Friday or Saturday, probably) > * Any further ideas you have for community-building in > Wikibooks > > To get us started, Whiteknight and I were discussing reaching out > to universities and other charities for book donations on > specific topics (such as a book on cancer from an organization > which deals with breast cancer) as well as recruiting editors > from their volunteer pools. Suggestions for similar topics to > discuss would of course be welcome. > I hope to hear back from some Wikibooks regulars, but also people > from the wider Wikimedia community. I've sent this to both > textbook-l and foundation-l and (I hope) I've set reply-to to > textbook-l. > Thanks, > -Mike.lifeguard > ---- > Mike.lifeguard > [email protected] > > _______________________________________________ > Textbook-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l > _______________________________________________ Textbook-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
